245. Alex Claridge’s Menu That Never Was.

 

  Alex Claridge appeared in the 2020 season of BBC’s Great British Menu and, as recounted in Blogs 87 and 90, was eliminated from the Central region heats after the first two courses and the audience never had the opportunity to know what the chef-judge Paul Ainsworth was missing.

  The programme introduced the necessity for the competing chefs to prepare an amuse bouche and Claridge’s offering was a ba tête beef tartare with Parmesan custard and other elements which was already familiar to those who regularly wondered in the The Wilderness as Claridge’s Big Mac. The four subsequent courses were to be linked to works of literature preferably from the region which the chef was representing and so Claridge’s starter was something rather weird and wonderful called Nah You’re revolting which was a tribute to Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes and included a cricket and mealworm bhaji with quail marinated in a yogurt and spice mix to mimic butter chicken sauce served with coal oil and various other elements including wood ant emulsion. 

  For his fish course Claridge prepared Goth Apple inspired by the book Ghost Drum by West Midlands author Jacqueline Susan Price. The dish included a scallop ceviche with various apple elements, a white chocolate skull and a wasabi emulsion which Ainsworth identified as overpowering the other ingredients and which he pinpointed as the reason for marking Alex Claridge down to 8 points while the other chefs were all awarded 10 points for their fish courses. It was this that saw Claridge taking an early bath and the result was that we never got to see what else he had to offer.

  So it was with great delight that I read an e mail telling me about a one-off dinner he was arranging for just twelve diners one evening in The Wilderness at which he would present his entire four courses + dinner which would have appeared on the television had he made it through to the second round. I scrabbled to ensure that I had secured two of the twelve places for myself and my guest and then, on the prescribed evening, met up with my companion at Isaac’s bar at The Grand Hotel where the dog and I were staying, rapidly glugged down a somewhat alarming Spicy Margarita and then boarded a taxi for Warstone Lane where this exciting event was to take place.

   A single large table was stretched out lengthways in the restaurant for the lucky dining dozen and the event had pleasingly attracted an affable selection of food enthusiasts and it was not long before everyone was exchanging with each other their impressions of local restaurants as well as dining establishments a little further afield. The cocktails flowed and the included wine flight took off to everyone’s pleasure.

  After Chef’s quietly spoken welcome and introduction to his thoughts about the Great British menu the Big Mac amuse gueule was served - a delicious little pastry with beef tartare and cheese custard. A hit! A palpable hit! 

  Then the starter (see illustration at head of this Blog) - Claridge’s revised version of Nah!You’re revolting - using a leg of barbecued Anjou pigeon in place of quail which is currently unobtainable and a bhaji pleasingly missing mealworms and crickets. This was really very good with the sauce giving much pleasure. 

  On to the fish course - an excellent ceviche of scallop with green apple, wasabi and white chocolate. The white chocolate skull was replaced by a rather more prosaic white chocolate ice cream but the dish worked very well with pleasing textures and flavour.

  At this point Chef turned up in a jacket with a large food-carrying bag on his back which somehow tied in with local author JRR Tolkien’s  Lord Of The Rings (an old man’s deafness inhibited my ability to fully grasp the explanation) and at last the main course was revealed and it was indeed a revelation. A surprising revelation. The dish arrived in a cardboard takeaway box (which one assumes might have been a little more lavish if it had actually appeared on the television) and, when the box was opened, a flatbread laden with (spectacularly tasty) ‘tandoori’ iberico pork and raita was revealed for the world to see at last. Delicious but probably not the right look for Great British Menu.

  The competition demands that the competing chefs prepare an intermediate course (what the then host, a wholly unfunny Scottish comedienne labelled hilariously [well, she thought it was funny anyway] “the pre-pooding pooding”. Claridge’s transitional course was again very enjoyable combining the flavours of white chocolate, lime and the tangy bite of padron pepper green chilli.

  The kitchen staff gathered round to watch chef plate up the dessert of gorgeous redness which united very effectively the flavours of raspberry, rose and the distinct taste of lychee. The meal was rounded off by a nibble of one of Alex Claridge’s very familiar hot lips.

  This was a quirky meal as we might expect. Too quirky I suspect for the Great British Menu. But it was a great occasion to sit there and have the various courses brought out and revealed to the world. Twelve very happy customers trooped out into the darkness of Warstone Lane at the end of the evening and whether or not a BBC celebrity chef or a Michelin inspector likes a chef’s food, in the end it’s the paying customer who really matters,

90. Alex Claridge In The Great British Menu

  The present season of the BBC1 television programme, Great British Menu, slides along through its latest 15th season showcasing chefs who work mainly in London restaurants but who claim to represent (with pride of course) various regions of The United Kingdom by virtue of having been born there, or having been brought up there, or having attended college there, or having a second cousin-in-law three times removed who lives there and so on. Their pride in the region with which they have these various connections and which entitles them to represent those particular regions does not of course extend to them working there and boosting those various regions’ economies by contributing to the local food scene. The pit of London draws them in and those who were once ‘One eyes’ (according to that discerning critic Giles Coren) are transformed into great chefs by virtue of working in that grubby city and privileged BBC luvvies are able to consume their food at highly inflated London prices which a BBC salary paid for by the television license fee will easily cover. Having grazed there they will then go off and complain about the government’s approach to social inequality and deprivation.

  But lo! The very first episode features a Brummie chef who actually works in Birmingham and struggles passionately to keep his restaurant afloat despite the slings and arrows of outrageous gastronomic fortune and whose dishes perhaps are rather (some of them at least) outrageous. As already revealed in Blog 87, I refer of course to the chef in The Wilderness, Alex Claridge.

  The first episode kicked off with the shocking revelation that there were not three chefs representing the Central region this year but four which made for pretty heart-pounding television viewing, I’ll tell you. And also there was the added drama of them having to prepare an amuse bouche for the first time ever in the competition’s history, one’s pulse rate raced with the revelation. That amuse bouche might be more important than you think as it was stated that if there were a tie then the performance in the amuse bouche section would be decisive in deciding the winner. Golly! Never has so little meant so much to so few. Interestingly as the weeks have gone by, that pesky amuse bouche section has proved a great trouble for many of the chefs who seem to view it as a starter judging by the large amount of food they have put into their a.b.s one or two of which have been positively gargantuan.

  The other shocking revelation at the start of episode one was that an extremely irritating Scottish comedienne was hosting the programme and hogging the cameras beyond tolerability. Although she ruined the Central region heats it seems that the producers have recognised the error they made in deciding to put her in the programme and, like Alice, she seems to be gradually disappearing as the series goes along. Which is good for my stress levels which rose with the irritation I experienced every time she appeared on screen and opened her mouth to make yet another fatuous remark. Now if only Radio 4’s Today programme could do the same and make Martha Kearney and Nick Robinson, especially Martha Kearney, disappear in the same way then balance will have been restored to my life and it will be far more easy to deal psychologically with the current pandemic.

  But back to the amuse bouche. Alex Claridge’s bavette beef tartare with Parmesan custard, gherkin ketchup, crispy onion and pickled shallots was placed last by the mildly bumptious guest chef-judge, Paul Ainsworth, and you really couldn’t help getting the feeling that the result of the competition was already decided. Though it’s fair to say it did look rather more like a small starter than amuse bouche. 

“I hope it won’t be me that skidaddles after the fish course”

  And so, on to the starter. The dishes this year are to be based on books for children hence marking, rather obtusely, the Bicentenary of the publication of Dickens’ Oliver Twist which, so the programme tells us, features the first child hero of a novel. Alex Claridge chose to base his starter on Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes which isn’t too promising a premise for a starter at a banquet. He named the dish Nah You’re Revolting. OK, that’s different. At this stage I began to have the feeling that we might be in for another extreme modern dish as was delivered by Kray Tredwell in the Midlands heats last year. And indeed we were though possibly one step beyond. The dish was centred on a ‘modern take on butter chicken’ rendered this time in the form of Norfolk quail marinated in a yogurt and spice mix making a butter chicken sauce and served with coal oil produced by using squid ink, a coconut and lemon grass gel and, instead of rice, roasted meal worms and crickets, which Alex Claridge promised would be “crunchy, salty and spicy”, and a spring onion and wood ant emulsion. Thus Claridge was opening up the new cuisine of insectivorous dining. A step too far for me I think. He foresaw great excitement among the children at the banquet but I have the feeling that there might have been a few plates sent back untouched. I’ve had ants at his restaurants before - impressively citric without a doubt but to be picked at with hesitation rather than joyfully swept up into one’s mouth - and crickets before (weirdly slotted into an otherwise very edible dessert) which I did not find at all pleasant but I would surely draw a line at the exquisitely unappetising mealworms whether or not they were crunchy and spicy.

The pleasures of insectivorism 

Meal worms, a vital ingredient of Nah! you’re revolting!

Discussing the starter

The face of a comedienne who has just tasted a spring onion wood ant emulsion.

The starter scored 6 out of 10. And it wasn’t because of the insects. Indeed not. Like any cool, up-to-the-moment, hip chef Ainsworth embraced the insects. “Alex,I like your theme. It’s controversial.  Really like that you added locust bhaji. Best thing on the plate for me. The quail was cooked well and the butter chicken sauce really nice. The ants brought acidity and I thought it had a nice earthiness with those mealworms too. What I didn’t understand was the squid ink and coal oil. Too overpowering. Completely killed the dish. It’s good to embrace the brief, alright? but, in my experience, less is more”.

“Alex, I’m giving you 6 points”

  Oh well, there’s always the fish course at the end of which the lowest scoring chef will be sent home and not allowed to cook his/her remaining dishes.
  Alex Claridge’s fish course was called Goth Apple taken from a book by a Black Country writer, Susan Price and with a heavy Japanese element to it.

  The dish was made up of wasabi emulsion, scallop slices cured in bonito vinegar with discs of mirin and pressed apple, crispy salmon skin, dashi vinegar-pickled cucumber balls, apple skin powder, dashi ponzu (made from soy, apple juice and mirin), and garnished with sea purslane and apple blossom and served with caviar and a white chocolate skull filled with apple ponzu. A remarkable sight on the plate but not perhaps quite as startling to those of us who have had the pleasure of meeting Alex Claridge’s chocolate skulls before (though never I think with the fish course).
  Ainsworth awarded the dish 8 points while the 3 other chefs’ main courses all received 10 points. Claridge was going home. Ainsworth said, “Alex, your dish, Goth Apples, the white chocolate skulls, they were incredible, really inventive, loads of fun, fantastic. The scallops, they were the right choice of protein for that dish. For me though there was just one thing that’s all, it was that wasabi. It just overpowered everything else”.
  I should have liked to see what Alex Claridge was planning to bring to the table as his main and dessert courses not to mention the “pre-pudding pudding” as the comedienne was constantly babbling about. Perhaps he will appear again next year. Ainsworth stated, after the points were delivered, “You have an unbelievable wild style and you know what? don’t change. You are an absolute talent”. Wild style? True but there’s a bit more than that to our local chef.

“Alex, I am scoring you 8”

  One final illustration:-

Irritating beyond imagination.

52. Great British Menu Gets A Disdain For Orthodoxy.

  Having moaned considerably about what was then the upcoming Central Region heat of the Great British Menu in Blog 51, I confess I sat down to watch the 3 episode, - starter and fish, main and dessert and deciding play off of the two highest placed chefs - with mild enthralment as three young Midlands-born chefs struggled magnificently to win a place in the national grand final.

  Although pre-publicity identified Kray Treadwell as having been born in Solihull the programme itself stated several times that he was from Birmingham - perhaps Solihull's too posh and lacking in street-cred to give rise to a tattooed but very personable kitchen worker. Sabrina Gidda's Wolverhampton origins were stressed by emphasising that her father was the first Asian in Britain to run a pub though, and here's BBC consistency for you, later it was stated that he had been one of the first Asians to run a British pub. Ryan Simpson-Trotman's Nuneaton origins were stressed a number of times. Sadly, despite their West Midlands origins, none of the chefs currently works anywhere in the Central region with two employed in London and the Home Counties and Treadwell working in trendy Leeds although the programme did mention that he had worked for a time with Glynn Purnell.

  Things did not get off to a good start with guest judge, Chef Paul Ainsworth of Paul Ainsworth at No 6 in Padstow - a one Michelin starred restaurant - showing a singular lack of enthusiasm for any of the starters giving them only 6 or 7 out of 10 and only Sabrina Gidda wowing the judge with her fish course. Then with the main course Kray Treadwell took over the reins and eventually scored a 10 for his dessert. 

  As a result of the dessert course, Simpson-Trotman was eliminated and Gidda and Treadwell who looked rather like a young culinary David Beckham complete with numerous tattooes, battled each other in the final with Treadwell winning as a result of his remarkable main and dessert courses. The visual appearance of Treadwell's dishes was very much that which we might quickly identify as originating in the kitchens of trendy chef Michael O'Hare's restaurant Man Behind The Curtain in Leeds. More than once judges remarked the first two courses produced by Treadwell were more style than substance.

  His first course was inspired by grime music, which was explained to judge Matthew Fort in the final episode by guest judge veteran Brummie musician Ali Campbell of UB40 as being "British rap" music, though that still leaves me floundering due to the very narrow boundaries of my knowledge of the recent music scene. The dish, called Fire in the Booth was made up of deep fried veal sweetbreads, raw tuna belly, hot sauce, caviar and truffle. Luxurious ingredients but not enjoyed by the final day judges at all with Ali Campbell describing the dish as 'Confusion not fusion' and Oliver Peyton asking "It's rock and roll but is it good rock and roll"

  Treadwell's fish course - Disdain For Orthodoxy - turned out to be a disaster. Treadwell said that the dish was inspired by Punk and was made up of turbot, Cornish ray, mussels and oysters. The dish was served on a special plate with a Punk's head incorporated in it and the ray's bone placed to look like the punk's Mohican hair style. Sabrina Gidda after sampling the crunchy ray's bone was heard to say that if she didn't eat it ever again she would not be upset. The Friday final judges, apart from Matthew Fort, found Treadwell's fish course to be rebarbative and there was much screwing-up of faces when they sampled it. Andi Oliver found elements of it - notably the oyster mousse in a stud-like capsule - to be "quite unpleasant" but Matthew Fort, crunching away on the skate bone, described it as being "by far and away the most interesting dish we've eaten today" and said, "I really like this dish, I really love this dish ..."

  Treadwell's main course turned the tide in his favour. Naming it Shharonnn! in honour of Brummie Heavy Metal musician Ozzie Osbourne (whose wife is called Sharon) Treadwell included in his dish barbecued Wagu beef blackened with charcoal powder, squid ink- blackened purple potatoes, a "blood-like beef sauce", black American-style scones with grated Stilton, purple potatoes, a red cabbage tuile and a hot sauce. The judges were swept away with delight for the dish and Oliver Peyton described it as "absolutely amazing, that is what turned the competition around for you, the meat was amazing, I loved the biscuit, a genuinely great dish".

  And so to Treadwell's dessert - A New Romance - named, rather alarmingly, after Brian Ferry's aftershave though when the judges were sent a sample to sniff Ali Campbell insisted that he had dined with Ferry and he didn't smell like that! The dessert, which had already been awarded 10 points by Paul Ainsworth, was a great success with the judges, being made up as it was, from sous vide-cooked peaches as well as a peach soup which also contained champagne, rose syrup and sea fennel and additionally there was also a sugar tuile containing edible glitter, blow-torched and diced peaches, peach sorbet, white chocolate mousse and edible flowers.

  So, The Midlands has an exciting young chef representing us in this year's grand finals. Though it would be even better if Midlands restaurants were also represented in the competition. Perhaps Treadwell will return to the area of his birth in the coming years and I would be very excited to test out his dishes except, of course, he might like to leave his 'Disdain for Orthodoxy' (the dish not the attitude) back in trendy Leeds.

  The judges' facial reactions to 'Disdain for Orthodoxy':-