345. Salt. The Bower House.

 

  I have already waxed lyrical about Salt this year (Blog 298) and was sufficiently enthused by my evening there, wallowing in the pleasure of the tasting menu, that I rated it 🌞🌞🌞. Since those early days, back long before the pandemic lockdowns it has matured into a provider of very fine food. The present Head Chef there is Laura Kimber and she has a very firm hand on the tiller. Likewise, Salt’s exceptional restaurant manager, the splendidly named Aurélian Molliere, who was appointed there in November 2022 having previously been restaurant manager at Buckland Manor, has the front of house running at tip top level, embracing the intention to be relaxed but at the same time to serve the diners with perfect poise and style.

  An autumn 4 course menu has been introduced there at a very reasonable price of £65 (sans gratuity) and  as my reservation was relatively late, and having visited Libertine Burger earlier in the day (see previous Blog), I opted to have this lighter menu if only to address the issue of my overnight gastrointestinal comfort.

  Though a menu of limited size, all the extras were pleasingly presented to make this feel like the full monty - hors d’oeuvres of fine olives and toasted almonds, 2 delightful amuses gueules made up of a crispy, flavoursome cheesy little tartlet and a splendid piece of pork ‘scratching’, some excellent bread with cultured butter and then a delicate heritage tomato starter, and afterwards a second starter of tasty Roscoff onion, very nicely cooked with pickled onion to bring sweetness and bite and crispy onion for texture. 

  The main was a beautifully and accurately cooked piece of Gigha halibut with sea herbs and for dessert a very pretty dish centred on plump blackcurrants, delightfully seasonal, with a soothing yoghurt sorbet. Two pleasing petits fours - a fudge and a jelly - were served with coffee. A well rounded fine meal.

   This four course supper was an excellent illustration of how multiple courses are not necessary for enable a chef to highlight their abilities and are kinder not only on the digestive system but also, of course, the pocket. The absence of meat was of little concern to me - I very often prefer fish for my main course but it may be a sign of things to come. This was a great pleasure and reminded me of just how good a restaurant Salt is.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.

  The following day, back to Shipston on Stour by bus through the quiet and beautiful south Warwickshire countryside for another lunch at the Bower House. Unlike my previous visit which had taken place on a miserable wet day, I arrived in bright sunshine set in a blue sky, and the town was looking very appealing. 

  Just as the previous evening had reinforced my very positive opinions about Salt, so this lunch had the same effects on me regarding the Bower House. The welcome and service is very good and the interior is very atmospheric, in one part stone flagged floors, in another a spacious dining room with large windows on two sides letting in the bright light.

  Here too I chose the set three course lunch, finding it appealing because of its highlighting of Japanese ingredients which I did not really expect to see being offered as a theme running through the meal. It represented exceptionally good value bringing with it a glass of house wine, bread with two types of tasty butter and petits fours to accompany the coffee (at an additional price). I indulged myself in a delicious Bower Sour to kick things off.

  

    The starter was a dish of tasty aubergine gyozas, very nicely cooked, with a mushroom and soy dip giving a real zing to the dish.

  I thoroughly enjoyed the main of stir fried roast breast of duck and vegetables and udon noodles. It was delicious and I felt very happy with my meal. The dessert of ‘Japanese crème caramel’ - a very good crème with slices of mandarin orange - was enjoyable though I suspected that the dish was more a playful invention of the chef rather than something whose origins can be pinpointed to the vicinity of Tokyo!

  

  The petits fours rounded off the meal very happily. The Bower House is such a pleasing restaurant to visit and its unpretentious but enjoyable food together with the excellent service and comfortable atmosphere make a trip out to Shipston to dine there very worthwhile.

Rating:- 🌞.

298. Salt. Tempest.

 

  It had been a while since I had last been able to visit Paul Foster’s Salt in Stratford upon Avon. I have paid fewer visits to the town because the number of Shakespeare plays being presented at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has been considerably reduced in the last year or so and some of the plays have been terrifyingly bowdlerised by its thankfully outgoing ultra-woke production managers (let’s hope the next lot are not even worse) and also because the days on which I was to be in town Salt has been fully booked.

  But now I was back. After a friendly greeting I was sat comfortably at my table in the recently redecorated dining area which could be described as chic rustic. At the small pass area, the chefs were gearing up for the evening and while waiting for the main event to start I discussed what I was going to have to drink with Salt’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable sommelier and nibbled smoked almonds and olives. Two fine amuses gueules followed and then some delightful in-house produced sourdough and butter with yeast fermented now for ten years.

  The first course was a fabulously delicious mushroom consommé full of shimeji mushrooms floating like mermaids in a still sea of deeply flavoured but nuanced mushroom consommé which was so fine that one feels it should be gradually lapped up rather than scooped up in a spoon and bodily delivered to one’s mouth. On top were enjoyably crispy shreds of mushrooms but an egg yolk purée in the depths of the consommé contributed nothing for me at least to this otherwise very special dish. I am a little perplexed about how one purées an yolk but I leave the cooking up to chef and take responsibility for the eating - and the tasting - of it.

  

  The next course was cured Loch Duart salmon served in a very adult way with sea fennel, dill and the lash of kombu powder. Then I chose red emmalle potato mouse textured pleasingly with puffed rice and then a magnificent beef tartare enlivened by charcoal mayonnaise and the earthiness precise tiny cubes of swede. 

    For the main I chose a lovely piece of Isle of Gigha halibut over saddle of fallow deer (which looked magnificent in the cooking which I could view being carried out near the pass and on the plate when presented to the table next to me). The roast halibut was seared to golden, exquisitely accurately cooked and perfectly accompanied by fine plump St Austell mussels and sea vegetables with the most impressively successful piece of crispy fish skin I have been served for a long time. A gem of a dish.

   

  The intermediate course epitomised the sophistication of dishes served at Salt - this brought the clash and cooperation of sweet and savoury together beautifully - goat’s milk ice cream, the sweetness of mango and the dark flavours and crunch of a sesame seed crisp. Finally the meal took its leave of me with a delightful ‘sweet’, outwardly simple one would think, of a remarkable ball of duck egg custard with precisely cooked rhubarb, a tasty rhubarb ice cream and ludicrously indulgent lumps of aerated white chocolate.

  Salt is in the vanguard of sophisticated yet accessible cuisine in the West Midlands. The new decor and the more comfortable seating and even the approachability of the staff help to make a visit to the restaurant pleasurable but the ingenuity and quality of the food served there means that Salt has not only fulfilled its early promised but has  established it as one of the highlights of dining out in the West Midlands region.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞

  The day before - 

  Lucy The Labrador and I were in Stratford upon Avon so that I could go to see what I expected to be its RSC’s latest bowdlerised Shakespeare production, this time I expected a mangled version of The Tempest. This gave me the chance to try lunching in the recently opened Prospero Lounge in Bridge Street whose offerings on its enormous menu are drastically eclectic and include an international tapas section, a wide variety of full English breakfasts and a long list of various burgers. 

  The lure was that the dining establishment is dog friendly and Lucy could sit with me and try to tempt me to feed her tidbits from the food on my plate. She has developed this form of emotional blackmail to a fine art, nothing looks more appealing and persuasive than a Labrador’s face when it is in a give-me-your-dinner mode. But a dog is a man’s best friend so by extension a man must be a dog’s best friend and therefore share what is on his plate with his best mate.

  The Prospero Lounge is a large space filled with shabby chic furniture and its walls are lined with a vast number of paintings which are obviously there as some sort of in joke since they seem to have been bought as a job lot from some sort of dire flea market. This a decidedly hipster sort of place - though admittedly far too big in spatial terms - but I can’t think of any hipsters I’ve ever seen in Stratford; it’s the sort of place where scruffy young socialists who have just carried out a couple of hours of canvassing for the local Labour Party Constituency Association will gather after doing so to join in a self-congratulationary comradely latte. But on this particular late lunchtime the customers were none of those - the place was full of better-off pensioners most of whom would never welcome a socialist government no matter what degree of meltdown the Conservative Party descended into. Cost of living crisis - what cost of living crisis?

  As reported in previous Blogs I am not a burger enthusiast but for some reason I had it in my mind that that was what I should order and I was going to do it in style. There were in fact a remarkable and ambitious fifty dishes on the menu (not including side dishes, puddings and cakes) plus cocktails, smoothies, beers, wines milkshakes, coffees, teas and so on. This all looked like a recipe for disaster.

  When the dog and I arrived many of the tables needed to be cleared - it was not an attractive sight. Still we found a table in the pleasingly warm dining area near the large windows from where we could watch Stratford passing by. After a prolonged study of the Bible-length menu I went to the counter and ordered a vanilla milkshake and the most ambitious of the burgers - the so-called Smokey Joe. The milkshake arrived in a large milk bottle with a straw that was irritatingly not long enough to reach the bottom of that particular container but the drink was pleasingly tasty and the vanilla flavour was delightfully discernible.

  The Smokey Joe burger arrived not longed afterwards. The menu describes it as, “6oz beef patty, spiced beef brisket, chorizo, lettuce, tomato, red onion, American cheese, spicy chilli ketchup and burger sauce” served with brioche bun, fries and house slaw”. The chips were good, tasty and a little crispy and not dry inside as some dining establishments seem to serve up.

  The burger itself was inelegantly served.The brioch was sweetly tasty and the ketchup added flavour but the slivers of cheese on top were unmelted and unpleasantly cold, the ‘slaw’ was far too cold when eaten with the burger and was not a pleasure and as for the chorizo there were just 3 little slivers of it and equally there was an ungenerous portion of brisket. The patty while well-cooked on the outside was certainly very rare inside to the extent I began to wonder where rareness ends and rawness begins. It was not appetising though the Labrador, who enjoys a little helping of raw meat from time to time, had no objections to it so all was well that ended well, for Lucy at least.

  The staff were quite pleasant. 

  I left Prospero’s Lounge in doubt that I would visit it again even if the dog is allowed to accompany me. I was pleased at least that the name of the restaurant I had eaten in that day tied up nicely with the play I was to see that evening. I like coincidences. 

  And I enjoyed, against all the odds, this production of The Tempest once the director had allowed magic to seep into it (throughout, it strived to relate the play to the current concern about man’s abuse of the environment and the natural world - a sort of Shakespeare as Greta Thunberg; the printed programme was full of drivel including Prospero’s magical initiation of the tempest which strands many of the protagonists on Prospero’s island being attributed to ‘geo-engineering’ by Prospero[(no, it wasn’t, it was magic]). Alex Kingston, in the RSC’s now established and frequently tiresome gender switching, played Prospero and very well too. Her delivery of the immortal soliloquy, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of …” was powerful and tears transiently raced to my eyes. The director was finally unable to continue cutting out the magic in the play as the final scenes brought spirits and monsters and thrills which even the RSC and its world wise production staff could not suppress. 

  Magic then is what we want - in the world, in the theatre and in the restaurant.

76. New Stratford, Old Stratford.

  After a rather larger-than-I-expected Ploughman’s lunch at the the Old Thatch Tavern (see Blog 75) I used my afternoon in Stratford upon Avon walking Lucy The Labrador up to Holy Trinity Church, last resting place of possibly the West Midland’s greatest historical figure, William Shakespeare, and in the evening walked the 100 or so yards from the wonderfully atmospheric and ancient Shakespeare Hotel which is one of the few Stratford hotels to welcome dogs and their humans, to The Woodsman restaurant situated in the also ancient Falcon (now the Hotel Indigo Falcon) to see what dinner there would be like having previously visited there for lunch (see Blog 67) back at the end of September 2019.

  It too was very atmospheric as one stepped out of the dark late January evening Chapel Street with the vague feel of drizzle in the air into the lively, warm, brightness of the Woodsman’s dining room with its open kitchen giving full view to the two chefs toiling over the large wood fire ovens stirring  their little sauce pans and arranging the fruits of their work on plates and summoning the bustling waiters to deliver the service.

  There really did seem to be a veritable ant colony of waiting staff walking around in all directions like a scene from an Eisenstein film. I noticed an unfortunate stuffed weasel in one corner of the room. When I say stuffed I do not mean that it was content and overfed rather that it was dead, discontented and had experienced the attentions of a taxidermist with whom it would probably have preferred not to have had any contact. I thought it was a rather strange item to have in a dining room but perhaps people like to have stuffed weasels around them when they’re eating an expensive meal. And anyway he did look like quite a nice weasel with a pleasant little smile on his face - not at all like the nasty stoats and weasels you read about in Toad Of Toad Hall.

  The theatre of the drinks trolley took place - apparently the negroni is something to experience but I settled for a less thrilling Elderwood g and t - and then a young woman plopped a couple of slices of bread with some butter on the table with none of the usual detailed explanation - which actually I would quite liked to have been given - of the nature of the bread or the special peculiarity of the butter. The delivery of the bread, conducted in silence, contrasted with the dramatic monologue, RSC-style, delivered when the drinks trolley was doing its rounds.

  I chose as starter a very fine terrine of local game birds and root vegetables served with Yorkshire rhubarb and granola. I shan’t go on about textures and flavours save to say in all such quarters this was a splendid starter and, as can be seen, a pretty dish too.

  I knew I should have had some of the local game for my main course as that is The Woodsman’s true raison d’etre and one probably isn’t doing justice to the place if one opts for the fish but I did and that’s that. I chose the Grilled halibut tranch. ‘Tranch’ was the giveaway. Dishes at The Woodsman are relatively expensive but the diner can not complain about ungenerous helpings.

The halibut was well-cooked but the size of the portion was so great that I began to tire of it and the last few forkfuls were hard to accomplish. The fish was accompanied by a smidgeon of red wine sauce and more of the sauce would have helped and there was also some salsify which is a vegetable about which I have my reservations when it comes to the flavour department and black trompette mushrooms and some sea herbs. I congratulated myself on forgetting to order a side-dish of the Woodsman’s excruciatingly delicious ‘dirty mash’ which, although it is a wondrous creation, would have thrown me over the edge of excessive consumption. When I first saw the dish the word ‘magnificent’ came to my mind but, I learned, you can have just a little too much magnificence in your life. It was a very satisfactory main course but I shall be careful not to have something which calls itself a ‘tranch’ in the future. 

  For dessert I had a fine fool with slices of blood orange lurking delightfully in its depths. Again it was quite a generously sized dessert but I battled my way to an emptied dish nonetheless.

  I think the Woodsman has its faults though a true trencherman would find it difficult to agree with me. But I do like The Woodsman. I think it’s delivering the sort of food to diners’ tables which an English restaurant should be delivering at the beginning of the 2020s. The atmosphere, particularly on a dark winter’s evening, is absolutely spot on. All the tables in the area  of the kitchen were occupied and all my fellow diners looked rather pleased about things.

  The following evening, having decided to eschew the professional critics’ darling, Salt, on the grounds that I went a couple of times soon after it was opened and, while having been impressed with the food, was less so with the service whereby the young people waiting there didn’t really seem to get it. I won’t elaborate but merely state that instead I dined at the doyen of Stratford’s fine food, ten years old this year, Wayne Thomson’s petite but perfectly formed No 9 Church Street, next door to which Paul Foster chose to open Salt. It must be a challenge being the fine dining restaurant situated immediately next door to a Michelin-starred Restaurant even if you do have a Michelin plate yourself especially when you’ve been around a lot longer than the upstart neighbour. Luckily No 9 seems to have a long-established clientele and an accomplished restaurant manager in the form of Magda Maciaszczyk who charmingly makes one feel comfortable and welcome at the restaurant in a way that one does not experience next door at Salt.

  With a micro-bar downstairs one climbs an ancient staircase to arrive at the comfortable and pleasant dining room. One feels relieved to be sitting there waiting for one’s food to arrive rather than waiting there delivering the food to the diners’ tables and doubtless running up and downstairs all evening. To wait at No 9 you need to be fit.

  I’ve been dining at No 9 now for at least five years on and off. Wayne Thomson’s food is interesting - when it’s good it’s wonderful but not every new dish hits the mark and some ingredient combinations do not always work together even though on paper they probably should do. But it’s nice to have something new and original and to able to draw one’s own conclusions about what’s on the menu. There’s always a couple of slices of bread and some olives to start which see you through to the arrival of the starter. Mine was an excellent example of what to do with pigs cheeks - ‘Thai-glazed with pickled Asian vegetables and spiced pineapple’ which really made the dish. This was a bountiful plate of food, a generously proportioned pigs cheek (I’ve been served smaller pieces of the meat as a main course) with the meat perfectly cooked and the vegetables perfect accompaniments.

  The main course sadly, in contrast, did not really work for me - charred salmon, chorizo and red onion compote, crispy new potatoes and broccoli. I couldn’t find the salmon, very nicely cooked as it was, to be a happy companion to the chorizo and onion - it was a combination that really didn’t work for me - and the broccoli seemed to add to the confusion of the mixture. Most straightforward were the sautéed potatoes but the description of them as ‘crispy’ was wholly inaccurate. This was a main course of four parts sitting uncomfortably together on the plate.

  I finished off with two happy little scoops of homemade ice cream - a happy pairing of coconut and clotted cream flavours (several other flavours were available). I think the generosity of the size of the pigs cheek had rendered me incapable of having a larger pudding though I gazed longingly at the delightful-looking desserts which were delivered to the happy people sitting at the table next to me.

  I do like No 9 Church Street. It has been there for ten years so Wayne Thomson must be doing something right even when a talented culinary newcomer arrives and sets up shop next door on his doorstep. A new spring menu has just been introduced so I look forward to giving that a try soon.

43. Christmas In Stratford.

  At Christmas the dog and I go away and spend three nights or so at a 17th century hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon. I usually manage to reserve my favourite room which shows its age beautifully and is made up of two rooms - a sitting area divided from the sleeping area by an ancient arch constructed from hoary beams - and if a room in an aged hotel ought to have a ghost this is it but neither the dog nor I have ever become aware of sharing the room with someone else when we have slept there.

  The hotel is no more than a couple of minutes walk from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre which is useful for going to see the Boxing Day evening performance of the Christmas play - this year it's a wonderful production of David Edgar's recent version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's also no effort to walk down to the riverside for a lovely long walk with my canine best friend or to walk up to Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare and some of his family are buried, for the midnight service on Christmas Eve to celebrate the arrival of the Baby Jesus on the midnight clear.

  As part of the Christmas package all meals are provided including the Christmas turkey, which remembering Scrooge, may or may not be The Prize Turkey. Alas it would not be true to say that this year it was the prize turkey since the hotel's chef had severely overcooked it and the end result was that it challenged the definition of edibilty somewhat. But I did eat most of it and what did not find its way into my alimentary system was wrapped up in a Christmas cracker and was gratefully accepted and rapidly consumed, as most things are, by Lucy The Labrador.

  The restaurant that is all the rage at the moment in Stratford is, as detailed in a previous blog, Salt. In the 2019 Michelin Guide, it was awarded its first star and professional critics generally are in raptures about it. My trips to Stratford have not given me the time to dine there for a long time though my visits to the restaurant soon after it first opened were very enjoyable (see Blog 35) but it means that I can not say how deserved is the current praise heaped on Salt. However while walking Lucy The Labrador in Stratford's Old Town I was able to take a peek at Salt's current menu.

  There's no denying that it's an interesting menu and chef Paul Foster has injected a few elements into it which qualify to be included in the Trendy Ingredient(s) of The Week series.

  Firstly, Miso, the traditional Japanese seasoning produced by fermenting soy beans with salt and koji (second trendy ingredient of the week - filamentous fungus used in Chinese and eastern cuisine) and perhaps rice, barley or seaweed. In Foster's menu miso is part of a dish which combines poached halibut, smoked eel (two more ingredients very high in the chef popularity charts at the moment) and seaweed (to be found in just about every restaurant at the moment).

  Next we have Crispy chicken skin (in a dish of carrot cooked in chicken fat, Crispy chicken skin and pickled carrot) which with Crispy fish skin is de rigour in any menu in restaurants which see themselves as being at the cutting edge.

  But most notable in Foster's depicted menu is Otterburn mangalitza which is a new one on me, the admission of which is, I acknowledge, a demonstration of my provincial ignorance and state of out-of-touchness; what Giles Coren has famously labelled my 'One eyeness'. What, we all ask, is Mangalitza? It's not a pasta, or Italian cheese or rustic European salad made from mangoes or even a mango pizza but, improbably, a Hungarian breed of domestic pig which looks like a cross between a sheep and a pig and which looks very appealing and more worthy of being a pet than a plate of food. Wikipedia tells us that the Mangalitza was developed in the mid 19th century by crossing old Hungarian pig breeds with wild boar and that the only British breed of pig with a coat of curly hair is the now extinct Baston or Lincolnshire Curly Coat. The meat of the Mangalitza is fatty but it is particularly useful for providing a sausage base.

  Paul Foster's dish is Otterburn Mangalitza, soured cabbage (hence recalling the pig's central European origins) with black shallot purée. I should love to try the dish but I fear that I would constantly visualise the creature's appealing face with every mouthful I fed myself.