183. Autumn Tidbits; Michelin Ignores The Midlands Again.

 

  Lucy The Labrador and I passed another 3 days in Birmingham city centre feeling rather comfortable and pleased with ourselves at The Grand Hotel where Lucy is something of an icon. Autumn had suddenly arrived with a vengeance, no more Indian summer but 36 hours of remorseless rain resulting in wet humans and soggy dogs. This was a midweek stay. The hotel was now busy with charmless businessmen, their time devoted to the making of money. I have long held that there are many in England who have a lot of money but are still as common as the Beckhams and Blairs. It appeared many of that ilk were staying at The Grand during our visit.

  Breakfast provided me with a shock. A buffet system has been introduced and while the products remain high quality one’s timing needs to be immaculate to ensure that the food is even mildly warm. The worst sight of the morning was an almost empty tray of dried out scrambled egg remnants, badly in need of replacing, but a rather vacant young man put in charge of it all did not seem to appreciate that such a need existed. He was more willing than able, it seemed. Matters, however, were soon put right when a senior person arranged for me to have freshly prepared plate of scrambled egg delivered to my table though even then things would have been better still if chef had recognised how much the addition of some salt enhances the flavour of scrambled egg.

  All around me, busy looking businessmen were playing with their mobile phones whilst shovelling great lumps of food, gannet-like, into their busy businessmen mouths. One charming individual, not far from me, thought it was a good idea to carry out a COVID-19 lateral flow test at the breakfast table. It was one of those occasions when one thinks, “Well now I’ve seen everything”. A charming member of the front of house staff picked up on my repugnance at this business-beast’s behaviour and asked if I would like her to speak to him but really this was not the fault of the hotel nor its staff and one hardly wishes to find them being put in an awkward position because of the disgusting behaviour of one of the guests. 

  I surveyed my fellow breakfasters around the room, mostly ‘busy businessmen’, all with a sense of self-entitlement bigger than Yorkshire, hardly any of them capable of eating food in a civilised manner but reduced to stone age shovellings of colossally-sized boulders of food into their gaping maws. England has very little to thank America for - and here’s another example - our restaurants serve unnecessarily huge amounts of food, à l’Americaine, and the English have learned to wolf down these vast piles of barely cut-up food using their forks like garden spades with no sense of just how disgusting they look. And now, why not blow your nose loudly over breakfast and then shove a stick up it for good measure to try to bring a crop of coronavirus into the outside world?

  The previous evening I had had a much pleasanter experience in the Madeleine Bar. Those who know (The Tatler) have ruled that while one may now use the word ‘toilet’ without being considered to be common (it has taken many decades to reach this point), the drinking of negronis is common. So obviously choosing a negroni was out (possibly one may still ask for a Boulevardier without committing a social indiscretion worthy of Posh Spice). Regardless, I opted for a Margarita and very good it was too (confirmed by a second glass of said pleasurable liquid) and suppered firstly on The Grand’s rather fine prawn cocktail and afterwards on the wondrous (and huge - too much for me but then I’m neither an American nor a busy businessman) The Grand’s charcuterie and cheese platter which was probably intended to be for sharing and would have been had dogs been allowed in the bar (Lucy would not be averse to a tidbit of robust flavoured venison salami). I rounded off supper with an impeccable Brandy Alexander which was flawlessly luxurious and simply the right drink at that time of night.

  After breakfast, Lucy and I set off for a walk around town and passed a sight worth mentioning when thinking about the city’s gastronomic history. Towards the furthermost end of Corporation Street, next door to the spectacular Victoria Law Courts Building, one comes across the Pitman Building which housed the Pitman Vegetarian Restaurant (see Blog 180) from the late 1880s to the 1930s and was famously visited by Mahatma Gandhi during his tour of England in 1931.There is a plaque fixed to the building which dates back to 1998 marking the Centenary of the opening in the building of the first ‘Health Food Store’

  

  Across the road from the Pitman Building is a building which once housed the Court Restaurant, presumably the place to which those who had business in the Law Courts would repair for lunch to prepare for the afternoon session. A building of its age, grandly decorated and barely noticed, surrounded as it is by other fine Victorian constructions, part of Birmingham’s gastronomic history. An photograph dating to 1961 found on the internet shows the Court Restaurant being used a first storey south Asian restaurant called The Light Of Asia located above a pharmacy and under a ‘Hair and scalp clinic’.

  It was the last Wednesday of the month which meant that the Michelin Guide was to release at midday the names of the latest restaurants to be added to the Guide. Given previous form it was not surprising to discover that absolutely no Midlands restaurants were included on this present list of nine; unsurprisingly two are located in Dublin which is the place that Michelin inspectors seem to be most in love with at present and there are also two in London inevitably, one in Belfast (33% of the list therefore located on the island of Ireland improbably), one in Scotland (genteel Edinburgh), two Up North (York and Manchester) and two Down South (Sussex and Reading).

  Not for the first time I am driven to wonder if Michelin inspectors ever pull off one of the northbound motorways to drop in on a Midlands county. Well occasionally but only, it seems, to visit places they have visited before. There is just one recent Michelin inspector Tweet from The Midlands to report - from Salt in Stratford upon Avon on 19 September. Perhaps they called in there on the way to Birmingham Airport to catch a flight to Dublin.

180. Land.

 

  Veganism is a problem for a gourmand, an epicurean, an old bloke who likes good food. I am a product of the 1950s and 60s when meat was celebrated by my parents’ generation simply because it was easily available again after the years of restricted availability inflicted by the necessary rationing of World War 2 and the unnecessary extended rationing of Attlee’s socialist government. Of course meat was not cheap and remained a luxury but at least it was a luxury that was obtainable even if the housewives of the day generally thought it would kill you if it were not near cremated in the cooking. The offspring of those who had endured 13 years of war and the ensuing intense socialism were therefore fed meat not infrequently, if only to give their parents a sense of liberation from the dual horrors of World War and a Labour government. Churchill was back in power and his return had brought the British a sense of freedom to enjoy yourself again even if only modestly. Meat - good quality British meat - was back on the menu.

  Naturally my generation grew rather attached to eating meat. We rarely had chicken - it was too expensive to eat more than occasionally and the main occasion for having a really good meat indulgence was naturally Sunday lunch when housewives pushed the boat out to delight their families with Sunday roast - beef with Yorkshire pudding, pork with stuffing and apple sauce and lamb with mint sauce. It’s hardly surprising therefore that old blokes like a bit of meat with their meal. Of course fish is perfectly satisfactory and even something with cheese might just do but a main course with a carrot as the centre piece is, er, difficult to swallow. 

  The 60s ended and Elizabeth David and her Italian (and French) cuisine became all the rage and even though the quality of the ingredients available to the continentals was much poorer than the quality British products, the British enthused about the cuisines David was promoting because they still centred on meat in the main. But the era of post-war socialist austerity was over and the British became increasingly free to experiment with all sorts of non-mainstream dishes. Young people were allowed to speak up more and little girls did not like to think of animals being killed for humans to eat them and so they told their mothers they would not eat meat and vegetarianism lodged itself into the British culinary  environment.

  As Britain waded through the 80s with its nouvelle cuisine, Beaujolais Noveau and burgeoning numbers of celebrity chefs, vegetarianism dug its nails into British gastronomy and would not let go. The rise of easily obtainable south Asian and Chinese-style food was mainly based on meat and poultry dishes even though a major religion of South Asia embraced vegetarianism. Indeed Gandhi on his visit to Britain in 1931 visited the restaurant at The Pitman Vegetarian Hotel in Corporation Street and that reminds us that vegetarianism is hardly a modern fad - the hotel dates back to 1898 and was run by James Henry Cook and was named after Sir Isaac Pitman who was the Vice President of the Vegetarian Society and was in business until the 1930s.

  As Modern British cuisine started to displace French, Italian, South Asian and Chinese food, the trendy food style, vegetarianism, begin to evolve into what was first seen as cranky full-blown veganism. All over the land it seemed that young girls were refusing to eat anything that would normally be seen walking about. And the trend spread to adults, doubtless more to women than men who generally, unless their religion forbade it, (or sometimes, even if it did) could not embrace life without an occasional bacon sandwich. Eventually the weight of numbers elevated veganism to an important aspect of British food and notable chefs, or some of them at least, began to take notice of it and then embraced it fully. Which is where we are today.

  To be honest I too have regrets thinking about an animal, a sentient being now according to The Law, being killed so that I can indulge my appetite. So the question is, could I be a vegan and ease my conscience whilst eating my lunch? Is vegan food really tolerable to we who experienced the postwar meat liberation years? and what would I be missing as an ex-omnivore?

  At least one review of Land (Jay Rayner, The Guardian) had waxed lyrical about this restaurant opened by chef Adrian Luck in 2019 in the atmospheric, rather gorgeous,Victorian Great Western Arcade and it had been a well thought of restaurant up until the pandemic but had not reopened after the recent wave until about 3 weeks ago. Rayner’s review had mused how chefs in general had failed through various phases to address the vegetarian option let alone the vegan question. He highlighted how, just as mainstream gastronomy in England had had its phases and fashions - from the end of rationing to the present Japanese-style/Baltic-Scandinavian/Foraged trends, so too, he reflected almost with bemusement, the fashions of British vegetarianism in the last forty years - from nut cutlet (I had one once in 1981 in a vegetarian restaurant in Edgbaston I think and recall deriving a degree of pleasure from eating it) to roast cauliflower (not yet an extinct species) which he called “the cauliflower years”, then “the aubergine years” and the all-enveloping entity of the wild mushroom risotto. How very true. And even if we haven’t ordered this stuff from a mainstream menu’s vegetarian option (and to be honest, like Rayner who wrote, “Love a bit of roasted cauliflower me”, I have indeed ordered it when everything else on the menu was unappealing) we all recognise the truth that most chefs are going through the motions when they even bother to offer a vegetarian option.

  But Land is an earnestly honest, devoted, impressive vegan restaurant which casts all thoughts of another charred slice of cauliflower into the pit of my fading memories. The restaurant is small, smart and perhaps a little dark inside, an effect partially of the apt but ardent dark green wallpaper on one side of it. The menu was typed on to an uncompromisingly small scrap of paper; no room to complain about wastage even as far as the amount of paper used for menus is concerned. In the open kitchen Adrian Luck could be seen performing his culinary art like any of the other notable Birmingham chefs who allow the dining public to peep in on their activities while they are preparing each course.

 

 At the top of this piece is a photograph of two delicious little appetisers, one of them a tasty little chopped beetroot item. Then the bread, golden yellow cornbread, light, pleasingly moist like a little fairy cake and with a flavour that told my dining companion and I that we were on new territory some distance from our usual haunts. What a relief not to have yet more sourdough.

  

 I’m really not sure what you call the first non-bread course of an all vegetable meal. Where meat reigns supreme it would be the starter but here let’s call it the First course, though you might say it is the third course (it’s like the English King Edwards [not the potatoes] - there were eight of them but actually there were three King Edwards before King Edward I, if you get my drift). The First course then was not the most elegant-looking dish - nicely cooked cannellini beans in a ‘creamy sauce’ with onion and texture from samphire but burdened, we thought, with an uncompromising, aggressive seaweed tapenade. True, the beans needed something additional but the seaweed did not give us too much pleasure.

 

 We were both lifted to a state of immense satisfaction by the Second course, perfectly cooked carrot with zough (a Yemeni dressing pronounced Zug) and an elegant, lattice tuile. What a delightful dish.

  Then a dish of puréed kohlrabi, which could have been substituted by a pomme purée but it’s good to have something a little different, with beech mushrooms providing texture and swirls of herby cream and a miso soup. I grew a little tired as I worked my way through the sizeable dish but appreciated the flavour. Then a spectacular-looking dish of sweet charred hispi cabbage with a satay sauce, a flash of chilli and crunchy puffed rice. And then on to two desserts.

  The first dessert was just up my street, or perhaps in this restaurant’s case it would be more apt to say “just up my country lane”, being exquisitely tart marinated cherries on a crunchy bed of oats with a subtle but deliciously oat flavoured ice cream and a cherry sorbet. A dessert I would happily eat every day. Then an elongated finger like chocolate brownie which was probably my least favourite course, not helped admittedly by general lack of enthusiasm for chocolate desserts, but also due to the vaguely unpleasant texture which I found to be mildly craggy.

  But no matter, on balance an exciting, original and tasty meal precisely and devotedly put together. We both, and I’m sorry about this, fantasised about having a little well-cooked pork belly with the kohlrabi dish or some chicken with the satay, so hard it is for our generation to evict meat from our desires. But this is a restaurant that’s heading for local fame and probably national recognition and such acknowledgments will be well deserved. But after all this, and of course, barring a sudden miraculous Damascene conversion, changing an old bloke’s mindset about the need to have meat or fish was never going to happen in a pleasant two to three hour-long lunch experience. My dining companion both came away feeling that we had dined very well but we had not dined completely. Meat does add something final to a meal, a substantiality, and it may be hard for the most brilliant vegan food chef to fill that gap.