410. Oyster Club. Purnell’s Cafe And Bistro Coventry Closed.

   Passing the weekend with Lucy The Labrador in town I opted to have Sunday lunch at The Oyster Club by Adam Stokes as I have on a number of previous Sundays in town. Well, actually I had a reservation for 6PM so the use of the word ‘lunch’ is somewhat stretching things. 

  The town was busy with countless fathers being dragged around the city centre to whichever dining establishments were open so that they could pay for their offspring to wish them “Happy Fathers’ Day”. 6PM on a Sunday evening is usually a nice quiet, civilised time to dine at The Oyster Club, one of the very few well thought of dining establishments to actually bother to open at this particular time on that particular day of the week and the restaurant was as civilised as ever on this visit though noticeably busier than usual with a number of men being entertained by their grateful broods and then handing over their bank cards in the knowledge that their families had enjoyed the occasion at their expense. Happy Fathers’ Day indeed.

  Sunday lunch at the Oyster Club usually involves me partaking of the excellently priced Chateaubriand plus all the trimmings lunch on offer there but on this particular day I wanted fish and nothing less than Dover sole would do. After a starter of pleasingly lightly battered tempura King prawns with a tongue tingling Gochujang dipping sauce which gave great pleasure, though one or two of the prawns were a little oily, there was presented a magnificent sole, meaty and of impressive size, quite adequately accompanied by nothing more than a wedge of lime and a fine beurre noisette with the right amount of saltiness and a happy texture provided by a multitude of capers and an insistent flash mob of delightful little prawns. Away you vegetables and you sea herbs, your presence is not needed here! The, I repeat, magnificent, fish was as much as any normal man could cope with though perhaps I might have thought of asking for some little buttered new potatoes (chefs - don’t sauté them please) but I was replete and the sole had not died in vain but such a fine chap had it been than dessert was out of the question.

  And to think, I had toyed with “going for a curry”

  Back to the Grand Hotel and the joyously sumptuous Madeleine bar for a couple of Vieux carrés which were rather good and rapidly served and, I thought, more paralysingly alcoholic than one might expect, which was rather good as there seemed to be no barmen there making the drinks. Great stuff. I do love Birmingham.

  There seems to be a little group of true gourmands in this city and they all tend to be attracted by special events at The Wilderness in particular, or perhaps Simpsons, and now Albatross Death Cult (I love typing the name, how will Michelin deal with it? - there’s no doubt that Alex is a real star). So at the public opening of ADC I was able to ‘network’ with the star Birmingham gourmands - dare I call them ‘epicures’ - who were present there and heard news that had previously bypassed me. This was that Purnell’s Cafe and Bistro in Coventry had been closed for the past winter and had not reopened, nor was it intended to do so. It had been Michelin-listed and well thought of and its life was short. Adieu.

293. Folium.

 

  A companion and I set out for lunch at Folium in the Jewellery Quarter on the day it had reopened after the Christmas and new year break. En route we had each enjoyed two glasses of the soothing cocktail Three and half ounces of happiness - making a total of 14 ounces between us - they lived up to their name - at the increasingly simpatico The Alchemist in Colmore Row, nestled very cosily as it is on under the simply stated luxuriousness of the grand Grand Hotel. Thence a slightly unsteady progress along Newhall Street, which in centuries past had once led to the grand home of the Colmore, past the now boarded-up and greatly missed Ginger’s Bar and Purnell’s Bistro where once we had enjoyed such pleasures as Cockney Rhyming Sling and Penicillin, eventually taking a right hand turn towards the beautiful Georgian St Paul’s Square, and thence a short distance up Caroline Street to the rather anonymous frontage of Folium.

  It was good to be back at Folium where the welcome was real and the faces are always friendly. It’s a smart place and looks the part. When everyone is going on about the future of fine dining and when hipster burger joints are breaking out all over in middle class suburbs to overhyped acclamation delivered by internet influencers and a meal’s not a meal without several negronis to precede it, it’s so lovely to still have a calm, tasteful haven in a quiet Victorian Street where very fine food, beautifully presented with originality shot through it, can be enjoyed at a restful pace.

  We had chosen the sensible five course lunch menu and were delighted with the dishes that arrived at our table.

  To start, there was a delightful amuse guele which took the form of a little tube flavoured with burnt onion and filled with fine chicken liver parfait, gorgeously flavoured and silkily textured. 

  After the excellent bread served with cultured butter, which we ate with relish, there followed Amela tomato with bonito vinegar and pretty, tasty little shiso leaves. I thought that this was very tasty; my companion felt that the tomato itself was not as full-flavoured as he might have liked but we both agreed that the dish as a whole was very pleasurable. It may be that a tomato-based course in mid-January is a little incongruous and I really do not know what time of year this variety of the fruit is at its best, originating as it does from Japan where it first appeared in 1996, but the tomato’s original homeland, together with the dish’s dressing and garnish, were a summary of much of the rest of meal - Japan was very much on the cards.

  Next a fine, Orkney plump scallop served with what appeared to be a rather pleasing, small beignet which was described perhaps a little inelegantly on the menu as ‘fried bread’. The scallops, which we both thought to have a spent a little too much time in the pan, were accompanied by an apt and delicious Ponzu espuma. The scallop was served sliced; is this a new trend? I see that Andy Hayler in his inestimable Blog (sadly almost entirely devoted to dining out in London and increasingly almost exclusively to dining at The Ritz, where once Escoffier plied his trade after defrauding and being sacked by The Savoy) also reported experiencing a sliced scallop in the past week which led him to express regret at this particular action by the Chef.

  The main course was really very good. This was Guinea fowl, which Chef Ben Tesh serves quite frequently, served as a ballotine, accompanied by a tasty yeast Béarnaise sauce. It was moist and nicely textured and thoroughly enjoyable. On then to an intermediate dish of iced horseradish with white chocolate shards and sorrel sauce. This was excellent with just the right amount of heat coming from the horseradish to liven up the tastebuds and reexcite the appetite for the final stage which was a toasted hay ice cream with a final burst of Japan in the form of miso and there was toasted buckwheat for a crispy texture. We both felt that the flavour of hay was a little too subtle but we certainly enjoyed the dish and the pleasure of our coffee drinking at the end of the meal enhanced by two delightful mignardises a ‘whisky and peat butterfly bun’ about which my lunch companion fell into raptures using the term ‘whisky baba’ to describe it and a chocolate and lavender choux, which was flavoured absolutely accurately and textured precisely.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

165. Adams.

  Professional food critics and Tripadvisers all agree that Adams is the best restaurant in Birmingham and probably the whole of the West Midlands. Two out of three visits there in the past led me to conclude that that statement was probably not the case. Excellent in many ways but too many faults for my liking but who I am to be at odds with Tripadvisers and those that get paid for reviewing food? So, it was time to return and to discover how much I would enjoy lunch there after a break from visiting Waterloo Street.

  Adams as we know, started life as a pop-up in Bennett’s Hill before moving to Waterloo street. I visited the pop-up once and felt that while it was pretty good, it was not quite as exciting as I had been led to expect. Then a very fine lunch after its arrival in Waterloo Street and then something of a calamity on a  follow-up visit which involved a double jeopardy of an excessively salty dish (precisely what it was has been blotted out of my memory) and a dish which involved paying a large extra sum to have some tasteless lobster added to the dish involved with no gain at all to the pleasure the dish gave.

Kieron Stevens, Head Chef at Adam’s

 

Tom Shepherd, Head chef 2017-19

 

  I was consequently lacking any real will to return to Adam Stokes’ much admired (by almost the whole world) restaurant where the head chef is presently Kieron Stevens (he trained under David Everett Matthias at the once two-starred Le Champignon Sauvage, see Blog 160, and took over the role from Tom Shepherd in February 2019) but the time had come.

  The restaurant operates like a well-oiled military machine. The staff look smart, the decor is chic, the restaurant is spacious (apart, perhaps, for the bar area which was full when my lunch companion and I arrived meaning that we were led straight through to our table for our preprandial cocktails (I had a fine, sensibly priced and very quaffable negroni) and everyone goes about their work efficiently, politely and effectively. The pace of service is spot on, not stiff and not relaxed. Professional would be the apt adjective in any business that performs the way Adams does. But I thought it was all a little more clinical than I should have liked. I would have liked a little schmoozing to have crept in at some point during the meal. 

  The food was very accurate and impressive. The dishes were presented perfectly and gorgeously. We chose the £80 à la carte menu (really I don’t need 4 starters, 1 main course, 2 desserts and all the extras at lunch time which the tasting menu would have rendered up to me) and the dishes on offer were more attractive on paper than the cheaper lunch menu. But I think this range of menu choices is perfect and the price of the à la carte menu sensibly pitched to ensure that the meal served was not made up of the cheapest ingredients but food of higher quality. What’s the point of going to somewhere rather smart and being fed dishes made from the cheapest cuts of meat and species of fish just to offer a lunch at a cut price? If you’re somewhere grand then let’s have some grand ingredients treated lovingly by an accomplished chef.

 

I chose the starter of delicious lightly salted cod coated with ‘Thai green curry’ with an included side dish of lobster in a crunchy tempura batter with a pleasing satay sauce. A remarkably good dish which could hardly be bettered anywhere else in the city except it included one of my bêtes noirs - fairly tasteless scorched pak choi (the entire national stock of which should be bundled up and exported immediately to the Far East) included in the dish no doubt because of its link with the cuisine this dish recalls and because there was some texture provided by it.

  This starter had been preceded by some happily enjoyable little appetitisers including a cheeky cheesy little chou pastry, a little squid ink wrap enclosing sublime beef tartare with pickles and two of the most fabulously tasting mussels I have ever had the pleasure to put in my mouth floating on a verdant velouté.

  

  My lunch companion and I both opted for the very fine aged sirloin which I greatly enjoyed. It was a precisely cooked plate, the meat could not have been more spot on. The accompanying vegetables were enjoyable but if they had not been there the two slices of beef by themselves would have made for a lordly main course. Accuracy, precision, modern versions of painstakingly cooked classic dishes - I felt was finally getting the measure of Adams..

 

 A predessert based on pineapple was not so palate cleansing as one might have hoped for (nothing does the job like a briskly lemon-flavoured tidbit) and then on to my dessert proper - I had chosen wild strawberries with a violet sorbet - a gem - and a scattering of perfectly matching, crunchy pistachio - a fine summer dessert. I had missed the option of rum baba (hiding under the headline ‘Apricot’) on the menu but my dining companion pounced on it and judged it, with its accompanying almond elements, to be one of those great pleasures in life.

  It was all over bar the coffee and its accompanying petit fours - this time a macaroon with a chocolate filling and another chou pastry but this time sweet and hence providing a clever little symmetry to the whole meal.

  The visit to Adams had dispelled my previous doubts. It serves very fine food indeed. It has the air of being somewhere very special. It is very highly placed in the firmament of Midlands restaurants.

                                                         ______________________

When I was a child*, I partied like a child, I drank Harvey Wallbangers like a child, I was easily pleased like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways and entered the dark lands of much more serious cocktails. When I was an old man I frequently visited Purnell’s Bistro (in the company of other old men - don’t worry I never drank alone) and eventually the excellent head barman put Penicillin on the menu. Dark, warm, autumnal, comforting as only an old bloke can appreciate.

(* here a “child” is a young whippersnapper well above the legal age for consuming alcohol.)

  But Purnell’s Bistro is no more and I ask myself where can I get myself my next shot of Penicillin when I need it? Now I rather like the hedonistic luxury of Madeleine at The Grand. Actually I have cravings to be there from time to time, not, I assure you for the alcohol (though that is an added bonus) but for the sheer pleasure of being there. It really is very nice, a few negronis and antique negronis have passed my lips in that very pleasant environment and now I have gone one step further and entered the land of the Boulevardier and one further step has taken me to making this dark drink myself, Satanic in its deliciousness, positioned I’m sure somewhere strategic in one of the Circles of Hell, and rather pleased I am with my Frankenstein creation. I have not quaffed a Penicillin yet since the reopening but I’m quite happy sitting around with my Boulevardier and letting the tormented world sail on by.

25. Colmore Food Festival 2018.

  In burning sun, the 8th Colmore Food Festival opened today in Victoria Square. As Lucy The Labrador and I walked up to the square, keeping in the shade as much as possible, we heard the sound of a steel drum band. We entered the square at the Town Hall side where two stages were set up - one for cookery demonstrations and the other for other entertainments. After the necessary opening speech by the rather dreary Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council (politicians so lacking in charisma really shouldn't be seen at such fun public events) the show got underway with a fine cocktail-making demonstration by one of the excellent bar men from Purnell's Bistro but the dog and I had to move away after a few minutes because the scorching sun to which the audience, accommodated appropriately in deckchairs, was getting just a little too hot for the Labrador to bear.

  We went in search of food and shade and dealing with the first need we headed for the Asha's stall and bought a helping of some magnificent chilli garlic chicken tikka which was truly delicious. On to the stall belonging to The Old Joint Stock where I selected a fine Mini chicken tikka pie with coconut and coriander served with an excellent mash and red wine gravy. Lucy and I sat in the shade at the end of Waterloo Street sharing the excellent pie - fine pastry indeed - and then we prepared for Round 3. Before we could set off however a man dressed as a large red chicken came along quite unexpectedly and Lucy amused the surrounding crowd by having a sustained loud bark at the strange creature, a performance she was to repeat later when 2 human pigeons strutted along beside us.

  Round 3 proved to be disappointing - I bought a Chinese tapas from Chung Ying Central - the deep fried prawn was satisfactory and the prawn dumpling seemed to be generously stuffed with prawns but the Vietnamese spring roll was quite horrible, the contents tasted quite unpleasant and the surrounding pastry could easily have been constructed from old leather.

  Finally after another sit in the shade, Lucy and I headed for the Zen Metro Thai Restaurant stall and thoroughly enjoyed the generous helping of Spicy wok chicken which indeed was very spicy. I definitely needed to cool my mouth down so we rounded off our visit to the Colmore Food Festival with a visit to Gingers Bar stall and I had a most refreshing Thyme For A Pimms cocktail.

  The Colmore Food Festival, which this year hosted stalls from about 30 Food and drink businesses homed in the Colmore Business District, is now well established as an important feature of the Birmingham food scene - it seems to grow from strength to strength.