526. Wilderness Tenth Anniversary Dinner.

  The Wilderness has been located down a side alley off Warstone Lane in the Jewellery Quarter for longer than was ever intended. After its move there, an old former factory and previous home to Two Cats, Big Nanny’s Jamaican Kitchen, Choolo, Toque D’Or and Restaurant Gilmore which first opened in 1997, Alex Claridge had planned to make it a temporary site for his dining establishment before moving it after a short period to somewhere more permanent. Plans fell through and The Wilderness settled in to its present site very comfortably. The restaurant had been born under another name - Nomad - on 15 November 2025 at the Urban Coffee Co. in 1 Dudley Street, close to New Street Station but was necessarily renamed as The Wilderness shortly after opening in April 2016  because of the extraordinary pressure put on Alex by a New York hotel, NoMad, which threatened to take legal action because it claimed that Claridge had taken on the hotel’s name which of course was pure nonsense.

  Right from the word ‘go’, The Wilderness caught the local press’ attention with some of the ingredients used in some of his dishes - ants, for instance, in place of citric fruits because Claridge wished to source hyper-locally and ants were readily available while lemons were not a recognised feature of West Midlands agriculture - it all got rather farcical when a friend I was dining with there asked for some lemon with his glass of tonic and was offered the only source of citrus at hand - ants - which he politely declined. Despite this extreme idiosyncrasy, now long an eccentricity of the past, the food that Claridge was serving in Dudley Street was remarkably good and a sublime lamb dish I had there remains forever in my memory.

  And so, just before Christmas 2025, I wandered through the vaguely festive streets of the Jewellery Quarter in the direction of the alley in Warstone Lane. The welcome was warm and the kitchen alight with activity. This was The Wilderness’ 10th birthday dinner and a worthy celebration it was. The theme of the dinner was old favourites reimagined and there was a surprise in the kitchen with Jonny Mills working there while he waits for his own Sāēl to be open for business. This was a tasting menu costing £150 but rather oddly called Requiem, though unusual and vaguely morbid names never come as a surprise from Alex Claridge. So Requiem it was and the meal began.

Menu signed by Ediz Engin and Alex Claridge

  Firstly, two pleasing amuses bouches - as often at The Wilderness, a croustade and a tartlet. And then Claridge’s Big Mac, a fine beef tartare dating back, according to the menu, to 2019, and delivered by Jonny Mills. Then another ever evolving Wilderness dish, the Carrot 2025, which originated in its first primitive form in 2015 and I presume, may well have been served when The Wilderness was still Nomad and also harked back to when Alex had been a chef until 2013 at the now long closed vegetarian restaurant, the Warehouse Cafe in Digbeth where I remember eating a languid and somewhat glum pak choi (I would be sure that anything so dreary had not been cooked by Alex) and resolved to loath the useless vegetable for the rest of my life. Alex had then moved on to be Development Chef at another vegetarian dining establishment, Bistro 1847 in the Great Western Arcade, before starting to do pop ups of his own food at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath. Presumably by the time Carrot 2015 made its first appearance, Alex had worked out just the right thing to do with a carrot.

  Then came a brilliant dish - witty, hilarious, original, delicious - Trout - Truffle - inspired by the 2016 dish, Trout & Soil. Overlying a piece of finely prepared trout lying on a bed of truffle was a pastry fish one which gave a dish of trout some great visual characterisation and on it, more truffle. This was a highlight dish of 2025.

  Next some very nicely cooked quail with a brilliantly tasty crab curry sauce. This was based on the dish NAFB which dated back to 2018 and afterwards a piece of venison as I like it - a nice pink slice with  a wholly agreeable bite to it - paired with plum and beetroot and based on Alex’s 2015 Venison and beetroot. This worked very well and shows that despite years of cooking vegetarian food by the time 2025 came around he was already a master of meat and the precise matching of ingredients.

  Next there was a small but delightful version of his 2019 white chocolate banana filled with mango which, to the best of my recall, he first served at his then other restaurant, Nocturnal Animals in Bennetts Hill (what an ingenious and fantastic surprise it was when it first made an appearance) although the menu dates it to the dish Banana 2023 which suggests that Tom Shepherd served a version of it first on The Great British Menu which is not correct. This remained a clever, meticulously prepared and delicious item to boost anyone’s spirits, even Alex’s.

  We were in the home straight. The predessert was titled sorrel and jalapeño ”cheesecake”, inspired by Claridge’s White chocolate and wasabi from 2017. The hit of heat from the jalapeño was fun though I think the description of a cheesecake even in quotes was stretching things a bit - it mildly scruffy and removed from Claridge’s usual meticulously arranged plates. But we went on and arrived at the dessert proper of Chocolate-cherry-cep inspired by the 2016 Cherry and mushroom.

This was a reflection of a former more radical Alex Claridge and was very edible though very filling and it took some to get to the end of it but the process of ingesting had been very pleasurable.

  I took my petit fours home with me, bid my Christmas farewells and happy new years and, of course, happy birthdays, enubered and was whisked home while I wondered what Alex Claridge would be presenting us with in the next 10 years.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

20 December 2025.

  Meanwhile the faces in the kitchens of Birmingham’s fine restaurants continue to shift around like tectonic plates. No sooner than they were first spotted in the kitchens of The Wilderness a few months ago, Messrs Lewis Perks, the talented pastry chef, Jordan Johnson and Evan Holliday, all late of Simpsons where the latter two were working when they appeared on Masterchef The Professionals and before they worked at Claridge’s restaurant, are now to be found working at The Fountain gastropub in Clent. That should be interesting.

Perks, Holliday and Johnson at The Fountain.

  Meanwhile at Simpsons, where a friend dines regularly, I am told by him that the restaurant manager, Steve Locklin, has now left his post there after about a year and we have already reported that the sommelier, Thomas Moore, has moved from Simpsons to Glynn Purnell’s new glitzy restaurant in Snowhill, Trillium. All of this makes it more difficult for Luke Tipping to deliver the high standard of food we have come to expect at Simpsons in recent years. Presumably many of these departures are linked to the proposed sale of Simpsons which so far does not seem to have advanced to any degree. But for now, at least, Luke Tipping ploughs on and Simpsons remains.

510. Sāēl At Verbena.

 

  Jonny Mills has met with some delays in opening his much anticipated 8 seater new restaurant, Sāēl, in the Goods Yard at the heart of the Jewellery Quarter and so is continuing to do ‘pop ups’ in various spots including Chancer’s Cafe in restaurant-heavy Stirchley (see Blog 497) and this time, just down the road at tiny Verbena on the corner of the Pershore Road as it serves its role as Stirchley’s High Street and Ivy Road.

  Unusually, rather than serving a tasting menu, the chef chose to present an à la carte traditionalist Sunday lunch in three courses.

  To start I chose a very tasty chicken liver parfait, nicely smooth and not aggressively over-rich with small pieces of perhaps over-crispy duck (though there was a nice crunchinesss about it), more crunch from nuts and a soothing elderberry hoisin which while being nice and sweet succeeded in eliminating any potential problem of excess richness from the parfait.

   The Sunday roast followed. While roast sirloin of beef was temptingly on offer, I opted for Packington porchetta which was served stuffed with a tasty farce, a small and successful Yorkshire pudding and a generous supply of the ‘trimmings’ including the inevitable cauliflower cheese which was very good though, as so often happens the flavour of cauliflower was lost to the sauce, crunchy roast potatoes, sweet slices of roasted onion, very nicely cooked carrot, a small amount of red cabbage and cabbage. The crackling for which Chef had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare was good but some parts of it were too hard and potentially problematical for some dentitions. Overall though, the course was very edible.

  I chose cheese to finish though I may have gone for the panna cotta which usually lures me to order it. This dish was made up of a good slice of Tomme (wheel) du Javernac, from the Charente Limousin region, anointed with honey and served deliciously on a thrilling little slice of malt loaf. The firm white cheese was an interesting choice and made a change from some of the current trendy cheeses on offer in  upmarket restaurants (Baron Bigod comes to mind though I do like it very much especially with honey and crackers).

  This was a very enjoyable Sunday lunch prepared by an enthusiastic - indeed passionate - and talented young chef eaten in a relaxed atmosphere and prepared with care and respectfulness.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

21 September 2025

497. Summer - Sāēl At Chancers Cafe.

 

    Jonny Mills, who had been Director at the Tame Hare in Leamington Spa from March 2016 until the restaurant closed following the COVID-19 pandemic and before that had been Head Chef at the Ebrington Arms from February 2014 to March 2016, Head Chef at Andreas Antona’s The Church in Kenilworth and had also worked at Mallory Court near Leamington and the Arden Hotel in Stratford upon Avon, has been making a name for himself over the past one or two years with his pop-up brand, Sāēl. 

  These pop ups have sometimes been solo efforts and at other times have taken the form of collaborations with other notable chefs in Birmingham. They are usually very well received and have a keen and enthusiastic band of diners who will go out of their way to attend his appearances in various locations in the city. Given his pedigree this is hardly surprising. Mills has been holding a monthly pop up at Chancer’s Cafe in Stirchley for some time and all this has been a preparation for opening his own restaurant in The Goods Yard, next to the Jewellery Quarter railway station, in the autumn of this year.

  I have been unable to attend even a single Sael pop-up thus far but this week the opportunity arose to finally get to find out what Jonny Mills’ cooking is really like when I was able to go to Chancer’s Cafe for dinner.

  This was to be a surprise meal with no written menu available to diners prior to being served but it was intended to make the most of seasonal ingredients and, given the startling heat over the previous few days, to try to use some cold dishes to keep the diners cool.

  The first course, the amusement gueule I suppose, was a tasty blue cheese gougère which was quite pleasant.

   They there was a deeply flavoured broth with a brunoise of seasonal vegetables which gave a pleasing texture. I was disappointed only because, having been promised cold dishes, this was a warm, comfortable soup apt for a dark chilly autumn evening rather than a burning hot midsummer nd of dy. is there no-one out there ready to serve me a zingy, chillingly cold gazpacho to calm me?

   There followed a very pleasant savoury scone, light and fresh, made with wholemeal flour and delicious Grove Wood Farm butter. This was excellent.

  Following on there was an excellent beef tartare with nicely sized pieces of beef, tender and tasty bound by egg yolk and with onion and walnut. This was a very enjoyable beef tartare.

Next came a dish of summer green vegetables - peas, beans and nasturtium. It would be hard for a dish to be more seasonal.

    Sliced green and yellow courgette looked very attractive atop some very pleasingly textured monkfish with the summer addition of gooseberry.

  The main was a plate of perfectly cooked retired dairy cow beef served with a variety of brassicas and kohlrabi including little slices of sweet pickled kohlrabi and the same vegetable barbecued. The brassicas did very little for me and I really don’t like to be served stems which are uncuttable and bad for my digestion, all in the cause of ‘wasting nothing’. Some things, I fear, need to be wasted. Nevertheless the beef was as well cooked as one could hope for and enhanced by a fine sauce which used gooseberry to once more remind the diner of summer.

  There were two desserts, the first Chef’s take on gooseberry cheesecake and the second another nod to ‘the season of  ‘courgettes and strawberries’ and a play on strawberries and cream - a delightful bowl of strawberry jelly, lusciously sweet macerated strawberries topped by a delicious meadowsweet cream which did£ overwhelm the flavour of strawberry, all served with cleverly spicy strawberry ice cream which recalled the great companionship of strawberries with the heat of black pepper. Excellent.

  Jonny Mills is a highly experienced chef who has worked in several important West Midlands restaurants as well as the late and greatly lamented Tame Hare. I look forward to enjoying his highly mature, skilled and inventive dishes he will undoubtedly present when he opens Sāēl later this year.