398. Sublime Wilderness x Nyetimber Collaboration; Michelin Recognises Rabbit; Toffs Moving On.

 

  I like collaborations. They tend to bring out the best in chefs. And when it comes to “the best”, Chef Marius Gedminas at The Wilderness is a very regular achiever of the concept just as Sonal Clare is a very great achiever of “the best” when it comes to hosting an event. I also enjoy English wine. It gets better as the annual temperatures rise in this island. Nyetimber was the first English wine company to make its mark and good stuff it is too.

  But to get back to basics, this blog is centred on the food encountered when dining out and so I will not stray into the field of oenology, there are those who know quite well what that are talking about while my skill is enjoying the moment when a good wine is brought forth and not getting too wound up about all the details of it. Still, even at this late age, my nose can spot a bouquet when it needs to do so and my taste buds also still function quite successfully. And so to the food served at this immaculate dinner.

  To start off this cascade of pleasures - a toothsome, profoundly flavoured smoked trout belly tart, delightful by itself but embellished with the taste of XO and ginger. The thin, crispy tart pastry was a pleasure in itself. This was served lavishly with the delicious Classic cuvée served from a magnum.Then on to one of the great dishes of the year which had the diners fainting with the gorgeousness of it a bed of white crab delightfully citricised with lime under a a fine espuma with wonderful smoked mussels, the hit and texture of almonds and white asparagus and a burst of flavour from an oyster leaf. This was accompanied by a very drinkable glass of Blanca de Blanc 2016.

   Then came perhaps the most perfectly cooked veal sweetbreads I can remember having been served to me, with peas and asparagus with a perfect bite to it and a chlorophyll Hollandaise. The rise that accompanied caused great surprise - so good was it - and proved to be the hit of the evening from the drinks point of view. Spring on a plate.

   Then the luxury of excellent barbecued turbot - cooked perfectly and bursting with flavour and escorted handsomely by a chicken sauce and crispy capers among other ingredients. Afterwards, and sadly I forgot to photograph it, a fine Orkney scallop, cooked precisely with a Thai green sauce - this time, unlike that I had been served a few days before, pleasingly rife with the flavours of south-east Asia. This was accompanied by a highly lavish glass of 1086 by Nyetimber (the date is the year of the Domesday Book relevant to the estate) 2013. “Ambassador, you are spoiling us”.

  It just remained to enjoy a familiar but not unwelcome dessert of green pear, finely diced, with a bay leaf ice cream and accompanied by a very happy glass of cuvée cherie - and why not!

  A memorable evening of very fine food and highly pleasurable wine.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

  Good news emerged from Michelin on 25 April when it published its April list of new additions to the Michelin Guide. Of the eight new additions, the much admired Rabbit in Stirchley has been allocated its place in the Michelin pantheon (the other seven were mostly in places favoured by the Michelin inspectors, because of their trendiness or ease to travel to - two in London (of course) and one each in Bristol and Edinburgh and three in the Newcastle Upon Tyne area). I have previously written that the opening  Stirchley’s now first ever Michelin-listed restaurant was probably the most important Birmingham dining out event of the year and as spring moves on, I’m sure that remains true. The restaurant owned and run by Ash Heeger and Erin Valenzuala Heeger now has a long waiting period to secure a reservation and is presently booming. This is all very reminiscent of Upstairs by Tom Shepherd. Perhaps the BBC have spotted Ash as a potential competitor on The Great British Menu.

  News from Solihull where Rob Palmer has announced that he is to close Toff’s and begin to work at the Hogarth Hotel in Dorridge which I previously visited during the limited time when the Butchers Social Club was based at the Forest Hotel. After settling in at the Hogarth overhauling the menu of the brasserie there during the summer, he plans to open Toffs at Hogarth in September 2024.

279. Michelin Listing For Black And Green and Mo; Peel’s To Close.

 

  24 November 2022 - The Michelin inspectors have been on one of their rare visits to the West Midlands and apparently washed up in Barnt Green with the result that Northeast Worcestershire has its own Michelin-listed restaurant in the form of Andrew Sheridan’s Black and Green which I last visited in June, very shortly after it had opened. I rated it 🌞🌞🌞 which places it, in my estimation, on par with one Michelin star-rated restaurants and so it is good that the Londonophile Michelinos have recognised the excellence of Andrew Sheridan’s small-but-delightful dining establishment, situated sweetly in this pretty upmarket North Worcestershire village and listed it. Is a star about to shoot across the firmament of north Worcestershire come the annual publication of the definitive Michelin awards for 2023?

  Another Worcestershire restaurant, Mo, in the south east of the county, in gorgeous Broadway also joins the Michelin listing this month. The restaurant is situated at Dormy House Hotel and Spa and, according to the hotel’s website, offers “an intimate dining experience…where dining is “an interactive chef’s table-style experience, offering a unique 8 course tasting menu to just 12 guests at a time”. Shades of Grace and Savour perhaps.

  On the subject of Hampton Manor, where Grace and Savour is the third restaurant, the local newspapers have been reporting that the Michelin-starred Peel’s Restaurant is to close after 14 years of serving fine food and seven years since it won its star. The restaurant, where the Head Chef has been Monty Stonehewer in recent months will close on new year’s eve. A fresh development is expected to replace Peel’s.

  Twenty five year old Monty Stonehewer trained at University College Birmingham and was a contestant in the 2019 Masterchef The Professionals at which time he was a sous-chef at Peel’s. He reached the knock out stage of the competition. He took over as Head Chef at Peel’s after Rob Palmer departed to set up his own restaurant in Solihull (see Blog 231). It will be interesting to see what will be the next step in Stonehewer’s career.

252. Sazerac. Adam’s. Michelin. Good Food Guide.

 

 

 I was going to dinner at Adam’s a short walk, as anyone would know, from The Grand Hotel where Lucy The Labrador and I were staying. It was too good an opportunity not to have a Harvey Wallbanger in Madeleine bar before heading off to Waterloo Street and Rich the barman there does a very good HW. He was telling me he previously worked at Fazenda and mentioned what he judged to be his own favourite classic cocktail, the Sazerac, of which I was previously ignorant which was a gap in my knowledge which should not have existed. The sazerac, said to have originated in antebellum New Orleans (pre-Civil War) though possibly more fin de siècle, is claimed to be the oldest known American cocktail.  It is named from the Sazerac de Forge et Fils brand of cognac which was combined with absinthe, Peychaud’s Bitters and sugar. There was nothing to do but try one of Rich’s sazeracs. Golden amber, clear, stately, adorned with an appropriately restrained tiny slice of orange peel - as refined and mature a drink as can be found on this earth and crafted by a master of his trade - the antithesis of the drink - the negroni - of vulgar, self-regarding hipsters. The negroni is fine but in the hands of Rich at least, perfected I should think by much practising and experimenting, the sazerac is the final word in cocktails for people of style and good taste. Will there be a sazerac revolution? Time will tell though perhaps it’s something that would lose its position at the head of the elite cocktails if the secret gets out.. And so to Adam’s.

  Adam’s. As serene as a sazerac. Calm, precise, formal but comfortable. I was planning to choose to eat from the tasting menu but was lured away by the à la carte with the thought that I might add the extra dish - crab with yuzu - to what looked like excellent dishes.

  First an array of fine appetisers including the tiny but memorable beetroot meringue and a speck of mackeral tartare. Next excellent sourdough with two types of butter and then take off with an excellent starter of scallop with grilled pea purée plus other pea variants, cuttle fish and chamomile. Fine food.

  Next came the extra dish of crab with yuzu. It looked very pretty but for me, the yuzu was far too powerful and the flavour of crab was all but lost. For me a disappointment and a dish that the chef really needs to reflect on.

  

  

  But rough seas were soon calm again with a main course of stupendously delicious aged beef served with smoked curds, bone marrow sauce and somewhere marigold though I am not sure I would recognise its flavour as marigold is not exactly a regular ingredient I have with my beef. The meat was, as it should be, the star of the course, tender, full of flavour, nicely seasoned.

    There followed a delightful predessert of blood orange granita with frozen yogurt and olive oil and then a very fine raspberry soufflé as dessert. This was a soufflé about which no complaints could be raised, light and tasty, pleasingly memorable. The petit fours included a charming miniature Paris Brest to lift the soul. 

  This was a Wednesday evening, for restaurants now the start of the working week. That day the country was being tortured by having its public transport assaulted by a rail strike courtesy of an unpleasant trade union leader who sees himself as a new Arthur Scargill and inflation is roaring away shooting up the price of food, basic commodities and one expects, soon, demands for big wage increases. The hospitality business has had a nightmare two half years - floods in some parts of the West Midlands, then repeated lockdowns and restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and now the fragile economic situation and all this seems to be having an effect endangering our recently burgeoning restaurant industry. There were only  ten people dining at Adam’s the evening I ate there - only about half the tables were in use in the main dining area. I suspect that that did not reflect the usual state of affairs even on Wednesday evenings. On social media various restaurants are having to publicise last minute availability where cancellations have occurred in an effort to fill their restaurants - even Adam’s see below).

  One hopes that our excellent restaurants are not going to go under now having survived the protracted period of the pandemic. Still there is some good news - indeed a historic moment - the Michelin Guide has finally included a West Midlands restaurant in one of its monthly listings - in the most recent it has featured Solihull’s Toffs by Rob Palmer (see Blog 231). A well-deserved recognition.

  Meanwhile The Good Food Guide has now gone live on the internet charging almost £30 for access to it and its recommendations. This is quite a lot more than the price of the last printed edition (it is no longer sponsored by Waitrose) and presently there are only about 300 recommended restaurants featured on it with many notable restaurants to be added. However in many ways it is much improved and now has an excellent rating system. So I have paid my fee and have the access to the Guide which I want but to give value for money the editor really needs to get moving with adding many more restaurants.

The West Midlands restaurants listed so far are:-

  Tropea (Harborne Birmingham) Good

  Dishoom (Birmingham) Good

  Tierra (Birmingham) Good

  Oyster Club by Adam Stokes (Birmingham ) Good

  Land (Birmingham) Good

  Cheal’s of Henley (Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire) Very Good

  Tailor’s (Warwick, Warwickshire) Good

  The Royal Oak (Whatcote, Warwickshire) Good

  Russell’s of Broadway (Broadway, Worcestershire) Good

  The Homend Ledbury (Ledbury Herefordshire) Good

  The Cider Barn (Penbridge Herefordshire) Good

  The Kilpeck Inn (Kilpeck Herefordshire) Good

  The Bell at Selsley (Selsley Gloucestershire) Good

  The Woolpack Inn (Stroud Gloucestershire) Good

  Forelles at Fishmore Hall (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  Old Downton Lodge (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  Charlton Arms (Ludlow Shropshire) Good

  There does indeed seem a long way to go with this project at present. 

  The scores so far are:-

  Gloucestershire - 2 Good

  Herefordshire- 3 Good

  Shropshire - 3 Good

  Staffordshire - nil

  Warwickshire - 1 Very Good

    

                           2  Good

 West Midlands - 5  Good (all Birmingham)

  Worcestershire - 1 Good.

  The problem currently is that with only 17 restaurants listed so far in The West Midlands the reader is paying for a completely useless list (unless the visitor is planning to dine in Ludlow and even there omissions are obvious). The list will need to be expanded almost exponentially to make it of any real use to the diner who has paid a lot of money to have access to it.

 

    

    

235. Dining At The Grand.

  

  There’s no doubt that cocktails in Madeleine and dining in Isaac’s at The Grand Hotel in Birmingham are rather special whether or not the food is any good. I’ve thought that Isaac’s is a missed opportunity in its New York-diner guise rather than in a classic, rather stately English alter ego persona but that’s just me I suppose; I’ve just read too much of the writing of Nathanial Newnham-Davis whose time has long passed and I have visions of grand dining rooms full of smart people dining off Escoffier-inspired cuisine rather than early 2020s casualness, American scoff, noisy music, tattooed arms and upmarket burgers, hot dogs and, er, lobster Newburg. I am forced to acknowledge that the Newnham Davis experience is not really for this present age. And yet…..

  But for decor and atmosphere Madeleine and Isaac’s are not to be missed even on a slow Wednesday evening when everyone’s dashed off to Europe to catch up on their continental experiences which they have missed for the past two-and-a-bit years, leaving the second city’s centre to its denizens who have only just arrived in the country and hardly want to be on their way out of it again. First an excellent Margarita in the soothing comfort of Madeleine. Such pleasure.

  Then, down a floor to Isaac’s. It really is very good (see photograph at head of this Blog). I start off with a generous portion of excellent house-cured lox served with tomato and onion on excellent rye bread with a generous layer of cream cheese. This was a grand dish. Then one of my great loves, hot dog - one of the finest frankfurters I recall eating - with sauerkraut, red cabbage coleslaw, sorry, slaw, ketchup (I declined the mustard) and really excellent thin chips, nicely salted and acceptably crispy. Such fun! 

  Finally for dessert, a mildly bitter New York cheesecake with splendidly sour macerated cherries though a little more sweetness might have been helpful in addition to the vanilla ice cream. Still, not bad. 

 Return visits to The Mount by Glynn Purnell in Henley in Arden and Toff’s in Solihull. In fact it has been two return trips to The Mount, both not quite up to that heady first day when Glynn Purnell was on site and it was all very exciting. The second visit, as mentioned in Blog 234, involved a pleasurable Atlantic prawn first course, a satisfactory but rather dull chicken main course and missed crème caramel as recounted previously. On the third visit I was determined to relive the great pleasure of my first visit - I ordered once more the truly delicious cheese custard starter (my lunch companion was delighted with his scotch egg), I gluttonised on the very generously portioned and optimally rustic pork cutlet and finally got my teeth around the long awaited crème caramel. My dining companion chose the cod and chips which was remarkably unimpressive with mediocre batter covering the admittedly nicely cooked cod and middling chips and a tiny helping of unsensational mushy peas. 

  The Mount quite naturally raises great expectations as part of the Glynn Purnell brand but does not quite live up to them. These are early days and the restaurant is full and the short term looks promising for Purnell’s latest enterprise but given the prices, it will need to raise its game in the medium term if the punters are going to keep coming back. And present commodity prices and the yoke of inflation could pose a major threat to any restaurant’s future.

  And so, a return visit also to Rob Palmer’s Toff’s in Solihull, this time accompanied by my dining companion who had ordered the disappointing cod and chips at The Mount. The menu was largely unchanged from my previous visit which is not surprising given how recently I had dined there. It was a damp spring Tuesday evening but most of the tables were occupied and later Chef Aktar Islam of Opheem fame and two of his team came in to sit at the Chef’s table and dine and to chat with Palmer.

  It’s not surprising that I should report that most of the dishes were exemplary on this second visit - my dining companion agreed with me - and while I derived least pleasure from the monkfish (not because of its cooking but just because it was monkfish) we were both mesmerised by the perfection of the cooking of the duck. The weakest course was undoubtedly the duck ragu (which itself was delicious) in a brioche ‘doughnut’ which was far too heavy. I thought that the dish would be improved by serving it in choux pastry and my companion thought it would be better in something crispy - no matter, we really did not enjoy the brioche. The other courses are described in Blog 231. The splendid scallop had been substituted by a mackeral ceviche (presumably a sign of the financial times but this was a truly fabulous dish and what had been lost in the luxuriousness of the ingredient has been substituted by the brilliance of the dish’s preparation.

  Just as for The Mount, these are very early days for Toff’s. Some honing and fine tuning is needed but given that Solihull needs a high quality fine dining restaurant and it has a captive well-off local residential population it should prosper..

  Wednesday 20 April - The Michelin Guide announced the latest additions to its list of recommended restaurants - it is no surprise to find that no West Midlands restaurants feature in it - none at all have received a mention since the Guide began this monthly exercise last summer. The five restaurants receiving recognition equally unsurprisingly are located in London (2), Scotland (1), the Michelin inspectors’ much loved Republic of Ireland (1) and Liverpool (1, presumably to irritate Mancunians as they fume in their gastronomic wilderness).

  Finally, a photograph taken from a Twitter posting of a recently opened and already locally respected restaurant in Harborne. I am being curmudgeonly here but is it really necessary to put a garnish of blood-veined sorrel, coriander and other herbage on what I take to be breakfast? Aren’t chefs just going a little bit mad with this plague of green stuff? I really don’t want a herb garden on my fried egg. And I certainly don’t want to see any more peashoots (see Blog 228). Honestly, I don’t.

199. Three Evenings In Lichfield - Larder, The Boat Inn, Rob Palmer At Thyme Kitchen.

 

  Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully: for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else. Dr Samuel Johnson, born in Lichfield 1709.

Dr Johnson scrutinising an excessively long menu?

 Lucy The Labrador and I were in Lichfield so that I could visit three restaurants, two currently mentioned in the Michelin Guide and the third featuring a pop-up of a Michelin Star-awarded chef planning to open his own restaurant next spring. Coupled with the recent opening of the superb Upstairs by Tom Shepherd (see Blogs 188 and 194) Lichfield is gastronomically hot at the moment. 

  On my first evening I dined with a companion at Larder. It was a Wednesday evening and therefore we were dining from the restaurant’s ‘Grill Night’menu. It is a comfortable restaurant with an upstairs dining room but we were seated in the downstairs area with a bar which contributed to the restaurant reminding me very much of 1980s Italian restaurant style but minus giant pepper grinders.

   Service was satisfactory, friendly but not excessively so and efficient without being overbearing. After memorable brioche bread with a delicious, almost gooey surface, served with a wonderful beetroot and chive butter, I chose a very fine starter of crab and wasabi with cucumber for texture. This was excellent - the taste of the crab shone through and little prickles in the mouth from the wasabi punctuated the flavour but always complemented it and never overwhelmed it. The cucumber both cooled and crunched and the accompanying crisp added to the pleasure of it all. It looked clean and appetising. All thought of ‘1980s Italian’ was dispelled by the time I’d finished the course. My companion also derived great pleasure from his scallop starter.

  

As it was grill night it would have been foolish not to have a grill as the main course. The lobster sounded alluring but needed to be preordered and I had failed to do so and therefore the obvious action was to order the generously proportioned fillet steak which was cooked perfectly according to our tastes and served with some very passable chips, the sweetest of sweet shallots, a delicious garlic coated mushroom and some crème fraîche. My friend chose an accompanying pepper sauce but I was happy to bask in the flavours, which were excellent with perfect seasoning, of the piece of meat in its nude state. Perhaps the only disappointment was an uninteresting green salad which we had as an additional accompaniment. 

  A light dessert was all that was needed and we both chose the warm boozy cherries with soft meringue, caramel and the crunch of delicious hazel nuts. Two pleasing little petits fours were served at the end including a happy fudge. 

  Larder is very enjoyable, relaxing, unpretentious but fine. The Michelin Guide quotes the restaurant’s tag line “All flavour, no pomp” and concludes “and that’s exactly what you’ll get … Attractively presented modern dishes are sure to satisfy”. A great start to my three nights in Lichfield. 

 

 After an enjoyable day in the fine and interesting city of Lichfield it was off to The Boat Inn at nearby Muckley Corner. Like Larder, The Boat Inn is Michelin-plated and of course its Chef Patron, Liam Dillon, appeared in the 2021 The Great British Menu (see Blog 136 and137) and gave a very creditable demonstration of his culinary skills and vision. The Michelin inspector in the on-line 2021 edition of the Guide states, “…..Shelves burst with goodies which are showcased in refined modern dishes and the tasting menu lists some luxurious ingredients”.

  The restaurant is bright and very spacious and on a cold evening, warm and comfortable with welcoming, pleasant, highly efficient and informed front-of-house staff. The meal started off with two delicious snacks, including a full-flavoured cheesy croquette looking like a head with Parmesan hair. Then some tasty beer soaked spelt loaf with two butters; the chicken butter was tasty but I loved the cultured butter in particular and the accompanying root vegetable pickle was fun and not out of place.

  On to the starter. This was goats cheese agnolotti, rectangles of perfectly textured roast squash, a fennel sauce and truffles. This was the least successful course. It was markedly saltier than I would have wished, the agnolloti were unexciting and although the accompanying wine was chosen to match the fennel sauce the flavour of fennel was undetectable. The dish looked lovely but the flavours said “salt” and not “fennel”. Then to an admirably cooked fish course of roast Gigha halibut fillet, a wonderfully complementary crispy chicken skin with shallots, sea herbs including rock samphire and salty fingers and a beautiful caviar sauce. I wondered if this course too was a little saltier than it should have been but I enjoyed it and derived great pleasure from the splended fish.

  The main course was a beautiful dish of sweetly pink loin of Primrose Farm hogget with a lamb mousse nestled on top of it, delicious artichoke and an artichoke mousse with a herb emulsion, all enriched by an excellent Bordelaise sauce. I will not forget to mention the more-than-garnish of surprisingly tasty and apt ox-eye daisy leaves which added a very interesting and decorative greenness to the dish. A grand course indeed. 

  My enthusiasm for chocolate desserts is limited but the lovely final course served at The Boat proved to be a great antidote to my usual chocolate dessert antipathy. This was a delicately flavoured chocolate parfait of perfect texture with lovely malty Horlicks ice cream, milk crisp and puffed rice. This was just what I need in a dessert - lightness, sweetness and a little luxuriousness.

  Unfortunately I did not have time for coffee but I received two enjoyable petits fours, one of which was a splendid twist on the little jellies that one is offered almost everywhere now - a brilliant strongly flavoured rum jelly. Great stuff! and clever!

 It was good to see Chef there leading from the front up there at the pass. Liam Dillon’s restaurant is an excellent, beautifully located fine spot to dine on modern British food. My joyous return is an inevitability.

  

Finally to Thyme Kitchen. The Head Chef at the restaurant is Susie Mandelberg who was born and grew up in Alrewas near Lichfield and after working in London returned to her home city to work as Head Chef at Thyme Kitchen. During the closing months of 2021, end of week dinners at Thyme Kitchen however are being devised and cooked in ‘pop-up’ sessions by Rob Palmer who was Head Chef at Peel’s Restaurant at Hampton Manor from the latter part of 2015 until 2021, leading the restaurant to the achievement of a Michelin Star on 3 October 2016. He is planning to open his own restaurant in Solihull in spring 2022. So the West Midlands gastronomic scene continues to evolve. The visit to Thyme Kitchen gave me an opportunity to see just what to expect at Solihull’s upcoming and badly needed new restaurant - from the point of view of fine dining the town has been wholly ignored up until now, surprising given the large number of very wealthy potential diners who live in the area.

Susie Mandelberg

Rob Palmer

  Thyme Kitchen is a lovely bright restaurant in as a quiet a rural setting as you might want. It was cosy and welcoming and the front of house staff are excellent. Everything was cheering and festive decked out with Christmas decorations and an appropriate amount of lighting.

  And so to the food. It’s almost the end of the year. I’ve visited a lot of good quality West Midlands restaurants this year and had a lot of fine meals. This was the best. It’s little wonder that Peel’s Restaurant was awarded a Michelin star with Rob Palmer working as its Head Chef. Each course was immaculate. I had nothing to grumble about and many reasons for which to purr with pleasure. This was a very fine meal. 

  I chose the 5 course menu. I could have had an additional main course (roast monkfish) but I knew that would have been a little too much for me. The physical menu itself was excellent - how nice to have each course detailed more fully than those three word jobs - ‘porpoise - plantain - beetroot’ - which tell you nothing except that the Chef doesn’t want to reveal the full extent of his jiggerypokery and also to have detailed the accompanying wines with an explanation of what to think of them. Thoroughly satisfied and nothing had yet been put in my mouth.

  There was a more-than-pleasing little ‘snack’ of a delightfully crispy cracker with the flavours of sweet onions and Berkswell cheese. This was another restaurant where I thought that a meal made up of nothing more than the amuse gueule(s) would more than delight me. This was followed by some delicious crusty bread with an exceedingly generous and much appreciated portion of excellent butter and then along came possibly the best starter of the year.

  This was gorgeous - diced, roasted and dehydrated beetroot marinated in pear juice with goats cheese ice cream, pickled pear, sourdough crumb and red veined sorrel. A silky, thick, unctuous beetroot juice was poured over it to make it glisten and give a polished sheen. Faultless and fabulous.

  I’m not a fan of the now almost ubiquitous carrot dish but if it must appear on a menu then Rob Palmer is the man to deliver it to you. This dish was made up of confit carrot cooked in beef fat (and very tasty it was too), green sauce, carrot purée with little stud-like pieces of thyme decorating it, a highly memorable beer and pickled onion gel and enjoyably salty mini scratchings. 

  Then to a delicious ceviche of salmon cured in lime with pickled maitake mushrooms, the texture of crispy wild rice rounding it all off. A great dish. Then the main course, my choice being roast duck, perfectly cooked, with charred hispi cabbage as well as some rolled and stuffed with mildly flavoured cabbage and duck offal, a delicious hazelnut emulsion and a gorgeous port and red wine sauce. The duck may have been rested for a little longer as there was a little of blood on one part of the plate but it was cooked beautifully. Close to faultless.

  

  By now I had enjoyed a Monkey 47 and tonic and 4 glasses of wine, beautifully described on the menu and also finely matched with the food and this resulted in me failing to photograph the somewhat different but excellent dessert - apple and raisins poached in brandy with a butter ice cream and compressed Granny Smith apple and cinnamon biscuit. Just up my street.

  As stated above, this was probably the finest meal I have had this year in any restaurant. I was able to have a couple of words with Chef and asked him the planned date for the opening of his restaurant in Solihull and he told me it was to be March 2022. If the meal at Thyme Kitchen was anything to go by then  that date in March just has to be the most anticipated page on the calendar right now.

  Even though Rob Palmer will soon be lost to Lichfield the city really has a lot to attract the lover of West Midlands food and a gastronomic mini-break in the city, as I have just had, is well worth considering. I have raised the question before - is Lichfield the new Ludlow?