516. Folium In Autumn.

 

  Folium remains the most peaceful haven of culinary pleasure in Birmingham. It certainly seems that way whenever I dine there. Even on a grim, dark autumn day the restaurant is full of light as the large window lets in any brightness squeezing through the dense clouds lowering over St Paul’s Square, a few yards down the road. The welcome from Lucy Hanson is relaxed and friendly, the service she gives is spot on and Ben Tesh’s food which she serves is unimpeachable. I have no doubt that if Folium were situated in London then it would have ling been awarded a Michelin star.

  On this occasion there had been tweaks to the menu. 

 

As an amuse gueule, there was now a toothsome croustade with Winterbourne trout and brown butter, a play on potted shrimps. Then, so familiar and excitedly anticipated, the spectacularly delicious homemade sourdough, so tasty and excitingly crispy on the outside, with Folium’s equally delightful cultured butter.

  The first course proper a tartare of Cornish blue fin tuna - tasty in a relaxed sort of way and very happily textured - along with shiso from Westlands in Evesham. There followed line-caught sea bream, cooked just as I like it, and a red pepper espuma with brioche, useful for mopping up the remaining sauce.

  The next course was a Folium old friend - wagyu short rib - on this occasion the texture was exactly spot on for me - with marinated chicory which gave sweetness to the bitterness of the endive. I then had the additional cheeses course which included Lincolnshire Poacher and Northern Blue. The cheeses were served in an excellent state and accompanied by Ben Tesh’s own crackers and heaven-sent fruit loaf as well as a pleasing quince jelly.

  There was a new dessert - a frozen passion fruit and marshmallow tart - very good - and then a triumph of texture - “yesterday’s sourdough” with rye caramel and the crunch of cobnut.  Afterwards the two mignardises - an old friend - the perfect pleated barley Madeleine with Cotswold whisky cream and a sweet little sunflower macaron filled with cep fudge - yet again, I use the word ‘delightful. After a nice chat with Lucy over a glass of port I headed back home, crossing St Paul’s Square, then up Newhall street and through St Philip’s churchyard where the Christmas craft market was underway with a vehicle selling Asha’s dishes at a prominent point near the cathedral.

Rating:- 🌝🌝🌝.

7 November 2025.

  But no time to stop, on through the churchyard, down Temple Street to New Street station to find, as often happens, trains delayed or cancelled. Hospitality businesses are under threat in the city centre for many reasons but having a failed public transport system which should be bringing people in from the suburbs to patronise the fine city centre restaurants does not help at all. Hopeful commuters were standing ten deep waiting on the platform for the severely late trains to arrive. If the city’s hospitality trade is to thrive then good, fast, easy access to the city centre from the suburbs is needed. But the system fails almost on a daily basis. Birmingham needs good political leadership to put it back on its feet and sort out its problems and those in power at present seem to have no idea of how get the city up and running again.

420. Zindiya, Moseley.

 

  Zindiya. located in a Moseley side street, not far from Chakana, serves what is termed Indian street food to eat pleasingly not in the street but in a pleasant, spacious, comfortable dining room, with lots of natural light and strings of fairy lights lined up across the ceiling, an open kitchen at the distant rear of the restaurant and the atmosphere of a popular neighbourhood diner as one suspects it might look and feel in India itself.

  The menu is fun - cheerful and colourful and divided into sections - chaats, side dishes, large plates, curries, breads and rice and grills - all very tempting and, like an old Woolworth sweets counter, to be mixed and matched as the diner wishes. The service is pleasant and efficient and a feeling of happy anticipation and contentment soon sets in. There were three of us at lunch at that allowed for a good range of dishes to be ordered.

  I ordered the delightful pani puri - wafer-thin, crispy, slightly flattened wheat balls filled with a joy-bringing sweet sauce based on tamarind on a mixture of tender potato, onions and chick peas with a watery mint sauce to be poured into the puri though it has to be said that flavour of mint was a little too subtle. Still, an enjoyable dish. I also ordered the moderately hot, spicy gunpowder potatoes which were admirably tangy being prepared, as they were, with chilli, spring onions and coriander.

  How can one resist the allure of onion bhajis. Zindiya’s turned out to be nicely sized, beautifully golden and crispy coated though the interior was a little too dry and woukd have definitely benefitted from the inclusion of more onion. As onion bhajis go,they were nevertheless, pretty decent.

    One of my dining companions selected chana chaat which proved to be singularly unremarkable and he made little progress in working his way through the numerous chickpeas but my other fellow diner chose beetroot chaat, which I sadly forgot to photograph, and derived much pleasure from the various elements which she all worked together very nicely.

  Two of us opted for the excellent lamb curry, the spicing of which was spot on for us, though I myself would have liked a sweet element as part of the dish to balance the dryness and mild sourness of it. The sauce was beautifully thick and substantial and the lamb was lean and tender and we both agreed that it was an enjoyable dish for we with our middle of the road western palates. We ate the curry with a shared nicely subtly-flavoured garlic  garlic naan and well cooked steamed basmati rice. Our companions was very satisfied with his butter chicken.

 

  Two of us chose light desserts from the list on offer - I had a surprisingly generous helping of cardomom-flavoured kulfi which was nicely flavoured and refreshing and my companion’s palate was greatly refreshed by a generous serving of mango sorbet though in reality, what came along was a mango icecream, though she thought it was none the worse for having an imposter identity.

  If I lived nearer I would be quite happy to visit the charming and highly affordable Zindiya on a weekly basis.

Rating:-🌛🌛🌛🌛. 9 August 2024.

201. Peruvian Street Food in Longbridge.

 

  I have expressed in previous Blogs my lack of excitement when faced with the threat of having to consume Street Food. I have had one or two overpriced stinkers in my time and all eaten uncomfortably seated on some stray street bench somewhere or the other with a gale whipping around me, drizzle in the air and the dog looking utterly miserable.

  Digbeth Dining Club made consuming street food in Birmingham somewhat more comfortable and, more importantly, cool, (or whatever word is now used to denote cool) and eventually sent out little satellites on a regular basis so that street food was not just confined to the inner city (by which I mean Digbeth and, lattetly, the Jewellery Quarter) but also suburban neighbourhoods and notably distant, near-rural Longbridge. 

  On 19 November 2021 St Modwen, the company which redeveloped Longbridge, with Digbeth Dining Club, opened Herbert’s Yard, named after Herbert Austin who founded the Longbridge motor factory, to house diners buying street food from stalls set up by regular stall holders of Digbeth Dining Club. There are dozens of tables which from the first day attracted hundreds of people local to south west Birmingham and northern Worcestershire - families, the young, the old and … their dogs. At last - street food at Longbridge in dry, spacious, wind-free surroundings (and Longbridge can be so wondrously windy that any denizen of Digbeth would believe that they had been transported to another planet by gastronomic aliens). 

  South west Birmingham has no restaurant to thrill the gourmand and so Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Herbert’s Yard is an opportunity not to be missed with approximately six Digbeth Dining Club stall holders turning up every week to sell their wares; the vendors changing every week. On the opening day I ate Taiwanese style with a delicious spicy jackfruit bao and in contrast then turned my attention to a hot dog but the size of the ‘jumbo’ sausage’ was far too excessive for my taste and Lucy The Labrador came to my aid and polished it off. The accompanying crispy onions were also no substitute for sweet gently fried onions which are traditional accompaniments with hot dog - sometimes change is not always for the better.

  I was unable to revisit Herbert’s Yard for a couple of weeks being away in Ludlow and Lichfield dining very well as previously reported. However on a return visit I was delighted to find that there was a stall there named Chakanita, run by those behind the Michelin-plated Chakana Peruvian-style restaurant situated in Moseley (and which was recently gushingly reviewed by Jay Rayner in a swooning ecstasy after visiting Chakana). There was no competition for my interest this week. It had to be Chakanita. It had to be Peruvian. After all, how often can you eat food prepared by a Michelin-listed establishment in these distant outer reaches of the city?

  We must remember that this was street food, prepared on relatively primitive cooking devices in a wooden shack. Not a smart Michelin-listed, food critic-pleasing, restaurant in a wealthy, Champagne- socialist, inner suburb of the city. I had long viewed Chakana as a restaurant I really must visit but I have an aversion to Moseley which I find hard to overcome and I still had not summoned up the moral fortitude to head to Moseley to enable me to eat at Chakana. But here was Chakana, or its smaller wayward sibling at least, plying its trade in modest Longbridge. 

 I chose a chicken tomale with an excellent, fresh spicy salsa which proved to be very edible indeed. The chicken was nicely cooked and the slickness was perfect. The pork in a blue corn bun - not a lot to say about it except that it gave a lot of pleasure.

  These few minutes of pleasure at Herbert’s Yard were the spur I needed and when I returned home I reserved a table at Chakana for a few days time. It was time to overcome my Moseleyphobia and set off to see if I could also experience Jay Rayner’s ecstasy at Birmingham’s mothership of Peruvian cuisine. The excitement of anticipation is growing already.

168. Birmingham Street Food - Old Man Bites Pig.

   I regret that I find myself repelled by photographs of burgers, often huge mounds of calorific monstrousness with everything bar the kitchen sink shoved in between the upside and downside of a sliced brioche, and find it hard to look at a burger in real life let alone a virtual one and find it even more difficult to contemplate ordering one for myself to eat.

  The burger is really the centre point of Street Food which is so trendy now, particularly here in Birmingham where the now ageing Digbeth Dining Club reborn as the Hockley Social Club pioneered street food here in the West Midlands. Of course we’ve always had street food - when I was a child I recall the vendors of hot chestnuts and baked potatoes and hot dogs laden with sweet, mildly slimy slices of onion that could be found in the smoggy, damp streets of the centre of Birmingham. There was nothing like a finger-burning baked potato or a delicious juicy hot dog on a dreary late November day in the early 1960s to bring a little joy into your life when as a child you are being dragged around Lewis’ and Rackham’s and Grey’s department stores by my mother and her 2 sisters (the adult male members of the family wisely found other things to do).

  So street food, like the poor, has been with us always. But now we have arrived in an era where street food is almost a cult even if the consumption of street food now takes place indoors and is often shockingly over-priced. Like the concept of  Fine Dining, Street Food has been marketed brilliantly and aimed highly successfully at the well paid age group who are least likely to accept a COVID-19 vaccine - as my old Gran used to say, aptly I think, those who “have more money than sense”. The Digbeth Dining Club was designed just for them, those who see themselves as being cool or whatever the present term might be, the 20 to 35 year olds who live in the Jewellery Quarter, the Gas Street area, Harborne, Kings Heath, Moseley and latterly, the superannuated  Stirchley which throughout my lifetime has been grim and unappealing but is now judged to be vibrant because it now has some coffee shops and a bakery that is not Gregg’s.

  Here where I live in the south west of the city, where Lord Austin’s old motor factory was demolished and replaced by glass and concrete and, more pleasingly, some rewilding along the river Rea which is really just a brook in this particular area, the Digbeth Dining Club has been hosting regular pop ups of five or six traders which it has named the Longbridge Dining Club and, our peculiar microclimate (persistent wind, lower temperatures and pop up showers) allowing, is a source of entertainment for the population where not very much else happens apart from minor crime (most of the pubs have closed and no-one seems prepared to risk their money opening a decent restaurant in the area). Now a building is being erected in conjunction with the Digbeth Dining Club at Longbridge to provide a permanent home for Street trader-type businesses. Is Longbridge about to become cool? A centre of the Street Food industry in Birmingham? The latest Stirchley but with fresh air and a lot of greenness? More than likely I think.

The new home of the Longbridge Dining Club under construction

  With that in mind I took the dog along with me to a recent session of the Longbridge Dining Club. The showers were repetitive and insistent but in between there was blue sky and moderate sunshine and the wind was quite soothing. There were only 5 or 6 stands and not a burger in sight. There was a steak sandwich stall, a drinks stall, an Indian food stall, a dessert stall but I choose to give my custom to a stall selling bao and south east Asian curries. And very pleasant it was too.

The Longbridge Dining Club

  

  To start I chose a very good gua bao - a very tasty version of Tiger bites pig (hu yao shi). Not being at all knowledgable about the consumption of baos, I enjoyed the bun itself very much and the nicely cooked diced pork belly it was served with had a splendidly unctuous sauce. It proved to be a happy way to pass a minute or two, so much so that I returned to the stall to treat myself to ‘a second course’.

  This was a good helping of a beautifully cooked chicken in a coconut sauce. The chicken was over seasoned but the accompanying spices helped to moderate the flavour and the accompanying salad was very good - fresh with crunchy red cabbage - and the rice was very well cooked. My bias against street food was moderated as a result of this excellent little meal under the summer clouds in the fresh breeze.

Chicken coconut curry

  It is just possible that as the combined damaging effects of COVID-19 and the present appalling Birmingham City Council (BCC-19) on the general state of the city centre continue to unravel, Longbridge, or somewhere like it, may emerge as an alternative  to the city as the place for Brummies to travel to for rest and relaxation particularly to track down good food. Now, is there anyone out there who wants to have a go at opening a smart restaurant here?

139. Street Food In Birmingham. Goodbye Digbeth, Hello Hockley. Goodbye Beefburgers, Hello Venisonburgers.

   I think I have made it clear before that I haven’t been caught up in the lemming-like plunge from cliffs into a sea of expensive, often somewhat unpleasant street food served on nasty cardboard trays that has become inexplicably popular in this city. Much of it just isn’t very nice. There are a couple of recent developments in this aspect of Birmingham dining that are worth mentioning here.

  Firstly Digbeth Dining Club is no more or at least not in the form in which those who like that sort of thing (mostly aged under 40 who have lead a life of whining and who are now prone to long-COVID) have come to know it. It has been based in Lower Trinity Street since it began almost ten years ago in venues such as Mama Roux’s and Spotlight but as the triumph of the government’s vaccination campaign enables the hospitality industry to be reborn imminently the DDC has revealed that it will open a new venue in the Jewellery Quarter in Hockley. DDC does say however that it is looking for its own venue in Digbeth, the charms of which remain lost on me to this day, and that the venue will be, “a place where we can grow, develop, champion independence and incubate the best food traders, musicians, DJs (I don’t think they’re referring to dinner jackets), artists and makers that the region has to offer”. So that’s alright then. The new location in Hockley will be in Great Hampton Street and it is said that the “Hockley Social Club will still feature a line-up of street food and DJs in a 10,000 square feet space” (really you’d think that cool street food-consuming dudes would have converted to metric measurements by now).

  Meanwhile Birmingham’s appalling City Council which is dominated by a Labour Party locked in perpetual civil war between the Corbynistas and Starmer’s Limp Left faction, which in itself does not give much hope for good governance, and made up of a lot of worthless inner city councillors who make no contribution to the progress of the city apart from claiming their £18000 annual ‘expenses’ (they’ve just voted themselves a substantial rise again) and anything else they can get their hands on along with councillors representing privileged members of the wealthy, self-satisfied left leaning-middle class who have swarmed in places like Moseley and Harborne, has taken it on itself to withhold licenses from long established street-traders unless the traders introduce an “innovative approach”to what they offer for sale. 

  In reply the traders have taken the council to court accusing it of wanting to “gentrify” the city centre which one expects is just the vision that the denizens of Moseley and Harborne and their council representatives probably do hope to see happen. In court the lawyer representing the Council was forced to deny that the Council wished to replace current stalls selling beefburgers with those selling chai lattes and Tibetan curries (I had to look up what a Tibetan curry is and had to conclude that it most certainly has a home in Moseley). The lawyer for the Council, one Jonathan Manning, said that an “innovative approach is what the council is looking for”. He continued that traders were not required to sell “something that no-one has ever heard of, that no-one knew existed” (not Tibetan curry then obviously). “if you are burger van (an interesting piece of transformation in itself) you can still innovate within the burger market by selling goods that are perhaps more diverse than you were previously selling,. An example could be perhaps a vegetarian line or a different kind of meat - one could have a venison burger”. Such drivel. Frankly I find most burgers to be pretty unpleasant but I do support the traders who have worked in this city through all sorts of weather over many years and resent the assault on them by those who represent the Tibetan curry-eaters who live in their million pound houses in Moseley and such suburbs. If they want a venison burger then you are bound to find one in B13 or B15 and you can wash it down with an over-priced  Côtes de Rhône at the same time.

What is a Tibetan curry? Well nothing special I wouldn’t think though it is said to be less oily than Indian curries and have a “cleaner, healthier feel” (that figures, I’m surprised Birmingham City Council has not already made it de rigeur in all Birmingham restaurants). Recipes on the internet seem to centre on bright yellow potato curries and while genuine Tibetans (I’m not sure how many there are in Moseley or Harborne) use a yerma peppercorn in their’s, western recipe variants seem to feature a lot of fenugreek. So now we know. I wonder how soon it will be before Birmingham city centre is full of Tibetan curry stalls and if one will find its way to the Hockley Social Club (actually to give myself an easy time I often make a potato curry and like to use a lot of fenugreek so I think I have been several years ahead of the denizens of Moseley on that one). However I haven’t yet made myself a venison burger.