371.Luke Butcher leaves Purnell’s.

 

2024 will usher in some changes in the restaurant scene in Birmingham. Notably Purnell’s will have a new Head Chef after the announcement just before Christmas that Head Chef, Luke Butcher, was leaving his post at the restaurant although his replacement has not yet been named.

  Butcher began to work with Glynn Purnell when he was appointed to be chef de Partie at Purnell’s in 2010, having started his career at Adlard’s Restaurant in Norwich and then moving on to be pastry chef at Tom Kerridge’s Hand and Flowers in 2006. He was appointed Head Chef at Purnell’s in April 2017.

  Regular diners at Purnell’s may have felt that in recent years, menus had become too repetitive with many of Purnell’s longtime signature dishes featuring constantly on the tasting menus and it will be interesting to see what role Butcher takes up elsewhere which might enable him to develop menus of his own with more freedom as well as seeing what direction Purnell’s’ menus travel in with the appointment of a new Head Chef.

  Bizarrely The Caterer initially reported Luke Butcher’s departure on its site and in a tweet and named  him as ‘Luke Batch’ and it was only after I commented on the tweet identifying his correct name that the tweet was deleted (and not replaced) and the name in the website article was corrected. It does seem vaguely insulting when a long-serving, well respected chef is wrongly named on a professional reporting site specifically designed to report on the hospitality industry. 

Corrected version on website - 

  Meanwhile, in the so-called Edgbaston Village, in Highfield Road near Simpsons, a restaurant describing  itself as ‘fine-dining’ and offering an opportunity to “celebrate the new year with a mesmerising eight-course fine dining experience inspired by the historic Silk Road” opens in January 2024. The publicity promises a “unique gastronomic adventure” with the menu taking the diner “on a journey through the rich and diverse food cultures of Turkey, Iran, Balochistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India - a true feast for the senses!”.

  There’s clearly a lot of hype around this new restaurant which is named Baloci and this term, ‘fine dining’ is bandied about rather a lot. Six by Nico (see Blog 364) is a good example of a restaurateur locating a restaurant in a smart dining room, plating up the ingredients attractively and calling it ‘fine dining’ but these are not necessarily a guarantee that what you get is actually ‘fine dining’. Fine dining needs a lot more than glitzy decor and the use of the term. We are approaching a stage where fine dining becomes a pastiche of itself just as nouveau cuisine suffered a similar fate. Still, I will give a Baloci a visit and report back but I go with a mild feeling of dread about what will happen when I go there. I’m also a little anxious about what the term “Electric Fine Dining” coukd possibly mean - some publicity expert seems to have gone a little bonkers. I hope Baloci does not turn out to be baloney.

  One of the less satisfactory dining experiences of recent years, allowing for the high price of the meal, was at the Bracebridge in Sutton Coldfield. This was another one of those restaurants with fine dining pretensions which failed to live up to what one was expecting (see Blog 59). Not before time, the restaurant closed in October 2023 but is now to be reopened, as reported by the BBC on 27 December 2023 by Andrew Sheridan and Sam and Emma Morgan’s Open Restaurant Group with some added investment from local residents in the well-heeled area. Sheridan himself of course, has decamped to reopen 8, previously located in the International Convention Centre, in his native Liverpool but retains his interest in the West Midlands with several enterprises including Black And Green in another affluent location - Barnt Green.

  It will be interesting to see if Sutton Coldfield, after a long absence, can finally find its way back into the pages of the Food Guides.

59. Recently Opened, Renewed Or Closed.

   In the warm summer weather of mid-July it seemed a good idea to troop off to one of Birmingham’s newest most-talked-about restaurants which trades particularly on its pretty location in Sutton Park - the previous Boathouse restaurant now reopened and named The Bracebridge. The new restaurant had been opened by Chef owners, the brothers Steven and Scott Lewis who trained under Michel Roux Jr at Le Gavroche and previously had been students at the Birmingham College Of Food with stints also at Quaglinos and Tante Clair between them.

  The food, when served, seemed remarkably unphotogenic so I gave my camera a rest and as all three of us thought that the gazpacho was a good idea on a hot day it seemed a pity that we all found it to be rather bitter and not all that pleasant. The other courses we found to be more pleasant but hardly memorable and we summed our experience up as not being Fine Dining but priced to be Fine Dining - the food really is quite expensive doubtless because of the restaurant’s location in well-heeled Sutton Coldfield. This was a generally disappointing experience but the location was pleasant enough.

A companion and I lunched at Maribel soon after the end of the one year Richard Turner era and thoroughly enjoyed sampling the food prepared by the restaurant’s new Head Chef, 24 year old Harvey Perttola who had been working there under Turner for some months and previously had worked at Opus as a chef de partie under David Colcombe before going on to work at Swinfen Hall in Lichfield and at Hampton Manor in Hampton-in-Arden when it received its Michelin star.

  Maribel is said to now have a new ‘more relaxed’ approach to Fine Dining and my companion and I certainly felt very comfortable in the bright, pleasant dining room. I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of asparagus and as a main course, deliciously moist poussin with a perfectly cooked carrot on a bed of spicy dhal. After we had eaten Chef came out to hear our reaction to his efforts and he was very personable and pleasingly enthusiastic. It contrasted somewhat with the previous Head Chef who more than once I spotted with his head around the kitchen door seeming to glare at his customers rather unnervingly. The absence of Richard Turner’s stare certainly helped to make the restaurant atmosphere somewhat more relaxed.

  Maribel should find its way into the guides to dining out in Birmingham as they are published as the latter part of the year goes by.

   The event to unveil this year’s Michelin awards which precedes the publication of the Michelin Guide will be held this year on 7 October at an as yet undisclosed venue.

 In Birmingham, as elsewhere, restaurants come and go. I wasn’t surprised to read an article in the 6 June edition of the Birmingham Post that Harden’s recommended Tom’s Kitchen, founded by celebrity chef Tom Aikens and situated in The Mailbox, had just closed only 2 years after it had opened. It just wasn’t special enough and when I lunched there, just the once, I had the feeling of sitting in a giant works canteen though the food which was said to be ‘British comfort food classics in a relaxed and informal brasserie setting’ was perfectly tolerable - I recall having a crab cake with an inadequate amount of crab flavour which was further suppressed by an incompatible taste of mint, a generously sized, tasty pork chop with black pudding and very acceptable crepes served filled with a rather good marmalade. As I said, all very edible but not mind-blowing and when it comes to comfort food the diner does not really wish to find it sold at un-comfort-able prices.

  A couple of nice pictures taken during lunch at Purnell’s at the end of May posted here purely because the dishes gave me so much pleasure, the trifle was about as good as a trifle could hope to be. It isn’t surprising that Purnell’s has survived for 11 years when lesser establishments have gone to the wall:-

  Moving on quickly to Noel’s Restaurant which opened in June 2019 close to the Mailbox and with a canal view its home page describes it as “a modern restaurant and bar boasting high-end dining and an inspired cocktail menu to be enjoyed in an opulent and relaxed setting. Our chefs offer creative cuisine using fresh ingredients inspired by the Mediterranean. Noel’s ambition is to be the best charcoal fired grill in Birmingham, offering a range of specially sourced fine cuts from master butcher Aubrey Allen. Our pasta and ravioli is made fresh every morning by our artisan pasta makers and dressed with beautifully paired sauces”. 

  Given all that perhaps it was a mistake for myself and my two companions to choose fish dishes. Yes, it was certainly a mistake. I started off with a pleasant-looking prawn and avocado salad served in an old fashioned martini glass. The sauce had a minimum of flavour and the dish was edible but little more. By the end I felt like I was just going through the motions so as not to waste any food. The main course was worse - I chose sea bass (depicted below) which was ruthlessly overcooked - the skin was rubbery and not crispy and the fish was dry. It was satisfactorily seasoned - a point I make so as not to be wholly negative. Nothing else on the plate was memorable and additionally charged side dishes were an unnecessary expense and added nothing to the meal. The dessert on the other hand was excellent - a delicious tiramisu. My companions both had starters of spicy prawns which they found to be very average and their monkfish main courses were again over cooked with the fish being rubbery and the whole lacking in flavour. One described the main course as “horrible”.

  The service was excellent and we had a delicious reasonably priced wine which, along with the tiramisu, was the best part of the meal.

  I have not found any backstory to the restaurant and I do not think there is a named chef. I do not know who is ‘Noel’. The restaurant is pleasant and bright and we may have had a much better opinion of the place if there were evidence that it employed a chef who knows how to cook fish. I fear that the long-term future of this restaurant is far from certain.