344. Lamb At Lamb’s Of Sheep Street; Burger At Libertine Burger; Chaplin Dines.

 

  The Shakespeare Hotel in Stratford upon Avon, which Lucy The Labrador and I have been visiting regularly for the past ten years, will close on 31 October for refurbishment for eighteen months. It’s almost like a second home to us, its staff have been friends and its absence will represent a little hole in our lives. Therefore we are paying a couple more visits than we would have otherwise done to have a final few days in the hotel. Which means dining out.

  In Blog 335 I described a visit to The Opposition, one of the row of bistros a few yards from the side entrance to The Shakespeare. It was tolerable but the dishes I was served were imprecisely cooked. Detail is everything if one is paying a not inconsiderable sum of money for a meal and overcooked, if not seriously so, fish makes the diner wonder if it was all worthwhile. 

  As mentioned in Blog 266, I have dined at Lamb’s of Sheep Street, in the past - in fact almost exactly one year ago. It is just a matter of few yards from the Shakespeare Hotel and while being timber-framed, oak beamed and altogether Elizabethan, is very spacious, has excellent staff and a good choice of food.

  The starter was never going to set the culinary world on fire, being a sort of deconstructed crayfish cocktail but the Marie Rose was nicely flavoured, the sliced avocado creamy and nicely textured, the pink grapefruit aptly citric to match the dish and the chopped leaves fresh and crispy. This wasn’t anything you couldn’t do at home but fine all the same.

  The main course was in a different league - three perfectly cooked cutlets of rack of lamb - an exact pinkness, joyously tender and mildly flavoured with bursts of rosemary. An accompanying dauphinois was delightfully buttery but in need of more seasoning - salt and pepper were available on the table but I always feel one should never have to use them though on this occasion I did, and precisely tender green beans, all tied together with a pleasingly adequate amount of gravy. A joy to behold - and eat.

  For dessert a tasty iced caramelised hazelnut parfait of excellent texture. The only problem with it was that it was a dish of one flavour, with nothing to contrast or complement it and eventually I felt like I was just working my way through it, somewhat bored. 

  Since dining, I looked back at Blog 266 and discovered that the starter and main had been the same dishes that I chose a year ago which says a lot about my limited range of preferences and the unchanging nature of the basic Lamb’s menu. This restaurant was included in the Michelin Guide from 2000 to 2020. The food it serves certainly seems to be more accurately prepared than at least one of its rival neighbours but it might be said that it needs to catch up a little with the proceeding 2020s.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

  Having surprised myself by discovering how little my tastes in starters and dessert change when similar menus are presented to me a year apart, another surprise grabbed my attention on this Stratford visit. While contemplating and musing in our room at The Shakespeare, with Lucy doing the same, both of us, she and I, thoughts firmly related to food, I noticed on social media that a West Midlands tourism promotion organisation, Make It West Midlands, had listed as finalists, three very diverse catering establishments for a Taste of the West Midlands award - Chapter in Edgbaston, Libertine Burger with outlets in Leamington Spa and Stratford upon Avon and Baxter Baristas @ 16 Hales Street in Coventry. An eclectic mix if ever there were one.

  But there I was - in Stratford wondering where to go for lunch and less than five minutes away was the town’s branch of Libertine Burgers and it was dog friendly and Lucy could therefore accompany me. It was not a hard decision to make and off we headed for a very unStratford-like concentration of popular chain restaurants off High Street. The restaurant is a narrow, clean-looking but fairly basicly furnished dining area like an English version of an American diner, with the kitchen where all the burger-making was taking place, at the centre of it all. An excellent young waitress took my order - I decided on the beef pattie with very nicely crispy smoked bacon, good cheese, a spicy sauce and crispy fried pickles which were great fun. I also chose the accompanying chips and these were really good - it would be hard to find any better. I’ve said it before, I’m not a burger lover but this was remarkably good. Now if only someone could find a way of preventing the base of the bun from being soggy. By the way, I washed it all down with a can of ‘cherry soda’ which we always used to call ‘cherryade’.

  The Stratford branch of the restaurant, so the waitress told me, opened about five months ago.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

  Another surprise of the stay in Stratford was discovering a fascinating, even fabulous, item hidden away in the lobby of The Shakespeare Hotel. It’s probably been there for years but I had never noticed it before, despite my many visits there. Hanging on a shadowed wall is a menu of the hotel’s restaurant, dated 7 November 1931 and signed “To the cook, the dinner was excellent” by Charlie Chaplin.

  I have to say, I covet this remarkable item. Of course Chaplin’s annotation makes this a culinary gem but the dishes on offer are also intensely interesting. It’s 1931, it’s the Jazz Age, Chaplin is a superstar and menus are still full of Escoffinalia. The travelling middle class, the visiting actors, the Bertie Woosters, Woosters’ aunts, the local upper crust are all staying at or just, perhaps, dining in the Shakespeare, the town’s greatest hotel. And they’re dining from a menu, as you would expect, written in French and made up of exotically named dishes, with famous people remembered by them. There’s Careme - Faisan D’Ecosse Careme, Carmen (from the eponymous opera? I wonder) - Délices de sole Carmen and even the bard himself - Specialite Chestnuts Shakespeare (such splendid Franglais). 

  Food - not all the pleasures are in the eating.

335. The Opposition, Stratford upon Avon.

 

  I was in Stratford to see what mischief the RSC had wrought on Shakespeare in its most recent production of Macbeth. Mischief had indeed been wrought. Best not to think about it.

  Dinner was needed the following evening and I chose The Opposition, three or four shops down from the Garrick Wing of the Shakespeare Hotel where Lucy The Labrador and I love to stay so by the time I arrived at the restaurant very little distance hade been travelled. The Opposition makes up a part of a row of bistros including the well thought of Lamb’s of Sheep Street and has an attractive frontage and an even more attractive interior - more spacious than you might think when you first arrive because there are four dining rooms that make up the ground floor dining area, atmospherically oak beamed with exposed stone walls.  Even though the pre-theatre dinner crowd had already moved on to see the rubbish the RSC was delivering at the theatre a stone’s throw away, the restaurant was still full of diners and for want of a better word, buzzing. And thereby might be the problem.

  The specials, written on a blackboard but also featured on the crowded paper menu, looked too tempting to resist. I had the starter of Cornish crab and avocado salad. It looked as though it might have benefitted from me arriving an hour earlier - the avocado was browning and the peashoots in the salad looked exhausted and were not a pleasure to eat (and I did not). The crab was nice enough but this starter did not rise above the middling

  The main was Fillet of plaice with samphire, caper butter and seasonal vegetables. This was a nice piece of plaice but the cooking was tragically inaccurate with the fish, though not inedible by any means, being well over which seems to me to be a great waste and misfortune. The way food was flying out of the very busy kitchen seemed the likely cause - it was clearly too difficult to apply the necessary attention which a fine piece of pricey fish deserves compared with a dish of lasagne or a plate of tortellini. The vegetables were mainly cooked satisfactorily, it was pleasing to have plain buttered new potatoes than being served with some cheffy twist applied to them.

  For dessert I had a depressingly inelegantly presented ‘fresh vanilla rice pudding with plum compote’. Again this was too tempting to resist and the rice pudding was very reasonable and nicely bucked up by the plum compote but I couldn’t help feeling that more could have been made of this dish.

  The service was excellent. I sat next to a charming couple who said they had visited The Opposition four or five times and “had never had a bad meal”. From my experience I doubt that the restaurant does serve any ‘bad meals’ but my meal was full of faults which I do not like to see when I am paying well over £60 for a three course meal plus drinks. It’s sad because it’s a lovely place with plenty of atmosphere and fine service.

Rating:- 🌛.