477. Tom Shepherd’s Cow Pie In Hopwood.

  The first principle of running a business must be to make a profit. Without profit a business can not survive and the individual who owns it will go hungry and those who work for it will lose their jobs. To make a business profitable the proprietor needs to make the products he sells attractive to and desirable to potential customers and at a price which they are prepared to pay. The business can be as glamorous or as down-to-earth as the proprietor likes as long as there are sufficient customers who are prepared to buy from it preferably on a regular basis. The business, particularly, a restaurant or dining establishment also needs to be situated in a location which is reachable and attractive and has ‘passing trade’ and it also needs to employ staff who know how to interact well with the customers. It is surprising how often, sometimes in a rush to open a restaurant, a restaurateur seem to ignore some or all of these points and therefore set their business on a course which will ultimately lead to failure.

  And so to the Hopwood Inn in Hopwood, the first village across the border from southwest Birmingham on the road to Alvechurch and Redditch. Suddenly housing disappears as one heads out across Worcestershire and fields and farms reveal themselves in the green, rolling countryside where the dairy cows of Groveley Farm are grazing very peacefully and hills start to rise up in various directions - the Lickeys and the distant Cotswolds and Malverns. These latter two hills can be viewed from High Hill which looks down on drivers on the Birmingham to Redditch Road as they cross the Birmingham/Worcestershire border and the vista gives a fine idea of the extent of the beautiful rural West Midlands. And on arriving in Hopwood, a couple of mikes from the edge of Birmingham, one finds a peaceful, pretty canal passing under the road heading from Kings Norton on to Alvechurch and beside it is the picturesque, old redbrick Hopwood House which is a grand example of just how well a hospitality business can do when the owners of a business get things right. 

  Here, everything seems to tick all the boxes - a convenient, attractive location close to a large population who find it no trouble to get to the spot, the right sort of food at the right sort of price to appeal to that population, a clean, bright, spacious, comfortable, pleasantly decorated interior with good parking and lovely gardens for the good weather and hosts who know how to welcome their guests and serve them well. The Hopwood House, sited next to the canal, and all the more attractive for that, just about gets all of that right. It’s a British rural pub, part of the Marston’s chain. It has no pretensions, it strives to feed and slake the thirst of those who go there and does not try to be something it isn’t. It’s not a gastropub and not all the food lives up to expectations. But it suits the people it aims to serve and that is a good business and generally, when leaving it, the diner’s appetite is more than satisfied with food that, in the part, has given them pleasure.

  But just at the moment, there really is something on the menu to make the diner drool with anticipation. We will recall Tom Shepherd’s success in the 2023 Great British Menu television series when his ‘cow pie’ was chosen to be the main course at the final banquet. Since then, his restaurant, Upstairs by Tom Shepherd in Lichfield, has been fully booked for seven or eight months ahead and then, it seems, tables are only available for groups of four or so. Not much chance of dining on his cow pie there then, you think. Well, Marston’s appear to have cleverly found a solution to that little problem to both its and Tome Shepherd’s benefit - 20000 of a version of his award-winning pie (‘a limited edition’) are being sold in Marston’s pubs until the edition runs out. Brilliant.

  It was for this reason a regular dining companion and myself set out for Hopwood (a pleasingly short distance from my home for once) to make ourselves comfortable in the Hopwood House, settle back and tuck into Shepherd’s remarkable creation. I had a pint of Inch’s recently introduced Riversider Herefordshire cider to get me started and very good it was too. Anticipation grew as we awaited the delivery of our pies and we were not to be disappointed.

  The pie looked good from the outside and rather better in the inside. The information displayed on a card on the table described the pie and it seemed to be consistent with the dish that Shepherd had served upin the Great British Menu, “A triple layered pie made with hand pulled beef cheek and pulled shin, sweet and garlicky caramelised onions, separated by a thinly sliced distinctively savoury, seasoned roasted potato layer, all encased within a deliciously textured beef fat pastry”.

And indeed it was highly delicious - an inarguably fine pie rarely if ever matched by the numerous pub pies I have eaten in the past. The description above was accurate, the meat tender and unctious as slow cooked beef shin and cheek should be and the whole generously portioned. The accompanying vegetables were unremarkable but the mash was as good as many a pub mash, the roast carrots nicely textured with a nice bite to them and the greens fairly humdrum but good enough. There was a good gravy or ‘rich red wine sauce’ (whichever term you prefer) with it and it all went down very well with my glass of cider.

I was immediately trying to think of an excuse to come back again to have another dive into one of these cow pies, so enjoyable was it.

  Though full, I chose cheesecake with cherries and cherry sauce. It was not distinguished in flavour but the texture was satisfactory and the macerated cherries were cheerful enough even though they were working hard to keep the flavour of cherry to themselves.

  But in the end, t’was the pie that made it. Tom Shepherd really is clever. And the view of the canal and the generally happy and welcoming atmosphere.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛 (sans pie 🌛🌛)

25 April 2025.

351. Tom Shepherd At Simpsons.

 

  Simpsons, the doyen of Birmingham restaurants, is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, as we have noted before. To commemorate this anniversary, Luke Tipping - Chef Director - has been staging some eclectic collaborations - firstly with Stuart Deeley of Smoke and then with Paul Colis of the burger restaurant, Meat Shack (both collaborations were reported on in previous Blogs). The third and final of these collaborations was staged on the evening of 3 October 2023 at Simpsons with Tom Shepherd, acclaimed chef of Tom Shepherd at Upstairs in Lichfield. This took the form of a fine seven course dinner.

  The thoughtfully already autographed menu included some excellent dishes and to local gourmands it was not difficult to decipher the culinary clues as to which chef was responsible for which dish. A thrilling amuse bouche was clearly the work of Tom Shepherd - a delicious savoury custard of smoked eel was flavoured not only by the eel but sweetened by the corn and given texture by both. Very Tom Shepherd. On to Luke Tipping’s first course - finely cured cubes of salmon with dill oil, oyster leaf and frozen horseradish. Very Luke Tipping.

  Not hard, too, to spot that the third course - one of the plummiest, meatiest scallops I’ve ever the pleasure to become acquainted with, textured with peanut and playfully paired with satay - was the work of Shepherd. Then to Tipping’s remarkable foie gras with a slice of banana, all sitting on spied honey bread. A gem of a dish. The foie gras-banana combination is not unknown and seems to be an American thing and I rather like it.

  Shepherd had had the honour of regaling his guests with the main course. This was accurately cooked, tender-as-butter venison with king oyster, plump blackberries and celeriac purée - the mellow mists and fruitfulness of autumn surrounded the highly seasonal plate. A hit! A palpable hit!

  The correctly timed cheese course brought Baron Bigod to the table sublimely paired with fermented plum and truffled honey all on malted waffle and Tom Shepherd rounded off with a grand dessert - a delightful Valrhona Araguani chocolate mousse base with pecan ice cream and happy sweetness from Pedro Ximenez. 

  These are grand collaborations that we have been enjoying at Simpsons. We do not need a special anniversary to ensure we go to future such events.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

306. Great British Menu Central Heat & Finals 2023.

 

  There’s little doubt that the 2023 series of the BBC’s television programme Great British Menu has been one of the weakest ever when it is boiled down to the abilities of the participating chefs. This time the heat  for the Central region (West and East Midlands and East Anglia) was the very last to be broadcast and one could only feel that things could only get better. And in true Midlands fashion, that is what happened. The only representative from East Anglia, Antigua-born Kareem Roberts, chef at a Caribbean-British fusion restaurant in Cambridge, was eliminated at the end of the first round (amuses gueles, starters and fish course) leaving Tom Shepherd of the Michelin starred restaurant Upstairs in Lichfield, Thom Bateman of The Flintlock of Cheddleton (both in Staffordshire) and Marianne Lumb, currently a private chef based in Leicestershire and aiming to open her own restaurant, The Pipistrelle, later in 2023, to fight out the second round (mains, intermediate course, dessert). Marianne had previously won the Central regional heat in 2018 but was not successful in her attempt to win a place preparing a course at the final banquet.

  Those that produced the programme had decided that the theme of the dishes should be ‘animation and illustration’ on the rather specious premise that 2023 marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Michael Bond’s first Paddington novel, with its pleasant illustrations. Marmalade, not surprisingly and rather obviously, had featured in several of the dishes presented prior to the Central heats. 

  For the main course Tom Shepherd turned his attention to the comic character Desperate Dan, who had an obsession with eating cow pies and that is precisely what Shepherd used as the inspiration for his dish calling it Desperate Dan’s Cow Pie. The pie was prepared by searing beef cheeks and then pressure cooking them for seventy minutes and serving the meat in hot crust pastry with mushroom ketchup, maple-glazed carrots, chive emulsion, a slice of sirloin and beef sauce. The anticipation of both the host, Andi Oliver, and the guest judging chef, Paul Ainsworth, was very high for this dish and that degree of excitement was addressed as the the dish saw Ainsworth awarding 10 out of 10 points to Shepherd for it and the statement by Ainsworth that it was the best pie he’d ever had. Pie praise indeed.

  Thom Bateman meanwhile presented a main course, May un mar lady (based on a long running Staffordshire cartoon) of sirloin steak, pommes dauphine with blue cheese grated over them and Staffordshire lobby (a beef stew, traditionally eaten by pottery workers around Stoke on Trent), carrot, confit onion, beer sauce and brown sauce from Bateman’s own recipe. The meat, both sirloin and lobby, was pronounced to be delicious though Ainsworth felt the sirloin was not rested for long enough and the carrots did not have enough flavour while the potatoes were a little undercooked.

  Marianne Lumb’s main course, Yumbly Hedge, was a vegan brined and roasted cauliflower dish served with a hazelnut Béarnaise sauce (which Ainsworth described as “delicious”). When Ainsworth announced the points he had awarded, Lumb received 7 points as did Bateman while Shepherd achieved the maximum 10 points.

  Shepherd followed up with a dessert, No Ordinary Boy (recalling the cartoon character Bananaman)  which was made of white chocolate containing banana mousse and served with banana ice cream and this too was awarded 10 points and ensured that he would join Thom Bateman in the judges’s chamber at the end of the week. Marianne Lumb was eliminated at the end of the second day but competed with charm, dignity and ably demonstrated her fine abilities. It is perhaps worth mentioning that, though the judge and presenter and fellow contestants were astonished by Shepherd’s banana dish, it was not the first time that regular West Midlands diners have seen it - with Alex Claridge presenting a very similar dessert titled Ch-ch-changes at The Wilderness intermittently since 2021. Indeed, the chocolate banana had appeared even earlier in 2019:when Alex Claridge was serving his version at the short-lived Nocturnal Animals.

Alex Claridge’s banana dessert first encountered at Nocturnal Animals along ago as July 2019:-

  On the regional judging day, Tom Shepherd was chosen to represent the Central region and in the finals the following week. His starter, Pac man, was probably his weakest dish and he came seventh of the eight contestants on the first day of the finals. His fish course, Fungus The Bogeyman’s Breakfast, took fifth place (originally served with kohlrabi which was not well received and which was replaced by chopped leeks in the final).

  The blue riband event of Finals Week is undoubtedly the Main Course on Day 3; this as we were constantly reminded, was the course all the chefs wanted to be selected to present at the banquet itself. There seemed little doubt from the various judges’ reactions to Desperate Dan’s Cow Pie that Tom Shephard’s immaculate dish would walk off with the winning main course award and this indeed proved to be the case receiving the maximum 10 points from all four judges, one of whom was the Birmingham comedian Lennie Henry. Shepherd therefore became the first Midlands Region chef to win the right to present the main course at the banquet and to score maximum points in doing so.

  Shepherd’s mock-banana, No Ordinary Schoolboy, also won first place in the dessert course competition but shared another set of four tens with the dessert served by the Scottish chef, who had been runner-up for almost every course, being placed 1st equal with it. In a tie-break the informed presenter, Andi Oliver, chose the Scotsman’s dish to go forward to the banquet which was an act of kindness though it wasn’t hard to get the feeling that Shepherd’s banana was really the dessert the judges would have liked to be shovelling up from their plates on the day of the banquet itself.

  Another great success for a West Midlands chef and the local dining out industry.