491. Wildmoor Oak Inn, Wildmoor.

 

  It is not hard to write a piece about another visit to the Wildmoor Oak Inn at Wildmoor near Bromsgrove. I need merely to state that it is excellent. It’s a joyous place - wonderful, welcoming friendly service, a lovely location and a splendid, atmospheric building, a business perfectly run and conceived and best of all, food that one really looks forward to going to eat, the work of Chris Jackson, former Head Chef at Carter’s of Moseley and Brad Carter’s brother-in-law. Food, too, which one is also feeling very happy about when leaving the pub while at the same trying to work out how soon one can return there.

  This most recent visit did not disappoint as my lunch companion and I purred happily at the pleasures we had just consumed as we left the little garden across a fairyland bridge over a small babbling brook, as clear as glass, to return to the car park. We ate from the recently adopted summer menu and as a starter I had chosen a gorgeously gooey crab rarebit crumpet with a splendidly crispy crust with the joyous flavour of brown crab meat and nicely textured and tasty little brown shrimps and perfectly textured samphire. A hit! A palpable hit!

  The main course, which we both chose and were glad to have done so, was fabulously tender and delicious Blythborough pork Milanese with parmientier potatoes and a nicely moderately-flavoured aioli. The soothing summer taste of tomatoes permeated the meal and caused great pleasure which complemented the excellence of the cooking of the pork. Ruthlessly and joyously rustic fare. Such things are dreams made on.

    The dessert which again we both opted for was from the Specials menu and again was exquisite without being overwrought. This was a strawberry mille feuille. The pastry was excellent and the accompanying vanilla icecream delivered the flavour of vanilla most pleasingly.

   Wildmoor Oak Inn is excellent. I want to move in there. Time for the established food guides to recognise it as somewhere very special.

Rating:- 🌞.

27 June 2025.

472. South West Birmingham And North East Worcestershire.

 

Kings Norton from Bilberry Hill by JRR Tolkien, 8 July 1913.

  To the south and west of the city, Birmingham gradually dissolves into Worcestershire. New Frankley becomes Old Frankley, Rednal becomes Lickey End, West Heath tails off to Hopwood, Kings Norton to Wythall and Rubery to, er, Rubery. In short, suburban Birmingham becomes (mainly) rural Bromsgrove with the Lickey Hills looking down on the surrounding countryside from where JRR Tolkien painted a watercolour on Bilberry Hill looking away towards Kings Norton, the then city distant and brooding, its industry every day threatening to encroach on and overwhelm the agricultural, green lands across the border. 

  In those southwest suburbs when Tolkien was living in Rednal, Herbert Austin was busy establishing his motor car factory at Longbridge and the Cadbury family had established their chocolate factory and had built a model village in which their workers might live very pleasantly unless they wished to consume alcohol which was banned within the boundaries of Bournville village by the Quaker Cadburys.

  Southwest Birmingham is barely recognisable as what we think of as Modern Birmingham. The population is dominated by white people, many of whom arrived there in the nineteen fifties and sixties as the old buildings of the inner city were demolished, in contrast to the population of much of the inner city. It is a mixture of former council estates (many of the houses on those estates were bought by their tenants when Margaret Thatcher introduced the right to buy) and upmarket houses where savvy members of the Birmingham middle class live in houses priced at a fraction of the cost of a similar home in the north of the city at Sutton Coldfield. The residents have all the advantages of living in the city while being close to rural landscapes, just a short walk from home in many cases, as well as cheaper housing. And now those residents of south west Birmingham also have the benefit of being close to some pleasing eateries.

  Recently I had lunch at Kafenion facing Bournville green. It is a busy, sizeable, shabby chic, rustic establishment full, when I went, of the sort of affluent middle class women in early middle age who make up the dominant species in well off-but-socialist Bournville (long gone are the female factory workers who now live in council houses towards the edges of the city). They either had their infants with them, the sort born to ‘elderly primips’, or were luxuriating in their children’s absence at school. It was like a scene from the hilarious BBC comedy, Amandaland. The image of Ladies who lunch has evolved to this new generation of Women who do coffee - with their intensively worked on casual image and their devotion to their mobile phones with much scrolling and texting going on in between the exchange of gossip and oneupwomanship. This certainly is a city of diversity.

    My dining companion, a frequent visitor to Kafenion, and I, who had never eaten there before, were soon settled and studying the paper menu and the blackboard which also listed the dishes on offer. The cuisine is Anglicised Greek or just plain English (with perhaps a little unEnglish spice added). This, in theory, was to be a light lunch and I was very drawn to the spicy (I was warned that it was very spicy by at least a brace of serving staff) curried butternut squash soup which was not only hot in the spicy sense but extremely hot in the temperature meaning of the word. It was very good and the spiciness was not just easily tolerable but also very enjoyable.To accompany the soup I ordered a bowl of excellent chips - crispy outside and soft and digestible inside and made interestingly pleasurable by being sprinkled with sage. There were also a couple of slices of toasted sourdough to mop up the soup.

  My lunch companion ordered an old favourite of hers - Turkish eggs - well poached and spicy and served with an appealing flatbread and she reported that they were very good.

I will have no hesitation to visit Kafenion again when the opportunity arises.

26 March 2025.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

  In the past twelve to eighteen months, north Worcestershire has gained the excruciatingly excellent Wildmoor Oak Inn (see Blog 454) and in Barnt Green, Andrew Sheridan and his Open Restaurants Group who already have the Michelin-listed Black and Green on the  main street through the village, have opened Cofton on the Green across the road from Black and Green. 

  This is similar to Kafenion in many ways - it acts as a bar for locals and diners with reservations for Black and Green who are waiting for the restaurant to open and serves all-day breakfasts and, an odd pairing, a variety of homemade pizzas. The clientele is similar to that of Kafenion though probably even more well-heeled as Barnt Green is exceedingly affluent (mere mortals in south Birmingham refer to it wondrously as the place where “the footballers live”).

  Regardless, when I and the same lunch companion with whom I visited Kafenion, pitched up at Cofton on the Green, we noted that it was busy, not very sizeable but with outdoors seating, shabby chic, rustic and full of the same sort of clientele as those we encountered in Kafenion, only this being a Saturday, they also had their gaggle of offspring with them though this did not prevent them from paying intense attention to their mobile phones and allowing their next generation to make feral noises or wander around while chewing on some sort of healthy option piece of carbohydrate or the other.

  A young woman, somewhat inarticulate, dropped off a pair of menus at our table and we agreed outr choices and waited for one of the several staff standing at the bar to come and take our order. Eventually, after some minutes, the penny dropped on all sides, and it was revealed to us that one must order at the bar and that way one’s interest in any particular would be registered and in time brought to the table.

  I had a cocktail and we both failed to resist ordering the all day breakfast though I was pulled towards trying one of the pizzas on offer as I suspected they were probably rather good. The breakfast/brunch was very good even at 1.30PM. By the time it reached us, most of the feral children had moved on with their mobile phone-clutching parents and there was only one table left occupied by three women-who-do-coffee  whose cackling was only barely above the level of tolerance. These factors made for a more relaxing lunch than we might otherwise have hoped for half an hour previous.

  These were fine ingredients. The Lashfords sausage, of very good size, was delicious and nicely cooked though the fried egg was cooked so that there was no runniness in the yolk whatsoever. The bacon and hash brown were very tasty but the highlight was the black pudding even if it came at an added price. The cooking of the pudding was perfect, helped, no doubt, by the pudding having plenty of fat in it; it had a  moist but firm texture - too often black pudding is overcooked and cloyingly dry. The twist to this Full English breakfast was that it was served not with toast (which made a truly pleasant change) but with the exoticism of middle eastern flatbread which was also very good. I should not forget to mention that the chopped mushrooms were also delicious and some of the tastiest I have eaten for a long time.

  The choice of dessert is limited and amusingly quirky - a variety of doughnuts - my lunch companion chose the lemon meringue doughnut and said that she enjoyed it. I thought that a milk shake might make a nice way to end the meal and opted for the alluring Malteser flavoured variety. I was disappointed with it - the flavour of chocolate masked the flavour of malt and the milk shake was not anywhere cold enough. 

  My companion and I had enjoyed our visit to Cofton on the Green and again, like Kafenion, I should be happy to return perhaps next time to sample one of the pizzas though a repeat of the Full English, especially if the chef can reproduce the excellent cooking of the black pudding and the mushrooms, would also be very tempting. 

  Cofton on the Green is dog friendly which makes much more sense than letting in a load of feral middle class children spreading which ever virus they have just picked up at school or nursery.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

12 April 2025.

  In addition to Black and Green in Barnt Green (Blogs 250 and 285), south west Birmingham dwellers also have the opportunity of selecting their choice of fast food at the popular Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge (Blog 201) and the fleshpots of Stirchley and, now trending, Cotteridge which are both just a few minutes away.

465. Kynd.

 The day after my most recent visit to David Taylor’s immaculate Grace and Savour at Hampton Manor back in November 2024, it was announced that the manor’s other esteemed restaurant, Stuart Deeley’s Smoke, would close in February 2025 with Deeley leaving at the end of 2024, and would be replaced by a second David Taylor restaurant to be called Kynd (see Blog 446). I’m sure the time relationship between my visit to Hampton Manor and the important announcement was purely coincidental.

  Kynd opened on 28 February 2025 as planned and I was delighted to be the first paying customer through the door on that opening day. I was in a happy mood as I headed along the country lane, walking from the railway station to Hampton Manor and I was buoyed up by the late afternoon sunset and the groups of snowdrops in the hedgerows on either side of the road. It was only the second time I have visited one of the manor’s restaurants while it was still daylight and it was certainly easier to find my way around the grounds with the light still present. And so I alighted on Kynd in the building which had once been home to Smoke. Where once Stu Deeley had been Lord of this particular part of the manor, now David Taylor held the reigns of culinary power.

  I was the first diner. Not quite the first man at the top of Everest or on the moon but a nice feeling especially after the relaxed, friendly greeting from Keoghan who had been so helpful in arranging a taxi for me when I was last at Grace and Savour. To all intents and purposes this was just like a revisit to Smoke which was not a bad thing at all. It was cosy and warm and nicely lit and decoratively rustic. It was  easy to make myself comfortable and feeling vaguely euphoric, I launched straight into a decidedly lip smacking, spicy margarita which was an absolute riot in the mouth and then a ‘snack’ of three different types of charcuterie including venison with fennel and cured beef and then I was presented with fresh, delightful sourdough with Ampersand butter, one of my favourites (fie! though marmite or miso or seaweed butters! give me rich, golden traditional butter to spread on to my comforting fresh, delicious bread any day! Fie, I say!)

  I would have opted for the Tasting menu but to be honest I found that the à la carte included dishes more to my liking, including gurnard instead of skate of which I am not a fan. The starter was a pretty and delicious dish of Cornish crab with salted turnip espuma and pickled fennel which bought great pleasure.

  The line-caught gurnard was delicious and meticulously cooked giving me good, tender, moist white fish meat and the happy flavour of fennel all in a tasty velvety bisque with the lovely salty texture of little pieces of sopressata adding little hits of a comforting texture. Alongside was a dish of crispy, tasty potato rosti which did not go unloved.

    Winter was coming to an end and I was delighted with what I thought was a seasonally apt choice for dessert of organic Welsh rum-soaked Tipsy cake with lovely brown butter ice cream. The cake was beautifully light though perhaps not quite discernibly tipsy enough. The feeling of seasonality was rounded off by the dessert being accompanied by a rhubarb and ginger sauce and I felt contented enough to drink a gorgeous ice cider with it.

  Night has fallen. It was a clear night and as I walked back to Hampton station, I thought about my new love - Kynd - and I was planning my next visit there as I walked through the deep darkness of Hampton village. In these gloomy times, pleasures such as those which David Taylor is delivering at Kynd make dark streets suddenly flood with the light of great pleasure.

Rating:- 🌞🌞.

  Meanwhile next week, the 20th season of the BBC’s Great British Menu enters the final week of the regional heats and will feature chefs representing the Central region. Apart from an East Anglian chef who works in London and yet another appearance by East Midlander Sally Abé who also works in London when she’s not appearing on The Great British Menu, there are two West Midlands chefs featured. One is Thom Bateman of The Flintlock in Staffordshire who, on his first appearance was beaten by Tom Shepherd of Tom Shepherd at Upstairs in Lichfield, in the end-of-week Judges episode and the other is none other than David Taylor who with his meticulous, inventive, fine cooking must surely be in line to go through to the final week ‘cook-off’.

  Meanwhile, I’ve had a very pleasing week - a night in Stratford upon Avon staying at the excellent Hotel Du Vin where I dined before going to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to see the present fabulous production of Hamlet (meets the Titanic) which, improbable as it may sound, worked wonderfully well particularly with its spectacular special effects and remarkable acting though here the director is worthy of special mention. Luke Thallon was a splendid Hamlet, the best I have seen in the theatre, and Nancy Carroll, was the best Gertrude, stately and long suffering like Queen Camilla, I have ever seen, full of convincing emotion highlighting her guilt and shock and horror of what is going on around her and how much she is responsible for it all. Few scenes in the theatre will ever be as memorable as that where the dead and dying characters slide down the severely sloping deck of the sinking ship Elsinore and plunge into the ocean while Horatio prays that flights of angels will give Hamlet a good send off.

  But back to my Stratford dinner. On this occasion I chose the excellent prix fixé menu and enjoyed 2 courses for £29. To start I had a generous slice of Wye and Severn smoked salmon which was entirely edible and no problem for the chef to place on the plate. I liked being served a large piece of lemon in a muslin bag- no chance of having to deal with annoying lemon pips - but the accompanying dill creème Fraiche was more soothing than tasty.

  The main course was a large, nicely cooked chicken schnitzel accompanied by a salad of sweetly picked red pepper and red pickled red cabbage, capers and rocket which, like mange touts, remains a personal enemy of mine. The schnitzel was very generously portioned and though nice became a little boring as the meal went along - it really needed a sauce, or perhaps a defibrillator, to add a bit of life to it. 

  I was too full for any dessert and though I thought the meal could have been a little more exciting it was well cooked and enjoyable though the dishes seemed to be veering a little too far away from the overall French-style theme, I still have an affection for the hotel’s restaurant. It needs to revisit its character, restore the Gallic element and give us a bit of can can au Moulin Rouge.

  The following day I revisited The Wildmoor Oak near Bromsgrove. My dining companion ordered an impressive basket of breads and I started with an item from the ‘specials’ list - reasonably tasty ham hock croquettes which were rather large; the size I think was a problem as the contents seemed rather insubstantial and light. For the main, neither of us could countenance eating anything other than the truly remarkable, battered haddock and chips. The size was colossal and the magnificent fish was utterly accurately cooked, the batter as perfectly golden and crispy as one could ever imagine, the chips irreproachable and the lovely mushy peas nicely minted. This was a fabulous plate of fish and chips, very pleasingly priced and as memorable as the final scene of the previous evening’s production of Hamlet which as memorable as anything comes. Happy days. Happy Days indeed.

454. The Wildmoor Oak Inn.

  Living close to the south west edge of Birmingham, visits to Bromsgrove and north east Worcestershire ought to be easy and, true, there’s a train to Bromsgrove or Redditch via Barnt Green and Alvechurch but if one wishes to visit the villages some distance from the stations and one is not driving a car then things become more problematical because public transport is very poor and local taxi services do not necessarily respond to one’s needs in any convenient way.

 That is why I had not yet visited Wildmoor Oak Inn located between Catshill and Fairfield located along a country lane off the road to Stourbridge. Fortunately I had a friend who wished to join me for lunch and who was prepared to drive me there and so my opportunity to eat at this self-declared gastropub was seized upon with much positive anticipation. The Head Chef there is Peter Jackson, brother of Holly Jackson, partner of Brad Carter, who was Head Chef of Carter’s of Moseley before Carter decamped from Moseley (the restaurant is now home to Sartori, listed by the Michelin Guide just six weeks after opening and serving Japanese-style cuisine - a report to follow shortly). 

  Peter Jackson had studied at University College and his training had included stages at Purnell’s and Simpsons and Bank and a period at the Hotel Intercontinental Hotel Dieu in Marseilles under Lionel Levy before going to work firstly at the Fat Cat in Solihull and then with Brad Carter when he opened the Moseley restaurant in 2010.

  The Wildmoor Oak was reopened on 20 May 2024 after an eighteen month refurbishment carried out by its new owners, Bex Wilkins and her wife, Sarah Robinson, who had both previously worked at Peach Pubs which runs a number of gastropubs in the West Midlands region including The Highfield  in Edgbaston, The One Elm in Stratford upon Avon and The Rose and Crown in the Marketplace in Warwick, and further afield.

Peter Jackson, Head Chef, Wildmoor Oak Inn.

Wildmoor Oak Inn

A pub with a postbox, what could be better?

  There’s little doubt that The Wildmoor Oak is charming, located as it is at the end of a country lane so typical of this corner of north west Worcestershire. A tiny babbling brook runs through its grounds and the large car park has a public footpath running through it and walkers can have a pleasing walk across the lovely, green, rolling Worcestershire countryside before settling in at the delightfully warm and cosy inn. And the inn has been designed accurately to bring a homeliness to it - glowing fires, print covered walls, patterned banquettes, comfortable, non-shabby, old furniture, even an eclectic range of traditional style plates and ceramics from which to eat. 

  The welcome was fine and my lunch companion and I were shown to our table. This was a crowded part of the room and some of the lunchers already there had loud voices and a tendency to shreek or cackle when laughing which one or two did quite frequently and so we requested a slightly more isolated table where we could enjoy the atmosphere without being persecuted by gaggling - this was duly allocated to us.

  The closeness of neighbouring tables was probably the only problem we encountered during our visit to the Wildmoor Oak. Bex Wilkins and Sarah Robinson clearly learned a lot during their time with Peach Pubs and have put their experience to good use in the way they have paid attention to every detail in setting up the excellent gastropub. But what about the gastro- part of it all?

  Carter’s it isn’t. This is extravagantly rustic English fayre prepared with intense care and humorously clever quirks of deliciousness. This is not just delicious, comforting English food but it’s all that but prepared by a top chef. This is irresistible top of the range pub food at a sensible price which leaves one not only more than satiated but glowing with intense pleasure. We made a good fist of the menu. For starters, I chose brown onion soup with cheese on toast. I had visions of thin brown soup heavily populated by shreds of sweet onion and a massive cheesy crouton à la Française but my expectations could not have been more wrong. Peter Jackson was clearly making no concessions to Frankish tastes - this was a bowl of thick, warming, perhaps not so brown, potage and the crouton was good old cheese on toast served separately and none the worse for that. Jane Grigson would have admired this fine serving of English - and not European - food which shouted out that culinary Brexit was indeed a reality!

 

  As her starter, my lunch companion chose to order from the list of snacks - ‘pigs not in blankets with Paxo mayo’. This was exactly what the menu said - three fine English sausages (not encased in bacon), well cooked and humorously enhanced by the Paxo mayonnaise - all the flavours of that grand old English packet dried stuffing mix. We both felt we wanted to rush out and buy a packet of Paxo and add it to some mayonnaise and serve it to friends and pretend we invented it.  Great stuff! I had rather expected these to be short cocktail sausages but these were the real thing that would under other circumstances make fine hot dogs (I much more prefer hot dogs using good English sausages over frankfurters to which I am not very partial).

  Neither of us could resist the lure of the haddock and chips served with mushy peas and curry sauce. We have both lived through decades of fish and chips and while peas are always the perfect accompaniment neither of us feel the need to add curry though we appreciate that may not be the case with the young and the less experienced (in my time I ate battered ‘hard’ cod’s roe out of tins - and loved it (but I was quite young), ate battered haggis when the local chip shop tried putting it on the menu (I was still quite young), gratefully accepted the bags of batter bits which chip shop owners were happy to give away (I was still quite young) and always had a giant pickled onion to accompany my cod, chips and bread and butter (or sometimes pickled red cabbage or pickled sliced beetroot - oh, those were the days but curry sauce was never on my horizon). But full marks to Peter Jackson for moving with the times.

  The haddock and chips were perfect, they were fabulous, they were divine. Harry Ramsden could have taken lessons from Peter Jackson, The batter was crispy and gorgeously golden and not too thick and the haddock was divine - white, meaty, delicious. The chips were perfect - unimpeachable. The peas were a little bit of an afterthought and the curry sauce was not too exciting but there was a very good tartare sauce. Again, just fish and chips, you might think, but English culinary artistry at its best.

  We were both too full for desserts but we had one anyway. My companion wanted a light dessert and the meringue with winter fruits seemed to fit the bill - it did, though when it turned up it looked generously portioned by any stretch of the imagination - but she thought the meringue was excellent and of a pleasing consistency and nicely balanced by the berries. I had seen the apple and pear crumble with custard on the menu and formed an irresistible urge to try it. It was very good - the crumble light and infiltrated by clever occasional bursts of sea salt which seemed to me very innovative and successful and the custard was made beautifully - again, light and suffused with as much vanilla as one would hope for.

  We departed feeling mellow and well fed. This had been top flight pub food in an excellent setting. ‘Pub food’ does not do it justice but as I say, it was not Carter’s - but it didn’t need to be.

  Rating:- 🌞 

16 January 2025.