498. The Chef, The Film Star And The Politician - ‘Service’.

 

  Back in April 2024, I had dinner at Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness where filming was taking place which seemed to mainly involve observing Claridge at the pass, plating up his delicate, intricate, exquisite dishes (see Blog 395). Then, well over a year afterwards, an invitation arrived from Rachel Whittle, Claridge’s partner, to join others who had been present that evening to come along to the Mockingbird cinema in the Custard Factory in Digbeth to be part of the audience which would be shown the finished movie. And so, I found myself seated in the bar area of that particular place of cinematic entertainment waiting for the film to begin. I was surrounded by a lot of young, very casually dressed denizens of Digbeth (it was a hot evening) and middle aged and even elderly hipsters, mutton struggling hard to be lamb. I suppose they were just the characters you would expect to find at an event such as this in the heart of Digbeth.

Rachel Whittle

Alex Claridge

   We were called into the cinema theatre and seated comfortably and after an introduction, the film began. It felt like a very short tasting menu - just four minutes in length, which surprised me - I had in my mind that it might last 30 minutes or perhaps even an hour. It was energetically edited so that each scene lasted barely 3 or 4 seconds, just time enough for Alex to be heard making a comment or for images to hit the retina before, like a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage then being lost for ever (though as this was a film it was not lost forever since the mini-movie could be reshown as it indeed was for another fleeting four minutes at the end of the evening).

  Titled, pleasingly punningly, ‘Service’, the film strove in its brief and frantic quartet of minutes, to convey the life story, philosophy and love of Birmingham and of the hospitality industry of Alex Claridge but it proved to be a case of a brief candle of illumination on its subject. Still, it was quite a jazzy affair, filmed in brutal black and white and an atmosphere of punk frenzy, illustrating a man of deep-felt passions frustrated by the barriers raised by bureaucracies and incompetent politicians which were destroying businesses and the city and the spirit of creativeness. It felt like a manifesto. I suspected it was.

  

  And, so it proved to be. At a Question and Answers session after the movie had been shown, Chef criticised the dreary present Mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker, or Pointless Parker as he is known in some quarters, for his passivity and held out little hope that Parker will ever do anything useful to support the regional hospitality sector. So, Alex, announced that he himself would be the champion and that he would stand as a candidate in the next regional Mayoral election which is another three years or so in the future. That had been a manifesto and this seemed very much like his first campaign meeting. I asked him if he now recognised himself as a politician - he was reluctant to admit to himself that he was (he is now whether he likes it or not) and if this had been his first campaign meeting to which he did not respond having answered the first part of the question at length.

  Alex had a receptive audience present in the cinema - the students, the aging hipsters, the Digbeth denizens, the Brum Bohemians, the one or two descendants of the once booming gothic trend plus … me. After his announcement there was thunderous applause from that audience. It will be interesting to follow how Claridge’s political aspirations proceed from this point. Is he the man to save the city’s hospitality industry where conventional politicians have failed? These are interesting times and now we have a Chef/Filmstar/Politician all in one, in the form of the man who persuaded Brummies to eat ants.

329. Summer Rain (2 - 670 Grams).

  The heat, it seemed, for the present at least had gone out of summer. Some may have said that a little blast of global warming over the West Midlands of England might have been quite welcome, given the frequent showers and distinct chill. Still at least Brummies weren’t roasting chickens on the heat of the bare pavements which the rule-by-anxiety BBC news broadcasts were suggesting might be possible in Rome or some other hot and ancient Mediterranean conurbation.

 I was gradually working my way through the Jeeves and Wooster books which are fascinating and record intermittently what the upper crust  - in the form of Bertie Wooster - was eating in the 1920s and later (the books move on through to the sting of post Second World War socialism when good servants are scarce and the idle rich, now reduced by Attlee’s welfare state, are having to work for a living or, in Bertie’s case, attend courses on how to look after themselves when servants are entirely non-existent). Incidently Bertie is expelled from his course because he uses an old woman to substitute for him in the sock darning exam (would any young person of what is now the idle middle class believe that at one time socks were darned or even that men actually wore socks?) Also of interest is that despite the passing of decades Bertie barely ages at all. But I digress.

  The upshot is that wherever I am to be seen currently, there’s a copy of a Jeeves and Wooster novel, presently The Mating Game, in my hand. This fact has some relevance to my visit to 670 Grams as my dining companion for the evening could easily have emerged from the pages of a Wodehouse novel and so partaking of Kray Tredwell’s 16 or was it to be 18 course tasting menu with a Gussie Fink-Nottle/joyless Aunt Agatha amalgam had all the prospects of making for an interesting evening.

    Tredwell was in good form. Fink-Nottle-Aunt Agatha had been greatly shook up by me walking him through the backstreets of ‘cool’ Digbeth; crowds of barely clad girls - ‘hens’ I suppose, scruffy bearded young men in Hawaiian shirts (despite the the very temperate temperature), middle aged hipsters who were old enough to have really known the meaning of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, all queuing to be allowed access into one or other of Digbeth’s drinking establishments. I had intended to show FN-AA the street art which, to some, has its merits and provides a relatively harmless pastime (unless they paint it on your wall) for the otherwise pointless young people who seem to frequent the area but FN-AA had rapidly entered a fugue state of panic as he thought he was about to be set upon and sold into the white slavery trade. Therefore arriving at 670 Grams and then discovering that Kray Tredwell was a rather fine chef served not only as a nerve-soother for him but also a revelation and delight. His initial facial expression of silent doubt turned to that of a rather happy punter within the period required to partake of the first two courses and after that everything surpassed the heights which FN-AA felt he had experienced even in some well known 2(+) Michelin starred restaurants in which he had dined. All this, like Gussie Fink-Nottle, without ever touching a drop of liquor.

  

  There were a number of familiar pleasures - the ‘left-overs soup’, the grilled pineapple, the supremely delicious Kray T fried chicken in its unique cardboard pot (this secured FN/AA’s love and everlasting devotion to 670 Grams) but we enjoyed new little tidbits - well, I had not tried them before at any rate - and new versions of previous triumphs - I adored the deeply flavoured charred cabbage, the play on sweet and sour pork - the meat finely cooked - and the wonderfully apt Birds custard and rhubarb tart with very fine pastry. Each dish worked perfectly which can not be said of every long tasting menu I have eaten in various restaurants over the years. FN/AA was ecstatic. He always moans about something - I’ve never heard him not do so - but here he was totally uncomplaining. 

  Well done Kray Tredwell, the Anatole (Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia’s chef) of modern Digbeth. Just as Aunt Dahlia would do anything to keep Anatole in her household so should Birmingham to keep your ingenuity and work ethic here in Birmingham.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

324. Summer Heat (2 - Low & Slow At 670 Grams).

  A hot early summer afternoon in Digbeth. I arrived early for my lunch at 670 Grams and had an amble around the streets near the Custard Factory to update my memory of the street art that was exhibited all around. Then on to the restaurant where chef Kray Tredwell was keeping cool in his shorts by the open entrance door. But there was no need to worry for another chef  - Andy Stubbs of Slow n Low - was hard at work in the kitchen above preparing the lunches. This was to be a six course collaboration by the two chefs.

  To start there was a remarkably good cabbage dish which transformed the edibility of cabbage from chore to unbearable pleasure.

  Then on to a remarkably delicious and visually beautiful - all gilded and glittering - mackeral dish which did for humdrum mackeral what the first dish did for cabbage. Then a magnificent portion of excruciatingly tender and tasty ox cheek with charred maitake and the improbability of cherryade sauce, one of the world’s greatest gastronomic developments. It seems that centuries have passed since I last drank cherryade. I lusted for a glass of it and Chef Tredwell obliged me with a can of the drink to down with the ox cheek. It is clear that any sommelier who does not add cherryade to his wine menu is not the sommelier he/she ought to be.

 

   There followed a dish of barbecued pork collar with elements of pineapple and gooseberry to balance it.

  The dessert of toasted seeds and honey sorbet was a pleasure but the final course was, perhaps, a little underwhelming - an undistinguished grilled half banana with a hazelnut mousse and chocolate soil. Despite this, it had been a pleasurable meal with many enjoyable elements; a collaboration of note.

83. Return Of The Native.

  Sometimes you have to give in to self-satisfaction and today I am basking in it. How pleased I am with myself that I have not yet shrugged off this mortal coil and as an old bloke now there’s a lot to look back on and so much to appreciate now while the old mortal coil keeps sparking.

  I’m also appallingly self-satisfied at my having developed an interest in food when I did and in living in and coming from the city and region where remarkable things are happening when it comes to food without having to suffer the horrors of living in London.

  And I’m terribly self-satisfied that here I am in Birmingham where a new generation of remarkable young chefs are taking the city’s food forward seemingly to new heights. And it’s good that some of them are Birmingham and West Midlands-born and look as though they are about to define what we eat around these parts in the coming years.

  Talking of which, I arrive at an exceedingly happy event which increases my self-satisfaction even more because I was there - Kray Treadwell’s return to Birmingham and his weekly pop-up restaurant at the new Selina hotel in Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter. Kray, who came to attention when he won the Midlands heats of Great British Menu in 2019 by producing the most original if somewhat controversial dishes of the competition - his fish course, Disdain For Orthodoxy, a tribute to Punk music which delighted Matthew Fort but appalled some of the other judges and his remarkable Shharonnn! (a tribute to Birmingham musician Ozzie Osbourne) which swept the judges off their feet with the sheer pleasure of it) (see Blog 52) - originates from Solihull and first worked in a restaurant kitchen whilst at college in Glynn Purnell’s The Asquith. After working at Purnell’s he moved to York to work at The Blind Swine where he became aware of Michael O’Hare and then moved to O’Hare’s The Man Behind The Curtain in Leeds, clearly picking up some of his style from O’Hare, where he became Head Chef, a post he occupied for over 3 years during which period his participation in Great British Menu took place.

  And now he has returned to Birmingham and has done a joint pop-up with Andrew Sheridan at Craft Dining Rooms at the end of 2019 and now is doing several weekly pop-up sessions at Serena Hotel for which I set out recently to get my first taste of the Tredwell touch. The plan was 8 courses and 8 diners and everything was led off by a welcome glass of Prosecco accompanied by a little snack of a nature which involved some stretching of the mind to believe that it existed - crispy pork skin (which had the texture of a prawn cracker rather than a pork scratching) with a lemon curd and black olive dip. Well, it worked for me.

  Seated then at our proper table along came an oyster marinated in gin perfectly accompanied by melon similarly marinated in the same alcohol all with a little bit of gold leaf draped on it to emphasise the luxury of it all.

  Much enjoyable silliness followed with a piece of Parmesan coated in crispy breadcrumbs and accompanied with little cubes of soothing pineapple. Kray Tredwell follows Glynn Purnell in giving his own twist on that throwback to the 70s - cheese and pineapple on a stick.

  And then a true classic. Fabulously dressed spider crab - the crabbiest tasting crab dish I’ve had in years - with a little scone. Flavour of the highest level.

  Then our very own chance to sample a dish as close to one of the GBM dishes as possible - Shharonnn! complete with Ozzy Osbourne plate. Truly fabulously cooked fillet steak - delicious and tender beyond words - with American scones turned black, I assume with the use of squid ink. The steak alone would have sufficed - the scones were very salty and there was rather more of them than I needed. But I also identified on the plate little patches of the ‘blood-like beef sauce’ we’d seen on GBM and there were dark potato chips, in the compilation. Great stuff

  And so to the exquisite little dessert - a dainty little ginger sponge, as light as a feather, with ginger and coconut. Lovely.

  Afterwards everyone had some time to chat with Chef. I asked him about his new restaurant. He will not be working at La Mariposa, as I had previously read, but will be planning to open his own restaurant named after the birth weight of his baby, in the Custard Factory in Digbeth around May this year. He will probably be offering a tasting menu but cheaper than elsewhere to try to give chance for young people to come and experience fine dining.

  He is very much looking forward to being his own boss and cooking what he wants to cook. He comes over as serious and passionate about his food and isn’t worried about giving a critique of other hoary establishments. He recalled how he visited The Fat Duck in Bray as a teenager despite being pretty hard up and not being all that impressed, feeling that the place got its reputation more from the theatrics surrounding the serving of the food than from the quality of the dishes themselves.

  No matter, my Pop-Up first experience of Tredwell’s food tells me that while he might produce some dramatic-looking and witty dishes he certainly does not need a lot of props to convince me that he is a great chef. It looks as though the food scene in Birmingham is moving on to even greater heights and he will be one of the young men leading it.

 Post Scriptum - In the course of our conversation the subject of retirement came up (mine, not his obviously) and I asked about whether Richard Turner  (Turner’s, Maribel) was going to take up another venture but it seems that he has indeed retired. And who can blame him? I heartily recommend it as a way of life.