52. Great British Menu Gets A Disdain For Orthodoxy.

  Having moaned considerably about what was then the upcoming Central Region heat of the Great British Menu in Blog 51, I confess I sat down to watch the 3 episode, - starter and fish, main and dessert and deciding play off of the two highest placed chefs - with mild enthralment as three young Midlands-born chefs struggled magnificently to win a place in the national grand final.

  Although pre-publicity identified Kray Treadwell as having been born in Solihull the programme itself stated several times that he was from Birmingham - perhaps Solihull's too posh and lacking in street-cred to give rise to a tattooed but very personable kitchen worker. Sabrina Gidda's Wolverhampton origins were stressed by emphasising that her father was the first Asian in Britain to run a pub though, and here's BBC consistency for you, later it was stated that he had been one of the first Asians to run a British pub. Ryan Simpson-Trotman's Nuneaton origins were stressed a number of times. Sadly, despite their West Midlands origins, none of the chefs currently works anywhere in the Central region with two employed in London and the Home Counties and Treadwell working in trendy Leeds although the programme did mention that he had worked for a time with Glynn Purnell.

  Things did not get off to a good start with guest judge, Chef Paul Ainsworth of Paul Ainsworth at No 6 in Padstow - a one Michelin starred restaurant - showing a singular lack of enthusiasm for any of the starters giving them only 6 or 7 out of 10 and only Sabrina Gidda wowing the judge with her fish course. Then with the main course Kray Treadwell took over the reins and eventually scored a 10 for his dessert. 

  As a result of the dessert course, Simpson-Trotman was eliminated and Gidda and Treadwell who looked rather like a young culinary David Beckham complete with numerous tattooes, battled each other in the final with Treadwell winning as a result of his remarkable main and dessert courses. The visual appearance of Treadwell's dishes was very much that which we might quickly identify as originating in the kitchens of trendy chef Michael O'Hare's restaurant Man Behind The Curtain in Leeds. More than once judges remarked the first two courses produced by Treadwell were more style than substance.

  His first course was inspired by grime music, which was explained to judge Matthew Fort in the final episode by guest judge veteran Brummie musician Ali Campbell of UB40 as being "British rap" music, though that still leaves me floundering due to the very narrow boundaries of my knowledge of the recent music scene. The dish, called Fire in the Booth was made up of deep fried veal sweetbreads, raw tuna belly, hot sauce, caviar and truffle. Luxurious ingredients but not enjoyed by the final day judges at all with Ali Campbell describing the dish as 'Confusion not fusion' and Oliver Peyton asking "It's rock and roll but is it good rock and roll"

  Treadwell's fish course - Disdain For Orthodoxy - turned out to be a disaster. Treadwell said that the dish was inspired by Punk and was made up of turbot, Cornish ray, mussels and oysters. The dish was served on a special plate with a Punk's head incorporated in it and the ray's bone placed to look like the punk's Mohican hair style. Sabrina Gidda after sampling the crunchy ray's bone was heard to say that if she didn't eat it ever again she would not be upset. The Friday final judges, apart from Matthew Fort, found Treadwell's fish course to be rebarbative and there was much screwing-up of faces when they sampled it. Andi Oliver found elements of it - notably the oyster mousse in a stud-like capsule - to be "quite unpleasant" but Matthew Fort, crunching away on the skate bone, described it as being "by far and away the most interesting dish we've eaten today" and said, "I really like this dish, I really love this dish ..."

  Treadwell's main course turned the tide in his favour. Naming it Shharonnn! in honour of Brummie Heavy Metal musician Ozzie Osbourne (whose wife is called Sharon) Treadwell included in his dish barbecued Wagu beef blackened with charcoal powder, squid ink- blackened purple potatoes, a "blood-like beef sauce", black American-style scones with grated Stilton, purple potatoes, a red cabbage tuile and a hot sauce. The judges were swept away with delight for the dish and Oliver Peyton described it as "absolutely amazing, that is what turned the competition around for you, the meat was amazing, I loved the biscuit, a genuinely great dish".

  And so to Treadwell's dessert - A New Romance - named, rather alarmingly, after Brian Ferry's aftershave though when the judges were sent a sample to sniff Ali Campbell insisted that he had dined with Ferry and he didn't smell like that! The dessert, which had already been awarded 10 points by Paul Ainsworth, was a great success with the judges, being made up as it was, from sous vide-cooked peaches as well as a peach soup which also contained champagne, rose syrup and sea fennel and additionally there was also a sugar tuile containing edible glitter, blow-torched and diced peaches, peach sorbet, white chocolate mousse and edible flowers.

  So, The Midlands has an exciting young chef representing us in this year's grand finals. Though it would be even better if Midlands restaurants were also represented in the competition. Perhaps Treadwell will return to the area of his birth in the coming years and I would be very excited to test out his dishes except, of course, he might like to leave his 'Disdain for Orthodoxy' (the dish not the attitude) back in trendy Leeds.

  The judges' facial reactions to 'Disdain for Orthodoxy':-

51. GBM Returns But No Midlands Restaurant In Sight.

  The annual parade of expensive food prepared by upcoming and talented young chefs who work in expensive restaurants generally for the pleasuring of the more comfortably-off who deem themselves to be gastronomically sophisticated in their tastes, the BBC's television programme The Great British Menu, is back on our screens and despite my jaundiced opinion of it I can't help feeling quite pleased to be sitting down and watching it. Well it makes a change from the unending saga of Brexit.

  There's nothing new about this new season - the same tortured use of a theme for the final banquet - last year it set out to celebrate the 'heroes' of the National Health Service (no-one who worked in the organisation could be spoken of unless the mention of them was preceded by the use of the word 'hero'), such is the BBC's sickly patronising populism with which we have become all too familiar in recent years since the BBC took over from the Church Of England as the main formulator of British public opinion. This year the banquet at the end of the series will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Abbey Road music studios which will enable the BBC to invite aging former popular music stars to serve as guest judges alongside Oliver Peyton who grows gaunter every year, Andi Oliver who once participated in a reggae band or perhaps a punk band, I can't quite remember which, and dear Old Matthew Fort, described as the Doyen of British food critique who fulfills the role of Grumpy Old Man quite splendidly and who has had delightful cat fights over the years with Oliver Peyton which have lifted the programme far more than any of the gastronomic creations featured on it.

  Apparently it's being made in Stratford-upon-Avon and it's therefore rather surprising that the makers of the programme couldn't be bothered to find even one competitor who works in a restaurant in the Midlands and East Anglia for the Central region heats. Still they couldn't be bothered to do that last year either so I suppose it's not such a surprise after all. The Central Region competing chefs are listed below:-

  Kray Treadwell is new to the competition and originates from Solihull but works as Head Chef at Michael O'Hare's ever-so-trendy Man Behind The Curtain in ever-so-trendy Leeds. The second competitor is Sabrina Gidda who is executive chef at AllBright, an all-woman club in, inevitably, London. She is given a second chance at winning a place at the Banquet kitchen by virtue of having connections with Wolverhampton. The third competing chef is the now terribly familiar Ryan Simpson-Trotman who is participating for the third time and is no doubt hopeful, like Theresa May and her numerous 'Meaningful votes' that third time, or perhaps fourth time, will be lucky for him. Or perhaps not. Anyway, his Midlands connections are tentative working as he does with his husband at Orwell's in Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire but having been brought up in Nuneaton.

  I couldn't resist picturing above a daubière which I came across on the internet and which is really rather a stylish vessel. It's used by the French to stew cheap meat. There's no doubting that even if most of the ingredients used by the French in their cuisine are rather disgusting and the results grossly overestimated they do have a chicness to the preparation of the stuff. Even when they're rioting which ofcourse they're doing rather a lot of at the moment they manage to do it in chic gilets jaunes which gives me the idea for what I might wear when I go to dine in a French restaurant next time.

50. Purnell Invents The Chip.

  A busy couple of weeks for a food lover. 

 Yesterday, a visit to Purnell's which for me remains Birmingham's leading fine dining restaurant regardless of what Tripadvisor, Good Food Guide and others may think.

  The Purnell's experience kicks off in the very heights of pleasure with the appetisers of potatoes in black coats to be dipped into a devastatingly delicious chorizo mayonnaise  plus the heaven-inspired edible charcoal and now, something new, another creation of brilliance - the chickpea chip. The latest simple-but-wondrous addition to Purnell's catalogue of gastronomic pleasure, I could eat the new chip on bread (Purnell's own light-as-a-feather pain de campagne would be ideal) as a modern day chip buttie and that would be fine dining indeed.

  After the delights of the finger food and country bread all else is a bonus. No other restaurant in Birmingham can match Purnell's for the ingenuity of the dishes (The Wilderness may give us ingenuity but some of the dishes descend into madness verging on a gastronomic equivalent of a screenplay for a horror movie) and the ingenuity is matched by the excellence of the flavours and textures. Lunch serves up 5 close-to-unimpeachable courses and Sonal Clair's sensible and inspired recommendations will ensure apt and delicious wines to accompany them. The lunch menu doesn't change much during the course of a season but even if the basic idea travels across the months there are usually tweaks to ensure a second (or third or fourth or ....) visit does not induce a sensation of Groundhog Day. And so the first starter of heavenly chicken liver parfait looked different this time from previous visits and had various presentations of beetroot accompanying it (what Purnell likes to call 'textures'). A spot on dish except one small slice of beetroot whose texture approximated to that of leather and lost the dish a vote of a perfect 10. And so, on to the fish course, the Brixham cod dish had been altered beyond recognition and about as near to perfection as you'd want it to be. The fish was perfect and had been pan-finished I think rather than being the product of nothing more than a water bath. It was delicious and served with various textures of cauliflower including a gorgeously sweet pickled version of the vegetable and a fabulous cheese sauce which unified the fish and cauliflower so brilliantly. If the chicken liver parfait had not scored the perfect 10 then the cod had assuredly succeeded.

  There had of course been the second starter which was also familiar - Cornish crab - but again altered though I recognised the delicious bisque and enjoyed the accompanying samphire and sea herbs. On to the meat course - slow cooked daube of beef, perhaps getting to be just a little too familiar now and it might be nice to have something different for spring. This dish is livened up by spiced pear and bbq celeriac and an unctious sauce but on my next visit I should like to have some different meat. The dessert of caramelised apple and tonka bean mille feuille with apple snow ensured that I was replete though it probably did not achieve the heights of some of the desserts I have eaten in Purnell's.

  And when you are eating at Purnell's make sure you have the coffee to ensure you get the best petits fours in Birmingham - this time a cherry chocolate that could be mistaken for a sawn-through bird's egg (that theme of eggs comes through at Purnell's time and time again) and a ferociously flavoured passion fruit jelly with marshmallow.

  Purnell remains, for me, the Doyen of Birmingham food.

  Aktar Islam is another Birmingham gastronomic notable and, though it's a gruesome term, celebrity chef. Having opened his excellent restaurant Opheem a few months earlier the doors of his next venture Legna which sells Italian-style food, were opened on 11 December 2018. 

  Three friends and myself paid our first lunchtime visit there about two and half months later and were pleased to find a menu which had food at highly competitive prices - £20 for 3 courses - antipasti, primi and dolci. However there's a lesson we poor old things should have learned years ago - you get what you pay for (if you're lucky) and if you don't pay much you don't get much. Restauranteurs should know that too - if you don't charge a lot then your ability to afford to serve up something memorable to your customers is extremely limited and it takes a genius to produce the truly memorable on a tiny budget (though such genii do exist). The genius was not present in Legna that day.

  It's a large stylish restaurant with pleasant staff. I was pleased to see Chef Aktar in the restaurant as we left though he will not be cooking there but present in these opening weeks to keep an eye on progress. The starter was picked out from a choice of two - a small fragment of bresaola with rocket, Parmesan and truffle and a delightful little spot of egg yolk located to the side of the plate. A pleasant starter not intended by its size to feed The Five Thousand but nicely presented as shown below.

  On to the main course. It is a long time since I have been served something so inelegant in a restaurant striving to build up a fine dining reputation. I had chosen 'Bolognese' described in the menu as, "Beef and wild boar ragu, pappardelle and mozzarella", and a large lump of meat (tasty it is true and pleasingly tender) on some satisfactory pasta made an appearance. If you did not look at it it was perfectly eatable and satisfying. 

  On to the dessert - what was described as a new twist on Tiramisu, "Mascarpone, coffee, marsala" It was perfectly satisfactory but not devastatingly delicious and little more needs to be said. We left the restaurant having settled our various bills and I said to one of my friends that I would be happy to return to Legna but fixing in my mind that if I did so then I would most assuredly choose a more ambitious menu, harder on my pocket, but kinder to my gastronomic pleasure surely and also fairer in assessing what Akbar Islam has come up with in this stylish restaurant in Summer Row.

  A number of chefs mentioned in previous Blogs started their careers training at the Birmingham College of Food which was renamed Birmingham University College in 2007 though the college dates back to the 19th century and became known as the Birmingham College of Food and Domestic Arts in 1957. The University College has 2 restaurants open to the public on a daily basis for them to taste the fayre that the students are producing during the course of their training and a friend and I recently visited the 'fine dining' half of the two, called The Atrium. At least we did after undergoing the very tortuous process of making a reservation through a supervisor whom one had to telephone but is not usually available but who then rings back when one is not available so that one must be ring back again and find the supervisor not to be available who then returns the call a second time and, with luck, manages to do so when the customer is available.

  The restaurant looks as modern and pleasing a dining area as one could wish. The delightful and enthusiastic student waiters descend on one in considerable numbers which is charming rather than irritating. Not entirely unirritating as there seemed to be a particular red wine that was being pushed forward and the young lady who was acting as sommelier was particularly aggressive in her promotion of the wine, was put out that we were insisting that we would like some white wine with our fish and later returned to our table to tell us triumphantly that another table "of four" had had the promoted wine with their fish and that they had been perfectly satisfied. Hmmm .... I should have been somewhat displeased to have encountered that young lady in a commercial restaurant if the college fails to cure her of her faults before she matriculated.

  I thoroughly enjoyed my starter of Wild Mushroom Ravioli (actually there was only one raviolo but well sized and satisfying) with crispy shallots, garlic mushroom and blue cheese and tarragon sauce. A fine and delicious - and memorable - dish.

  Another treat was to follow - the main course of supreme of salmon served on a splendid ratatouille with a basil cream sauce and 'red pepper essence' with a gorgeous 'crispy lemon sole' goujon. This was an excellent dish that one would be happy to be served in a commercial restaurant. I was quite happy with my dessert - a warm pear and almond flan served with an amaretto ice cream. The total cost of this collection of semi-precious gems was just £18.50p - well worth the effort of negotiating one's way through the tortuous process of making a reservation. 

49. Pizza In Stratford.

  I had a sudden thought this morning, where has foam gone? Not all that long ago you couldn't have a meal in a smart place without drowning in foam. And now, I can't think of a meal I have eaten recently which has had little bubbly splashes of liquid on it. The cycle of fashion, what goes around comes around and, conversely, what goes around goes away again and, I assume, what goes around will eventually come around again, has turned and foam has passed away - the bubble has burst you might say. Au revoir, or is it Adieu, Foam. Perhaps now we can also say goodbye to unfoamy smears of sauce on plates, often so small that a single taste of them is just about all there is to have any idea of what ingredient they derive from.

  Perhaps we can return to a nice, generous amount of sauce which can still be made to look pretty but isn't so tiny in volume that it's identity remains a mystery. A sauce, a gravy, something to add the final sparkle to fine meat or fish and the other hangers on lurking on the plate or piece of slate or whatever on which the  dish has been served.

  I was interested to read in The Sunday Telegraph this weekend that the founder of the Pizza Express chain of restaurants, Pierre Boizot, had died just before last Christmas, on 5 December 2018. A review of the restaurants described how Boizot had taken on the lease of a 'struggling Soho joint called PizzaExpress' in 1965 and how he had been a 'true pathfinder, realising how this humble Neapolitan foodstuff could be made the basis of a contemporary, cosmopolitan and even a mildly swinging experience, a groovy cavalcade of primary colours, Paolozzi murals and ... live jazz'. 

  Coincidently, a dining companion and I, having limited time to fill up before setting off to see the brilliant production of A Christmas Carol at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon that evening, decided to go along to sample the delights of the Stratford branch of Pizza Express in Ely Street just 2 days after Boizot had died. Our dining place opportunities were limited as my fellow theatregoer has long convinced himself that anywhere that serves spicy food is intolerable to him and that being a well-established penny pincher - physically and psychologically well suited to have offered himself to play Scrooge that night had Aden Gilliat been taken ill and unable to play the leading roll on stage - Pizza Express offered a good opportunity for a relatively inexpensive but filling meal.

  It was ofcourse a Friday evening just before Christmas and the place was pretty full of middle class parents with their noisy offspring waiting to be fed like young gannets lined up on a cliff-face. It won't be the first time that I have stated my lack of love for Italian food in general and my specific disregard for pizzas but here I was hoping to oblige my Dickensian friend. Of course, my friend wanted to save money by sharing a pizza and, having not eaten since breakfast, I thought it would be a good idea to have something extra to ensure that I would feel comfortably replete. I ordered some cheesy garlic bread at a surprisingly high price and was served, almost in a blink, some not very enjoyable bread in a smaller sized helping than I might otherwise expected given the price paid.

  We ordered our pizza, naturally at about the lowest price that was available on the menu, and devoid of any ingredient that would have rendered it even vaguely spicy to fit in with my friend's tastes, and tucked into our demi-pizzas. We chose a 'La Reine' which is described thus:- 'prosciutto cotto, black olives, closed-cup mushrooms, mozzarella and tomato on a Romana base'. It was admirably dull but edible. It was delivered to the table super quickly, showing that the restaurant was capable of living up to the name of Pizza Express. The meal passed quickly and uninterestingly but given our intention to eat reasonably cheaply and without any ingredient which might have any degree of flavour - well I suppose the 3 half-olives were mildly tasty - the restaurant can hardly be blamed for that.

  I was left feeling that, 2 days after its founder's death, Pizza Express hadn't really left me with an overwhelming urge to return for a second visit but the crowds of families with their well-scrubbed offspring seemed to be quite happy there so I am happy to leave the place to that particular clientele.

  The Telegraph article gave Pizza Express a generous 7 out of 10. There's no accounting for taste.

48. No. 9 Church Street.

  I visit and stay in Stratford-upon-Avon very regularly usually, but not always, to visit the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to see what outrage against the Bard's plays has been perpetrated on this occasion as the Royal Shakespeare Company comes more and more mired in increasingly extravagant political correctness and total silliness. Ofcourse other playwrights are used to promote the RSC's obsession with exaggerated equality - the grimmest recent example being a plainly puerile assault on Molière in which some not very talented actors performed in a dire production of Citizen Khan meets Tartuffe.

  Sometimes I like to pass a couple of days in Stratford, even though it's less than 20 miles from my home at the southern edge of Birmingham, and that gives me an evening to fume at what the RSC is up to and another to calm down and try the food at one of the several restaurants to be found in this most famous of Warwickshire towns. For several years now I've been a happy diner from time to time at No. 9 Church Street, in Stratford's old town area, just across from King Edward's School where Shakespeare had a short-lived education and a short walk from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare's body is buried along with several members of his family.

  This is the tenth anniversary year of Wayne Thomson's comfortable restaurant which has a good turnover of dishes so that it's possible to always try something new and appealing on every visit. Wayne Thompson was born in Cornwall but brought up in Warwick and trained at Stratford-upon-Avon College before working at some prestigious restaurants such as those at The Savoy and Claridge's under authorities such as Alain Ducasse and Anthony Demeter. On returning to the Midlands he took up his first head chef post at Nailcote Hall Hotel at Berkswell and later was head chef at the New Hall Hotel near Sutton Coldfield.

  On my most recent visit to No. 9 Church Street I found that apart from the changing menu everything else was comfortably familiar. The food at this restaurant which has a Michelin Plate and is listed in The Good Food Guide is the product of good, solid cooking without the fireworks which modern Michelin starred restaurants might be expected to deliver to achieve that award. The plating up was a little short of the glamorous which we have come to expect in some restaurants and the main course dish in particular looked less than perfect with the bisque unevenly spread (it might have benefitted from the bisque being served in a small jug to be added at the table on serving) and a rather too large a lump of angel hair noodles overwhelming the piece of sea bream visually.

  I started off with a neat and tasty, but not dramatically delicious, warm game pie served with some mild chicory and appealing pickled rhubarb. Again there was a slight dowdiness about its visual display but all in all it was an enjoyable enough dish.

  The strong-flavoured sea bream was toned down by its accompanying south-east Asian ingredients, the most effective being the bites of ginger which cut through the strong fishy taste. There were also prawns and spring onion and undetectable chilli but for me there were a few too many noodles which can be quite tiresome to eat.

  I rounded off with a gorgeously alcoholic rum baba served with mint, little cubes of pineapple and a pina colada ice cream which had a slightly too aggressive flavour.

  No. 9 Church Street remains a pleasing place to dine when in Stratford but I wonder if it would benefit from a little thought being given to giving it a not-very-dramatic 10 year reboot. Well, just an idea but when you've got the trendy Michelin-starred Salt moving in next door to you, you don't really want to look like a fusty old uncle posing by his chic young nephew.

47. Colour, Light And Locusts - It Must Be The Nineteen Eighties.

  It's not often that a reflection on a visit to one of Birmingham's new restaurant would start off with a picture of the restaurant's floor and some photographs of the wallpaper in the men's lavatories but this is Nocturnal Animals and the floor and the gent's loos' wallpaper says everything you need to know about this wonderful new dining place in the heart of Birmingham. Well perhaps not quite since it says nothing about the food though as the sign over the pass area says, "It's only f---ing food".

  People will often talk about their dining experience and Nocturnal Animals is certainly an experience with a capital E and a capital experience it is. The restaurant floor is colourful and the gents' lavatories wallpaper would be almost genteel until inspected more closely when one discovers that the design features rather unusual viewpoints of the sights of Edinburgh. The gents' loos also have a mysterious black hand emerging from the wall which looks like it ought to be shaken but let's face it, you just don't know where it's been. So bemused by it was I that I forgot to take a photograph of it.

  Before getting to the restaurant and its floor and loos you must ofcourse enter through the ground floor bar with its migraine-inducing floor and bright lights and then passing down a white, light flooded passage which makes you feel you've had a cardiac arrest and are now entering a new astral plane and then go downstairs to the restaurant proper, much of it black like its mother ship in the Jewellery Quarter but with much more light to make the place look like it's much more fun, and be greeted delightfully and seated in an instantly comfortable chair. By this time the cocktail you've selected from a rather funky menu given to you upstairs is doing its work very well and you realise just what fun Nocturnal Animals is. The 1980s music is helping to merry you along as well. A quick trip to the loo involves going down another exotic corridor with its strip lighting forever changing colour making you feel quite certain you have arrived in Wonderland.

  So, at last, the menu. And the excitement reaches its peak as you discover just what Nocturnal Animals is going to feed to you. The lunch menu said 'dinner' so I take it that the food and prices are the same at all times of the day. There are two choices - a shorter menu for a very reasonable £28 or the full menu for £55. We chose the short menu only to change our minds when we were thoroughly delighted by the delicious first course which was a sort of cauliflower satay. The cauliflower was the first dish to appear not being preceded by bread be it the ubiquitous sourdough or any other type for that matter nor any amuses bouches, pleasingly.

  A parade of interesting confections followed - some quail in a south Asian setting made tasty with tamarind and boosted by a pleasant little samosa. This colourful dish was made visually more striking by being served on a plastic plate of swirling white and red. I was starting to get the fun of eating at Nocturnal Animals.

  Onwards through a tough little piece of octopus with sweetness and sourness as well as garlicness and then on to another plastic plate, this time of swirling blue and white, on which was sitting some far eastern flavoured salmon. Then some fine pork belly made sweet and sticky with the Chef's version of a barbecue sauce and a perfect blob of yuzu flavour which countered the fat of the pork. I am not a fan of pork belly but this was an enjoyable way to serve it - like an upmarket spare rib but with more meat and no bone.

  And so to the highly flavoured 180 day aged sirloin on a mildly curried sauce and thoroughly enjoyable black garlic gnocchi with the whole course finely completed with lovely slices of pickled carrot. Again all the colour was rendered vibrant served as the course was on another one of those splendid blue and white plastic plates. Such fun.

  The dessert was served on another spectacular plastic plate which looked like a black napkin laid out on the table with a form of mildly flavoured tiramisu lying on it though if I had been served it without knowing how it was described on the menu I would not have used the word tiramisu. The three locusts placed on the dish didn't seem to lend an air of Italian authenticity either.

  Of course the restaurant owner Alex Claridge's initial fame in Birmingham came with the spark of near-notoriety he lit when citric-flavoured ants were lined up on his cheese tartlet dessert when The Wilderness lurked, moss and all, in Dudley Street. So perhaps it wasn't too surprising to find a new species of insect seeking attention on another rather elegant pudding. Sadly, the ants fitted in very well while the locusts just looked out-of-place and tasted rather unpleasant, especially the after-taste, though they certainly had a crunch to them though I would have been happy to have not experienced that particular bit of added texture. Clever people who want to direct our lives having lost ground in the Brexit referendum are currently telling us that we should eat insects rather than meat as they are a more environment friendly source of protein. I can hardly believe that the idea is going to catch on in Birmingham after my locust bejewelled dessert.

  So there we have it, daytime creatures eating lunch at Nocturnal Animals, named apparently not after badgers and slow lorises (though it could be argued that I and my dining companion could be easily compared with that latter creature) but after the well-thought of 2016 film which features a lot 1980s music as is to be heard in the restaurant. The restaurant is also offering a twist on traditional English high teas which sounds interesting and would be well worth trying if they're as much fun as the lunches. The kitchen staff are led by former Professional Masterchef competitor and pastry chef Brett Connor with the cocktails menu being devised by James Bowker.

  The Japanese/Far Eastern theme so trendy at the moment dominates many of the dishes so I  suppose we must live with the fashion until it has run its course which I suppose it will. I wonder if English pies and roasts are all the rage in Japan at the moment.

46. Gin From The Cotswolds. Where else?

  The White Knight household had a joyous arrival this morning. A package was delivered much to my surprise as it contained items which I had forgotten that I'd ordered just before Christmas. Tearing away the packaging I revealed 2 delightful bottles of special gins from the Cotswold Distillery situated towards the southern-most tip of the Warwickshire countryside at Stourton near Shipston-on-Stour.

  My first experience of Cotswolds Gin must have been soon after the Distillery was opened in 2014.

I was having dinner at the excellent No 33 The Scullery in Stratford-upon-Avon and I spotted the bottle of Cotswolds Gin on the shelf of the tiny bar in the very narrow little restaurant which itself had only recently opened. I couldn't resist trying it with the recommended accompaniment of Fevertree tonic as it was produced in a local Warwickshire Distillery and my first experience of the flavour is savoured to this day. That Christmas everyone I knew was given a bottle of Cotswold Gin as their present and my present to myself was two bottles which I viewed as being well-deserved. Since that happy time of discovery Cotswolds Distillery has expanded into making whiskys and specialist gins.

  An early specialist gin was 1616 which is said to pay homage to William Shakespeare and to be the distillery's interpretation of what gins would have been like in Shakespeare's time when gins were largely made in Holland. I remember buying a bottle which had newly arrived in the impressive little wine and spirit merchant's shop on Henley Street in Stratford, Vinology, which is situated close by Shakespeare's birthplace and which the very helpful owner admitted he had not yet had chance to sample himself and so he could not really tell me his impression of it. I splashed out on a bottle of it anyway and first sampled it with friends who were visiting me prior to going out to Purnell's for my birthday dinner. 

  I really should have read the instructions as 1616 certainly is not a gin and tonic gin, made as we are told by historic methods using a combination pure wheat spirit, distilled malt wines and gin botanicals including juniper, coriander, angelica, orange peel, cassia, nutmeg and allspice. The spirit is distilled in red wine casks and diluted to 46% strength. If I had read the instructions I would have known that this drink would have been best served by itself on ice or with ginger or ginger beer. Still, a memorable drink from Cotswald's Distillery.

  And so to the package which arrived today with the two new Cotswolds Gins safely wrapped but rapidly unwrapped. The first bottle was Baharat which is said to be a tribute to those inhabitants of the Cotswolds area who lived in Georgian and Victorian times and who set out from their Midlands homes to travel the world and bring back  various treasures and flavours from their journeys.

  Baharat is produced by adding a combination of middle eastern spices to juniper and wheat spirit, the spices including cumin, coriander, chilli, cardamom, clove, black pepper and sweet citrus oil. It is recommended to be drunk (this time I read the instructions) as a gin and tonic garnished with a slice of orange peel perhaps half dipped in chilli flakes or with ginger ale in place of the tonic. Mmmm ...

  The second bottle contained Cotswolds Ginger Gin which contains Cotswolds Dry Gin casked for 3 months and then sweet Valencia orange peel is added to the matured gin with candied root ginger which soak in the gin for several weeks. Final sweetening is carried out with the addition of honey and the whole is diluted to 46% for bottling. Recommendations for serving suggested that it is best served as it is or on ice or with a few drops of Angostura Bitters or with warmed apple juice. Again, mmmmm .....

  With this little collection in the gin cabinet it looks like being a rather comfortable winter. And all of it made in the west midlands.