275. Lulu Wild.

 

  Having consumed one or two East Asian meals recently under mildly bleak conditions in Stirchley, with its hipster and Bohemian pretensions and Spartan conditions evident all around me, I thought it was time to return to glitzy, exciting, rather noisy Lulu Wild in Brindley Place for a different style of East Asian restaurant and relive the pleasures I have experienced there before.

  In Stirchley, menus exist which recall the Victorian concept of the Ordinary where diners sat together eating a set meal decided upon by their hosts, the restaurateurs, for a reasonable but set price. They haven’t quite got there yet in Stirchley but they can’t be far off. In contrast, the Lulu Wild was adventurous and luxurious, colourful and promising. I can see how Stirchley diners may feel their that shabby suburban  experience is gastronomically tasteful - outwardly modest and becoming of unworldly socialists - while flashy, pulsating Lulu Wild must, by its glitziness, be an inferior option - Stirchley dining is to Jeremy Corbyn what Lulu Wild is to Boris Johnson. But there’s room for every style and I do like Lulu Wild’s style and find the food served there to be really very good.

  I started off with a generously sized scorcher of a Margarita - a masterful rendition of that particular cocktail - and was served my choice of steamed prawn and scallop won ton accompanied by a blistering chilli sauce. The won ton were perfectly cooked and, I thought, delicious. A great and light start to the meal.

  For the main, I felt I had to revisit the restaurant’s dish of Black cod served with asparagus, raw radish and a generously sized bowl of jasmine rice. The fish was cooked perfectly as was the accompanying grilled asparagus. The rice was just as one would want it to be. 

 It is best not to mention the dessert - mango pudding - which was made up of a lot crumble, a startlingly sweet mango sorbet, accompanied by a glass containing a mélange of ingredients including I expect, mango, but more notably, some gruesomely bitter chunks of grapefruit, which I expect were inserted in an ill-judged attempt to counter the supremely sweet sorbet but which in fact were far too great a contrast and too astringent to pair with everything else. The dessert was, in short, disastrous.

  Mango pudding aside, and let’s face it, ambitious and accomplished desserts are not a feature of Stirchley  East Asian restaurant menus to any degree, this meal at Lulu Wild was excellent.

  Walking back to The Grand Hotel on the mild mid-November evening, Christmas, it seemed, had arrived complete with big wheel, skating rink, other fairground rides and in Victoria Square, the dreaded, tiresome, tacky, well past its sell-by date German Christmas Fair. 

274.Yikouchi At Chancer’s Cafe

 

  The Good Food Guide has gone a little potty this year since it cast aside paper and embraced digital publishing. I’m not entirely sure what its aims are. Is it to identify good food per se or is it to identify the very best of dining experiences? - the two are not precisely the same thing. Has the Guide even defined which of those goals it wishes to achieve? You might say it is titled ‘The Good Food Guide” so in fact you would think that food is what it’s all about but if that’s the case then I demand a spot in the book since I believe that my chilli con carne is “good food’ and people should know about it but whether or not anyone landing on my doorstep would want more such as atmosphere, comfort, choice, spot-on service, opportunity to relax and so on if they were paying more than, say, £20 to eat the food, is a good question.

  To be fair, the editors of the GFG have gone further than ‘food’ in defining their rating of restaurants - they additionally take into account ‘uniqueness’ and ‘welcome’ which are clearly words that embrace more than they initially suggest. Myself, I’m a little anxious about the ‘uniqueness’ element - I don’t really strive to find a ‘unique’ restaurant though I might very well welcome a restaurant wherein the chef has original thoughts on the dishes he prepares. It’s not particularly pleasing to visit restaurants which are clone-like - thoughts of the string of bistros on Sheep Street in Stratford upon Avon spring to mind - but ‘uniqueness’ is a little odd as one of three criteria when rating a restaurant; for instance I could come up with the concept of a restaurant inspired by Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell - that would be pretty unique I think - should be rated ‘outstanding’ in the uniqueness category - but any steaks cooked there would necessarily be well done and food admirers might not view that outcome as optimal.

  I take a lot of notice of the Good Food Guide these days. The editors and inspectors are doing their best to level up (gastronomically) - they’re here in the West Midlands visiting previously unheard of neighbourhood dining establishments and covering a wide range of cuisines and restaurant styles. Good for them. But are the new places they mention really worth the mention? This is a national guide, not a local publication listing reasonable places to eat if you live there or are perhaps visiting there. Has the Good Food Guide gone too far?

  This appears to be the age of the hipster influencer when it comes to dining out. There are a number of the creatures here in Birmingham, denizens of Harborne or Stirchley (with Moseley falling out of fashion with them as places to live) (see Blog 272)  and it seems that these are the people who are luring food critics and guide inspectors alike to drop in on these suburbs of not immoderate affluence where they themselves have their homes. The question is - are the critics and inspectors right to do so? Well, they have certainly been very positive about some of these suburban dining establishments and so the question now changes to - is this a matter of The Emperor’s new clothes?

  One such restaurant which is rated ‘Very Good’ by GFG which makes it, improbably, one of the 11 best restaurants in Birmingham is Yikouchi at Chancer’s Cafe which is a tiny establishment on a section of the Pershore Road running through scruffy Stirchley (the locals call it ‘the High Street’ which takes pretension to levels only the comfortably off middle class would aspire to - t’was ever so). It isn’t unfair to say that the restaurant doesn’t really look very inviting. But stepping through the door, a rather pleasant and unfussy interior reveals itself and I was certainly made to feel welcome immediately. As was my dog (you can have dog-friendly pubs but dog-friendly restaurants are rare) who sensed the relaxed atmosphere of the place immediately and settled down on the floor beside me and was ready to make the most of things).

  The Good Food Guide and other sources tell us that the chef-patron, James Kirk-Gould, was brought up in Coventry and worked for 6 years teaching English in Beijing with his partner Cassie before working in London and eventually becoming head chef at the Duck and Waffle in Bishopgate in London, the capital’s highest restaurant, in the clouds with prices also in the clouds (well it is London) which makes us appreciate just how lucky we are to be West Midlands diners and not denizens of The Smoke (lobster roll £17 - £12 at the Grand Hotel in Birmingham, roasted scallops £27 - just hand over your bank account, a side dish of carrots £7 and roast potato £8, sea bass £50, I won’t go on). Kirk-Gould, a pleasant-faced, smiling man with a red beard and Cassie who works front of house moved to Birmingham looking for affordable housing and opened the converse of where he has previously worked - a tiny restaurant, definitely on the ground, serving food with which Kirk-Gould had become familiar during his time in China, at prices a tiny fraction of those at the London restaurant at which he had worked. 

  A visit from a real food critic, Jay Rayner of The Guardian, suggested by one of the Birmingham influencers mentioned above, brought the restaurant to national attention and various gourmands and inspectors and critics made their way there and, lo and behold, Yikouchi was getting an impressive rating from the Good Food Guide. 

 Clearly the denizens of Stirchley, in their hipster clothing, barely any male beardless, loved the place too because within a few minutes of my and Lucy the Labrador’s arrival, the place was bulging at the seams. We were nicely settled in and the local hipsters took their places while giving the dog plenty of space to lounge. 

  Meanwhile I spent a couple of seconds perusing the menu (there were two choices, one dish which could be either chicken or cabbage, or both, or a second chicken dish, fried chicken in house chilli oil, which I chose after some discussion with Cassie and instead of having rice with it I settled on the only other available accompaniment of smacked cucumber which was made up of generous-sized cucumber  pieces with chilli oil.

 The fried chicken was stupendous. The batter was perfectly crispy and the chicken inside was as perfectly cooked as one might hope. The house chilli oil had a precise degree of heat, the Szechuan pepper corns had their own heat and flavour and the pleasure increased the further down the bowl I reached as I worked  my way through the pieces of chicken to those that had the most oil on them, A very memorable dish nicely complemented by the cucumber.

  The only dessert available was the fun of a Mr Whippy-style vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce and honeycomb. Really rather enjoyable but hardly contributing to a rating of “Very good”.

  

  I enjoyed sitting at the counter in the window looking out at the goings on outside. For a second or two I thought Stirchley was mimicking perfectly a socialist republic that its residents so aspire to as a long queue formed outside a bread shop with Oxfam shop-clothed residents waiting their turn to be admitted to get their hands on a loaf just as happened in communist states pre-1991 but what I needed to remember that this was Stirchley and that was an artisan bakery and this was the more middling of the Birmingham middle class showing what good taste they have in buying the sort of basic food items items which the working hoi poloi would never appreciate.

  I very much enjoyed my meal at Yikouchi. It was, beyond doubt, quite delicious. But quite how one compares this restaurant on equal terms with those which present multiple complex dishes to their diners, is not clear to me, the Good Food Guide is correct to judge the food very good, the ‘welcome’ is very pleasing and the ‘uniqueness’ is obvious. As I write I am thinking of a date to revisit the restaurant very soon to eat again what this accomplished chef has to offer. But I do feel I want more on my dining out package than this neat little restaurant can give me.

  The restaurant has the air of  a ‘pop-up’ in many ways. I should like to see this excellent food - I say “excellent” admittedly on the experience of one meal alone - being served in grander, more comfortable and more spacious surroundings so that it can be more fully appreciated. I shall be interested to follow how this chef’s story develops over the coming few years.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛

273. Orelle.

 

  Orelle is probably the restaurant that Birmingham has been waiting for. It’s the restaurant that The Grand Hotel should have had. It’s spectacular, breath-taking, chic, smart. The people who work there look the part. And it has a fine, sensible à la carte menu which features luxurious items which make it worthwhile going out to dine. It is where fine dining in Birmingham in the mid-2020s should be heading.

  I ordered a Monkey 47 and tonic and the charming staff, one of whom had worked previously in the now sadly closed Pulperia, were swift to deliver two tasty gougères and some fine bread to the table.

 My chosen starter of dressed white crab looking very pretty with slices of rainbow radish and nicely textured with thin slices of seasonal fresh-tasting apple with buttermilk and lovage emulsion and almond was a hit, a palpable hit. Almost perfect - there was a single tiny piece of shell in the crab - this was an admirable, cheering, scintillating dish though I should have preferred it if my apéritif had arrived rather earlier than half way through the first course. The bar seems to need to settle in a little more though the kitchen seems to have hit the road running.

  I could not resist choosing the Cornish turbot as my main course. Served with gem lettuce, confit fennel for texture, all sitting under globe artichoke and with a gorgeous crab bisque (this was made from the brown meat, I was told, of the crab which had provided the white meat for my starter and I replied that I liked the consequent symmetry of that use of ingredients). To be persnickety, I thought my turbot was just slightly over and had not so much flavour as I had hoped for but the bisque was robust and rumbustious and the whole was delightful.

 And so to the joy of the dessert trolley which is clearly staging a comeback in the city, Harborne Kitchen having reinstituted the tradition some time ago. And what a great pleasure it was to sit back and admire it and the pinks and the chocolates and the whites and the oranges and the yellows spread out on its palate. I chose the magnificent choux pastry - really this was a Paris Brest - its exterior delightfully crispy and with it the delights of caramelised apple and mascarpone and a little jug of caramel sauce to pour on it and bring it all together. These were real desserts made by a real pastry chef. This was not a matter of a mousse and some crumble and a bit of chocolate ganache - this was fine patisserie and exactly how a meal should end.

  Perhaps a couple of mignardises to accompany the coffee would have been a nice touch but what did it matter?, instead I had the most exciting views of Birmingham on offer all laid out before me to enjoy while the coffee went down.

Rating:- 🌞 🌞

272. Diners.

 

  Dining out is a great pleasure - in the main - chefs crucify themselves to invent, design, prepare, present and come up with excuses such as sustainability and “respecting the entire animal” for using ever cheaper ingredients in their dishes in order to keep themselves solvent to provide dishes to customers; Maîtres  D’Hotel - the very best at least - schmooze and smarm charmingly and convincingly (who doesn’t want to feel loved by the maître d’, feel picked out for special attention and to be congratulated that the dish or wine just chosen was “an excellent choice”?); the usually young front of house staff, soft voiced and often not fully conversant in English, struggle to remember the detailed descriptions of what they’re bringing out to their diners and to enable old blokes like me to understand what they’re whispering and precisely what is on the plate set before one  ….. aaah! the pleasures of dining out. There are many more.

  But then there are the other diners who are generally horrible. And not one of the pleasures of dining out. The problem is that the younger middle classes now just have too much money and while being useless to society and self absorbed, they are able to make themselves seen in decent restaurants though it would be better that they were never seen by anyone apart from their fellow self-admirers and ‘selfie’-takers.

  This diatribe, not yet finished, was set off by a recent visit to Weston super Mare’s The Ginger Pig Kitchen (which really does deserve a mention in The Good Food Guide given the guide’s new approach to sites of dining out that caused it to allow hipster neighbourhood restaurants such as Eat Vietnam in the Stirchley Socialist Republic to be admitted to its august pages). I was pleased (and surprised) to see how busy the restaurant was at 6PM on a Thursday evening but I noticed that there had been a paradigm shift in the clientele dining there - the Brummie and West Midlands elderly holidaymakers had made way for a younger, scruffier (sorry, more casual) collection of diners with middle class West Country accents. And a lot of them spoke very loudly.

  My table was unfortunately positioned next to that of the loudest man in the room where he sat with his three dining companions. One of the females had a loud repetitive inauthentic laugh - ha ha ha - which advertised her presence to everyone else in the restaurant and filled in for the periods of a few seconds when the male, a large man of about 40, unsuccessfully doing his best to look cool and admirable, gave his tongue a rest. The group behaved as though they were entitled to ignore the presence of any other diners in the room or, conversely, to inflict their dull conversation on the other diners whose presence they were treating with indifference. In truth it is likely that they were indeed unaware of all the other diners except that they provided an audience for them.

  The previous evening I had dined at an Indian restaurant and again was unfortunate enough to be sat next to a table of excruciatingly loud mid-twenty year old men whose conversations were carried out by what could only be described as shouting with respite only being obtained when they paused, which they frequently did, to pose for ‘selfies’. 

  Diners, especially those from the middle class which feels empowered to use foul and filthy language on social media about anyone who does not share their outlook on life, live self-righteously and sanctimoniously, are relatively well-educated but are often vaguely thick and foolish, adept at manipulative behaviour, seem to be running riot even in fine restaurants. Apart from the question of loud speech there is the question of dressing to dine.

  I found it hard to believe that male diners at Adam’s restaurant thought it appropriate to turn up to dine in shorts when I ate there one evening a few weeks ago on a not particularly warm night. What was the staff to do? Adam’s is not a cheap burger joint and diners should be expected to respect the nature of the restaurant and fellow diners. I really don’t want to have the sight of hairy male legs inflicted on me while I’m dealing with my mackerel ceviche. 

  It’s all about middle class entitlement. This is the section of society that allows its children to rampage around other diners in dining establishments which have embraced the concept of child-friendly restaurants. They speak to their brats in ways designed to broadcast to those unfortunate enough to be around them that they have very bright and forward children. If only they would understand that no-one finds their children to be any where as charming or as interesting as they think they are (though there is usually some old middle class biddy sitting somewhere nearby ready to engage the horrors in a silly question and answer conversation). Advice to restaurateurs - don’t be child friendly (unless you sell burgers and hand out free plastic toys) - be dog friendly instead - dogs cause far fewer problems, are much better behaved and are far less likely to spread disease than human brats do.

  The worst gastronomic product of the new socialist middle class is the blogger/self-proclaimed food expert -  usually aged in the range 25 to 49. These are self-publicists, rapidly approaching, or having already arrived at, a feeling of lost youth and who are unsuccessful in a career that is useful to society. They think that chefs and important restaurant figures love them whereas they are in fact rather disdainful of these sad people, often alcoholics, but humour them just in case a potential diner does take notice of a negative review sparked off by any perceived slight they receive in a restaurant. Notably these people are never offered a job as a food reviewer for a respectable organ of any type and they haunt the internet tweeting like there’s no tomorrow. By the time they arrive at fifty they have run to seed looking prematurely aged, have established alcoholism but have been unsuccessful in overcoming their insecurities and have developed even more severe personality traits than they had one or two decades before.

  Earlier this year, I was dining in a restaurant belonging to a celebrity chef and had the dubious honour of witnessing one of these ‘influencers’ - a woman - preening herself over an expensive plate of fish and chips and self-consciously drawing attention to herself. I had no idea who she was but was interested that chef himself brought her meal out to her - I’m not entirely sure that he wasn’t taking the mickey - but I searched around the internet and found that this individual - her literary skills clearly somewhat limited - had recorded her day visiting this particular restaurant and I was pleased to have identified this particular diner though I have long since forgotten her identity and I doubt that I would recognise her again. Oh, how  short are those fifteen minutes of fame.

  It is remarkable to me that these middle class, so casual, so self-aware, so self-entitled diners are spending hundreds of pounds on consuming expensive meals out while proclaiming the financial distress of the country. It seems that the government they blame for the financial disturbances has not been so disastrous for them. 

  I dislike dining in the presence of the smug diner or the diner who doesn’t understand the privilege they are experiencing when dining out in fine restaurants or why they should have a little consideration for their fellow diners - not just those at their table -  in keeping the sound of their voices down to a level where everyone else is not having to hear their conversations and braying laughter. I dislike the way those who feel self-entitlement are wholly indifferent to those around them. 

  I wonder what old Nathaniel Newnham-Davis would have made of it all? - “Tut tut. None of that sort of behaviour in my day, yer know”.

  By the way, on the day of writing this, I record that it’s Escoffier’s birthday (28 October 1846 - 12 February 1935). Happy birthday to a giant of gastronomy and a failed fraudster.

271. Carter’s Of Moseley.

Last visited - January 2022.

Rating prior to new visit - 🌞🌞🌞 

This week named 19th Most Exciting restaurant in Britain by Good Food Guide.

  It was quite coincidental that I had reservations made for Carter’s of Moseley at the end of the week that started with me being at the Good Food Guide awards and witnessing Brad Carter’s restaurant being named the 19th Most Exciting Restaurant in Britain for 2022 (it was also the week where Britain’s prime minister resigned hence becoming the holder of that post for the shortest time in the history of that role).

The starters as a trio were immaculate. Firstly a gorgeously coloured beetroot sorbet sitting on a delightfully tasting piece of mackerel on a shiso leaf nestled in a pleasingly crispy pastry with caviar happily crowning it all to tell us that this was going to be a great meal. Anyone who can make me purr whilst eating mackerel has to be a great chef. Then a clever oyster starter with oyster leaf, richly flavoured; then a magnificently large chicken thigh encased in a salt and vinegar ultra-crunchy coating - a fabulous play on fried chicken.

  From the beginning it was obvious that I and my lunch companion were dining in one of the great restaurants of Birmingham, whether or not a national food guide agreed with that statement.

  

  Next came little ribbons of cuttlefish with swede - a pleasing dish - and then a profoundly tasty version of Matthew Boulton’s 1794 ‘Birmingham soup’, a perhaps too-small piece of slow-cooked beef with turnip and a gorgeous consommé all topped off by a tasty lattice shaped to bring Birmingham Central Library to mind. From the accents to the dishes Birmingham is a theme running through the meal.

    Then my least favourite dish - Cornish ray with little shrimps, squash purée and delightful shrimp butter. Skate, and now ray, are everywhere this year presumably on the grounds of sustainability (the autumn months are their ‘season’) and also cost. I’m having problems with their texture and substantiality. I like a meatier, most robust fish which can usually be replied upon to have a more embracing flavour) These cartilaginous fishes just don’t do it for me. That said, of course, the fish was cooked beautifully and so there were no faults in the preparation for table. And then the autumn fare continued in the form of a half BBQ partridge. Delicious, served with seasonal mushrooms, a fine sauce and Carter’s’ own rice (produced from oats and now very successful in its impersonation). Some of the bird’s tasty little offal bejewelled the the faux ritz.

    At a point where I was comfortably replete but not suffering from overindulgence, along came the immaculate dessert, red to emulate the brick buildings of Birmingham, and zinging with the perfectly judged flavour of coffee and a fine crispy wafer to give it ideal texture as well as a Q-shaped tuile (“to recall chef’s favourite club”) placed over it all. A very memorable dessert that makes me want to return to Carter’s as soon as possible if only to relive the pleasure of this ruddy coloured pleaser. With coffee, another crowd pleaser, the by now familiar, and no less celebrated because of that, white chocolate bar with the colours of a Birmingham underpass on it.

  In these heady days of Birmingham’s gastronomic ascendancy, Carter’s Of Moseley is high up there with the West Midlands culinary gods, the pantheon of which continues to expand so that we worshippers in these temples find it increasingly difficult to celebrate each deity as often as we might wish to do. How delightful it is, though, that we are so spoiled for choice. 

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.