277. Lisa Goodwin-Allen At Simpsons.

 

  One of the interesting developments in dining out in Birmingham in recent years is the increasing number of special dinners laid on by notable restaurants where the restaurant’s own chef shares the duties of the kitchen with a visiting, usually well-known, chef who may be best known to the dining enthusiasts through appearances on television. These events are not new to Simpsons and yesterday I was delighted to have a reservation for a dining collaboration of Simpsons’ Executive Chef, Luke Tipping, and distinguished chef, Lisa Goodwin Allen, Head Chef at the one Michelin-starred Northcote Manor in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire.

  Simpsons has improved out of all recognition this year after a time a few years ago when the service was chaotic and the food reasonable but hardly breath-taking. The front of house staff, charming, polite and extremely helpful, worked like elements in a well-oiled machine and it was not long before I was seated comfortably in full view of the kitchen watching the cooking side of the operation gearing up for service. It was easy to spot Lisa G-A with her shock of white hair and the slim, distinguished-looking Luke Tipping in their joint role of performance conductors. The excitement was building.

  The meal started with two exemplary canapés - Tipping provided a delicious bacon and egg tartlet - robust with flavour - and Goodwin-Allen presented a wonderful and original ‘butter pie’. The pair made me suggest to the waiting staff that they should not distribute any more of the canapés to the rest of the room but deliver them all to my table for my consumption only.

  

  Next came Tipping’s frothy seaweed custard with a plump crispy mussel and topped with Imperial caviar. Sweet and salt and elegant.

  After the excellent bread came Goodwin-Allen’s roast quail which was so perfect I felt it must be the best quail dish I can remember eating. The little bird had not died in vain accompanied as it was by sliced pickled turnip, apple versus and an inspired frozen element. Next came Baby gem lettuce used as a receptacle for a heady combination of summer truffle shavings, artichoke, confit maitake mushroom and L’Etivas cheese. This had luxury written all over it but the lettuce seemed insubstantial and lacking in pleasure and I could only dream of having it all served up in nice crispy pastry with real bite to it.

  Luke Tipping’s finely cooked Cornish cod restored the deep pleasurability of the meal after the lettuce leaf and was served with tasty little shrimps, various forms of  kale and a delectable shellfish cream which had to be mopped up with my remaining chunks of bread. Such stuff are dreams made on. But the absolute peak, the outstanding dish, was yet to come - Lisa Goodwin-Allen’s fabulous rhapsody of deer meat and beetroot - her stupendous Scottish venison dish. Never, truly, never have I enjoyed a plate of venison quite so much. This, if it were any other form of art, would have been a museum piece. Just venison and beetroot. A triumphant rendition of the pairing. The photograph at least tells part of the story. Look at that absolutely perfectly cooked piece of venison, see the astonishingly delicious meatball by its side, regard those brilliant variants of what to do with beetroot also sitting on the plate. A symphony of gastronomy. And there I rest my case.

  Luke Tipping then gave the by now ectstatic diners a pleasing dessert of a classic combination of black figs, salty Cashel Blue cheese, Bournville honey and the bite of chicory. The figs themselves were a little lacking in flavour but the other elements on the dish were admirable.

  Then in one last flourish, Lisa Goodwin-Allen strove once more to hit the evening’s gastronomic ball out of the park with a sweetly lemon dessert the flavour of which launched the most pleasant assault on the diners’ taste buds. She presented a very convincing lemon lookalike made from lemon-flavoured white chocolate served with meringue, limoncello and the perfect addition of thyme. This too was the stuff that dreams are made on.

  A great evening came to a close. The chefs circulated among and chatted to their guests. Menus were autographed. Carriages (well, taxis at any rate) were summoned. Mellowness lingered all around.

    In the reception area, whilst waiting for my taxi, I took the opportunity to buy Andreas Antonia’s fine new book with its enjoyable 1970s patterns and colours. Well worth a read.

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:- 🌞 🌞