309. Purnell’s and Purnell’s Plates.

 

  Dinner at Purnell’s and this time the Full Monty - that is the - the Tasting Menu. Out come, triumphantly, the happily returning black potatoes (though sadly on this occasion I did not get the bite of lemon which which these little gems have previously distinguished themselves), the edible charcoal (so silly and so delightful), all married together with the crowd pleasing chorizo dip. Then that cheeky little number, emotions of soixante dix, the now almost infamous play on cheese and pineapple on a stick but now exuberantly served in steaming clouds hence giving a nice synergy, since the final dish, another old friend, mint choccy chip, will also appear with swirling crowds around it. Out too comes Purnell’s usually sensational pain campagne but oh dear, what’s happened it’s too salty but not as bad as the butter which accompanies it which has far too much salt incorporated in it making it taste like the Dead Sea. Maître D’Hotel Adrien sympathetically brings me a new dish of butter. But what’s going, has a salt fiend invaded the kitchen?

Then down to the serious business. Firstly a superlative dish of ceviche of sea bream with textures of radish and orange and yuzu kosho. This is an immaculate dish, an absolute scene stealer. The beauty of its visual appearance is more than surpassed by the gorgeousness of its flavours and textures. One of the best dishes I’ve had so far in 2023.

   Adrien allowed me at this point to substitute the haddock and egg, which is not my favourite of Purnell’s classics, for the stupendous beef carpaccio, served with red wine braised octopus, sweet and sour onions and the enigmatic beefy ‘OXO’ cube. This is another very fine dish in the Purnell’s repertoire.

  Then the fish course - a fine piece of Scottish halibut served with a silky champagne and mussel velouté and a nice helping of caviar but no - it cannot be - the Salt Fiend has struck again and assaulted the halibut in a most overwhelming manner. What is going on the kitchen this evening? What a pity, this would have been a lovely dish apart from the overdose of salt. 

  Fortunately the Salt Fiend had been expelled when the main course was being prepared and a delicious plate of Wiltshire downlands lamb accompanied by a little tart (of fine pastry) of morels and chopped asparagus makes it appearance with the perfect accompanying flavours of mint and redcurrant. The portion of meat is generous and tender as a plate of butter.

  The final straight has been entered - along comes 10 - 10 - 10 itself, the burnt English egg custard surprise served in an egg gatherer’s basket but a surprise it is indeed. Under the creme caramel lurks a layer of quite bitter caramelised apple and muscavado severely assaulted by armagnac - this is the least enjoyable version of 10 - 10 - 10 with which I have ever been presented; the accompanying Yorkshire rhubarb is well cooked but the cake under it is not that great. Well, I suppose there must be experimentation but on the whole this dessert was nor great. I am too full to have my helping of mint choccy chip but enjoy the three petits fours that accompany coffee. 

  I enjoyed my meal on the whole as I always do at Purnell’s but I was forced to wonder if my egg surprise had been prepared using a curate’s egg.

  Rating:- 🌞

  A few evenings later, a return to Purnell’s Plates. This is now very busy. The staff are welcoming and a fine Margarita was served (a surprising choice on my part, you might think, after my moaning above about  the actions of a Salt Fiend at Purnell’s). 

  I chose four small plates which seems to be about right for an old bloke whose “eyes are bigger than his belly”, as my dear old Gran used to say. Inevitably I chose patatas bravas which might make up part of my last meal were I given a choice prior to the bell that tolls, thoroughly enjoyable cheese croquettes - enjoyably crispy and as cheese-flavoured as any man might wish, a laudable grilled octopus dish (well, a grilled octopus tentacle dish, at least) with lovely meaty flesh  and afitas de pollo, said to be chicken wings with lime and paprika but, while being mildly spicy and joyously sticky, overwhelmingly sweet, indeed shockingly so, that, especially as this was the last dish served, so that I rather felt I was eating my first ever dessert containing chicken. This would have been a beautifully self-indulgent dish by itself but it did not fit in at all with the rest of the menu and really needs to be rethought unless it is indeed to be added to the rather scant dessert section of the menu.

  Even so, it was a meal generally enjoyed at a reasonable price. What else can one hope for?

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛

308. GULP. Pasqua.

 

  Sometimes dining can become, er, a little repetitive. Of course in London, and I rarely write anything in praise of the place, there are thousands of restaurants and scores of high quality such establishments. In Birmingham, with a much smaller, less well-off population and a fraction of the number of tourists visiting the city, there are far fewer restaurants and about three to four hands worth of high grade dining establishments. So we must make the most of what we’ve got which is, fortunately for us, really very good. 

  But still, even with changing menus based on seasonality, the more variety the better - as long as we are not substituting quantity for quality.

  It’s been notable that since just before and certainly since the pandemic-related lockdowns, events have been popping up everywhere - collaboration, specially themed menus, celebratory events - anything to break up the creeping petty pace of day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. I’ve been to the Queen’s Jubilee lunch at Simpsons, a Tipping-Goodwin Allen collaboration, a Stu Deeley-Andrew Sheridan collaboration, a Purnell-Roux-Kerridge collaboration, a two-handed Purnell-Roux event, a KrayTredwell- Ben Taylor collaboration plus others and then there’s the ones I’ve missed because I have had other commitments in my diary. I’ve been to post-pandemic pop-ups - Low and Slow at The Wilderness for instance. They’ve all been very good fun. Therefore, I conclude, special events involving our fine restaurants and fine chefs add to the pleasure of dining out in the place where, after all, The Good Food Guide has pronounced to be the Most Exciting place to eat in Britain. Excitement on excitement, who could ask for anything more?

  So what about a dining establishment (in the broadest sense of the word) which is based entirely on events? “Events, dear boy, events” as Macmillan once said, only he was talking about politics and not gastronomy?

   The artist, Kaye Winwood, specialises in an art form which embraces texture and, according to Linked In, “Food is central but not definitive to Winwood’s practice. Working with the tools and paraphernalia of cooking and dining the uses food as a pivot that enables a range of discourses to come into focus”. That is very appealing and I was hooked when I read that she and chef/gardener (a new title in Birmingham’s gastronomic history, I think) Matt O’Callaghan were planning a dinner event which would attempt to reproduce the bizarre gastronomy of the Italian Futurists, the subject of which is a Blog itself. So appealing was the prospect of the Italian Futurist’s event that I entered a state of minor depression when I realised that the date of it coincided with me being out of town but all was not lost. The next planned event was Pasqua, an Italian Easter celebration meal, and I rapidly bought my ticket to see just what Winwood and O’Callaghan were putting on.

  Come the night, come the man. The Jewellery Quarter is remarkably quiet and eerie on an early April evening. Kaye Winwood had established herself in an old factory, on the first floor up steep rickety stairs, in Spencer Street. There was no indication of precisely where the event was to take place and my first incursion into the building which seemed to bear the advertised address took me to a functioning factory where a good Brummie worker knowingly directed me to where the event was really taking place. 

  I was the first to arrive. Kaye greeted me; the table was laden with charcuterie, albeit, I suppose, Italian charcuterie. Oh joy, cold continental meats, how I love them. And sparkling wine to boot. Before the other five guests arrived, I was able to ask Kaye about GULP and especially about the previous event featuring Italian Futurist food which at the event was inspired by dishes featured in the cookbook of the Taverna del Santapalato (Inn of the Holy Palate), a restaurant opened in Turin in 1931. The book, La Cucina Futurista, was written by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Luigi Colombo Fillia and I was  delighted and fascinated when Kaye brought a copy of it out to me for me to peruse. After the meal and my expression of deep regret for missing the Holy Palate meal, Matt O’Callaghan suggested that they may hold a first anniversary repeat of the Futurist meal and I delved into my diary to ensure that I would keep that week in 2024 free so I could join the other Brummie Futurist food fans to finally experience it all for myself.

  On with the meal. First, naturally, the antipasto, charcuterie, cheese, sweet peppers, olives. How delightful. For the pasta course O’Callaghan had prepared a splendidly rustic and delicious artichoke and spinach lasagna and the main course was equally rustic and equally excellent - a generous helping of tender and tasty lamb with little hints of mint served very pleasingly with fave beans and finely cooked roast potatoes fragrant with the flavour of rosemary. No espumas, no nasturtiums, no dots of emulsions. What pleasure.

  For dessert, an exquisite, perfectly judged - wobble quotient, flavour, texture - panna cotta, always my dessert of choice and beautifully presented by Matt O’Callaghan who then brought in two original, home-made liquors, one perhaps a little too sweet for my taste, but both were delightful. And at the very end an Easter gift, a Sicilian-style marzipan lamb which it would be a hard thing to eat as in itself it is a piece of culinary art and a tiny little piece of Birmingham’s gastronomic history.

  And finally, an exciting little souvenir to take home with me, a left over menu from the Holy Palate dinner, folded as was intended in the shape of an airplane (aeropitura - aeropainting became an obsession of the second generation of Futurists from the 1939s to 1940). 

  We do not know for sure in which direction English gastronomy and dining out will be travelling in five or ten years time but Events could well play an important part in continuing to mobilise the English public’s love and hopefully increasingly sophisticated appreciation of great cuisine. Winwood’s GULP may well play an important role in developing this aspect of dining out in Birmingham. It looks all very exciting.

Rating:- 🌞🌞

306. Great British Menu Central Heat & Finals 2023.

 

  There’s little doubt that the 2023 series of the BBC’s television programme Great British Menu has been one of the weakest ever when it is boiled down to the abilities of the participating chefs. This time the heat  for the Central region (West and East Midlands and East Anglia) was the very last to be broadcast and one could only feel that things could only get better. And in true Midlands fashion, that is what happened. The only representative from East Anglia, Antigua-born Kareem Roberts, chef at a Caribbean-British fusion restaurant in Cambridge, was eliminated at the end of the first round (amuses gueles, starters and fish course) leaving Tom Shepherd of the Michelin starred restaurant Upstairs in Lichfield, Thom Bateman of The Flintlock of Cheddleton (both in Staffordshire) and Marianne Lumb, currently a private chef based in Leicestershire and aiming to open her own restaurant, The Pipistrelle, later in 2023, to fight out the second round (mains, intermediate course, dessert). Marianne had previously won the Central regional heat in 2018 but was not successful in her attempt to win a place preparing a course at the final banquet.

  Those that produced the programme had decided that the theme of the dishes should be ‘animation and illustration’ on the rather specious premise that 2023 marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Michael Bond’s first Paddington novel, with its pleasant illustrations. Marmalade, not surprisingly and rather obviously, had featured in several of the dishes presented prior to the Central heats. 

  For the main course Tom Shepherd turned his attention to the comic character Desperate Dan, who had an obsession with eating cow pies and that is precisely what Shepherd used as the inspiration for his dish calling it Desperate Dan’s Cow Pie. The pie was prepared by searing beef cheeks and then pressure cooking them for seventy minutes and serving the meat in hot crust pastry with mushroom ketchup, maple-glazed carrots, chive emulsion, a slice of sirloin and beef sauce. The anticipation of both the host, Andi Oliver, and the guest judging chef, Paul Ainsworth, was very high for this dish and that degree of excitement was addressed as the the dish saw Ainsworth awarding 10 out of 10 points to Shepherd for it and the statement by Ainsworth that it was the best pie he’d ever had. Pie praise indeed.

  Thom Bateman meanwhile presented a main course, May un mar lady (based on a long running Staffordshire cartoon) of sirloin steak, pommes dauphine with blue cheese grated over them and Staffordshire lobby (a beef stew, traditionally eaten by pottery workers around Stoke on Trent), carrot, confit onion, beer sauce and brown sauce from Bateman’s own recipe. The meat, both sirloin and lobby, was pronounced to be delicious though Ainsworth felt the sirloin was not rested for long enough and the carrots did not have enough flavour while the potatoes were a little undercooked.

  Marianne Lumb’s main course, Yumbly Hedge, was a vegan brined and roasted cauliflower dish served with a hazelnut Béarnaise sauce (which Ainsworth described as “delicious”). When Ainsworth announced the points he had awarded, Lumb received 7 points as did Bateman while Shepherd achieved the maximum 10 points.

  Shepherd followed up with a dessert, No Ordinary Boy (recalling the cartoon character Bananaman)  which was made of white chocolate containing banana mousse and served with banana ice cream and this too was awarded 10 points and ensured that he would join Thom Bateman in the judges’s chamber at the end of the week. Marianne Lumb was eliminated at the end of the second day but competed with charm, dignity and ably demonstrated her fine abilities. It is perhaps worth mentioning that, though the judge and presenter and fellow contestants were astonished by Shepherd’s banana dish, it was not the first time that regular West Midlands diners have seen it - with Alex Claridge presenting a very similar dessert titled Ch-ch-changes at The Wilderness intermittently since 2021. Indeed, the chocolate banana had appeared even earlier in 2019:when Alex Claridge was serving his version at the short-lived Nocturnal Animals.

Alex Claridge’s banana dessert first encountered at Nocturnal Animals along ago as July 2019:-

  On the regional judging day, Tom Shepherd was chosen to represent the Central region and in the finals the following week. His starter, Pac man, was probably his weakest dish and he came seventh of the eight contestants on the first day of the finals. His fish course, Fungus The Bogeyman’s Breakfast, took fifth place (originally served with kohlrabi which was not well received and which was replaced by chopped leeks in the final).

  The blue riband event of Finals Week is undoubtedly the Main Course on Day 3; this as we were constantly reminded, was the course all the chefs wanted to be selected to present at the banquet itself. There seemed little doubt from the various judges’ reactions to Desperate Dan’s Cow Pie that Tom Shephard’s immaculate dish would walk off with the winning main course award and this indeed proved to be the case receiving the maximum 10 points from all four judges, one of whom was the Birmingham comedian Lennie Henry. Shepherd therefore became the first Midlands Region chef to win the right to present the main course at the banquet and to score maximum points in doing so.

  Shepherd’s mock-banana, No Ordinary Schoolboy, also won first place in the dessert course competition but shared another set of four tens with the dessert served by the Scottish chef, who had been runner-up for almost every course, being placed 1st equal with it. In a tie-break the informed presenter, Andi Oliver, chose the Scotsman’s dish to go forward to the banquet which was an act of kindness though it wasn’t hard to get the feeling that Shepherd’s banana was really the dessert the judges would have liked to be shovelling up from their plates on the day of the banquet itself.

  Another great success for a West Midlands chef and the local dining out industry.