332. Summer Rain (4. Tipping And Deeley At Simpsons)

 

  And the rain, the rain it fell mainly on the Birmingham plain. And, it appeared, rather heavily in Edgbaston.

  Off to Simpsons to dine at what was promising to be a rather happy evening, despite, the endless summer rain, of a collaboration of Simpsons’ Head Chef, Luke Tipping, and his former Simpsons pupil, Stuart Deeley whose food I have eaten, with pleasure, in the past at The Wilderness, at a collaboration in Craft Dining Room, and of course at Smoke at Hampton Manor. 

  Let us not dwell on the rather long wait to order an aperitif for everything then snapped into gear and the service was faultless, all remarkably spot on. 

  Through the dining room window, both chefs could be seen preparing to deliver their prize exhibits and all around them their entourages seemed to be functioning as one would hope to see in a well-ordered kitchen such as you would expect at the city’s most venerable dining establishment. 

  The starter, a Simpsons dish, was excellent - a lovely oriental-style scallop tartare with apt strips of chicory. Then, from Deeley, a gorgeous tomato gazpacho, sparkling with peppery heat and sweet with tiny tomatoes. This was served with a generous ball of burrata stationed like Rockall transported to the Red Sea and which was not really needed since the dish was delicious enough without the blandness of the cheese.

  I liked the Simpsons’ next dish of Loch Duart salmon uncontroversially paired with horseradish snow, which needed a bit more oomph to it, and pickled cucumber and the inevitable nasturtium leaves. This was a very safe and unexciting dish - though enjoyable - but hardly cutting edge. Dishes like this tend to date Simpsons to times past rather than gastronomic opportunities to come.

    Next came a T bone steak, West Country cote de boeuf, barbecued to perfection by Stuart Deeley, but a more enormous portion than I felt comfortable with (as a single diner I had double the portion for which I felt grateful but rather guilty).This was served with what might be called in modern culinary parlance, “dirty” boulangere potatoes, gruesomely delicious but clearly wicked as hell, with truffled barbecued baby gem and hen of the woods.

  The predessert was unexciting - set strawberry yogurt and strawberry sorbet with strawberry fragments (which were not the most strongly flavoured I’ve had this year) - mainly because the flavours were not powerful enough to refresh the mouth after the meat and before the waiting dessert.

  Deeley returned the meal to an even keel with an exciting looking and tasting play on Black Forest gateau with the flavour of cherries successfully hitting the diner from all parts of the plate - the relaxed cheeriness of the sorbet working with the chocolate and cherry mousses in the cake.

  A fine evening rounded off by an appearance by Andreas Antona to thank the chefs. Deeley’s talents were nicely demonstrated.

331. Summer Rain (3 - Vines With A View; Colmore Food Festival).

 

  During the course of my many decades on this earth I have never before been to the top floor of the Rotunda. I remember the excitement surrounding its construction in the 1960s. The new Bullring seemed like one of the modern wonders of the world to we provincial suburbanites and there, towering above it all, was The Rotunda, magnificent, rampant, dominant. My darling grandmother who entered this world in 1900 came home one day to say that she had now seen the completed behemoth and that it was so tall you had to lie on your back to see the top of it! How perceptions change. 

  Now dwarfed by much around it, the old Bullring long bulldozed away - just as its predecessor had been in the 1960s - the Rotunda stands still as the finest and most memorable, and most loved, remnant of Birmingham City Council’s mid 20th century assault on the fine old city as glorious Victorian and Edwardian buildings were pulled down to make way for the philistine brutalism which replaced them. The Rotunda, and the neighbouring Smallbrook Queensway, which a new generation of philistine councillors is lining up to be demolished, were the only really tolerable products of the 1960s Birmingham architectural revolution that it was ever a pleasure to look at.

  And now, I was finally going to visit the top of the Rotunda myself - how exciting - to spend a couple of very enjoyable hours quaffing wine nicely selected by the maestro, sommelier at the Wilderness, Sonal Clare and nibbling nibbles under the watchful eye of Alex Claridge. There were some particularly delicious crostini on offer and some pleasant people to speak to. Aptly named ‘Vine with a view’, Clare had selected four very pleasing wines to sample and enjoy and the weather was behaving in a sympathetic way so that standing on the balcony of the twentieth floor, an excellent view of various aspects of the city could be taken in.

  Messrs Claridge and Clare, an excellent name combination to add to their other fine points, had amusingly chosen to serve their guests in hotel bathrobes though fortunately the same apparel was not expected to be worn by those being entertained. Birmingham has such clever leaders in the hospitality business presently but they also have their serious side. I was glad to have a couple of minutes chatting to Alex Claridge about his recent appointment by Mayor Andy Street as nighttime economy tsar for the West Midlands. The local hospitality industry has a fine - and realistic - representative in the form of Alex Claridge.

  How nice it was, too, to have a goodie bag to take home afterwards and inside a can of Rotunda Pale. The question is, should this work of art be opened or the ale left untouched with the art intact? To be or not to be, that is the question.

  The summer rains continued. Three days after the trip to the Rotunda, I took Lucy the Labrador along to the 2023 Colmore Food Festival. It was a day of constant deluge and it was so diluvian that the dog, for once, assented to wearing a waterproof coat to keep her back dry. Effort had been put in to the arrangements for the festival and a number of local food and drink businesses were represented there in St Phillip’s churchyard. And when they built it they did come - that is - a respectable number of members of the public were there to support the event given the nastiness of the weather.

  I don’t think they’ve quite got it right. It is a ‘food festival’ with mostly better class street food and entertainment but much of the entertainment has nothing to do with food, being made up mostly of local school choirs and bands - as charming and talented as they were plus a tragically camp host who, one must admit, worked hard to invigorate the proceedings and only very occasional references to food on the stage. Perhaps one of the organisers should visit Ludlow this September to see what a real ‘food festival’ should be like.

  I sampled food from the recently opened Bundobust - I thoroughly enjoyed the spicy chickpea curry though the onion bhajis I also chose were less pleasing - their contents seemed to have become infected with strips of moderately tough spinach. Don’t do it - if your cooking onion bhajis make them full of sweet, delicious onions, adding spinach will make little difference to the healthiness of a splendidly deep fried pleasure such as the onion bhaji and will detract from the pleasure of it.

  The Purnell’s stall served up a somewhat esoteric ‘Glynn’s sausage roll’ which, though having pleasing pastry, did not really contain sausage, the contents having the appearance, both visually and gustatorially, of pulled meat and in the end it was not really all that enjoyable especially at £5 for a small slice. There was an accompanying crunchy coleslaw which was more enjoyable texturally rather than by way of flavour.

  Finally an excellent, hot and tangy Thai red curry from the Zen Metro stall. It was full of tasty, lean, tender beef and a delicious sauce helped it down in a most enjoyable way. A good way to wrap up a wet by happy lunchtime.

  By the way, the organisers, Colmore Bid, looked after their canine guests very well, with free biscuits and chews being generously offered and bowls of water at hand.

329. Summer Rain (2 - 670 Grams).

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

Rating:- 🌞🌞

330. Summer Rain (1 - Harborne Kitchen).

 

  A century ago,  plus or minus forty years, Harborne was traditionally and deprecatingly known by Birmingham residents as ‘Hungry Harborne’ because it tended to be inhabited by those who thought themselves a cut above the rest of the city’s denizens despite them being rather less well off than they would have liked to be, to the extent that they could not necessarily afford to eat as regularly as one would have expected. At the same time, Handsworth, then the location of substantial housing with the feel of Moseley’s Salisbury Road about them, was equally deprecatingly known as ‘Kippers and Curtains’, the meaning not lost on those who lived in the city at the time. Harborne has fared rather better than Handsworth in these post-millennial times though to one who visits there only infrequently, it was obvious to me on my most recent trip to this outwardly well-heeled suburb that the rot has set in just as it clearly has, quite dramatically, in Moseley. But one can hardly still call it ‘Hungry Harborne’ given how many dining establishments representing an eclectic mix of cuisines there are scattered along its ugly tired, high street where there are now quite a number of closed shops.

  Walking along the High Street one can see that Harborne has its population of useless hipsters all intent on prioritising their ‘work-life balance’ but squeezed by their mortgage repayments, mixed with older people who’ve made a quid or two in their now passed working lives and who get angry at the poor service in the long queue at the understaffed post office or feel sad to see Harborne High Street fading right in front of their eyes.

  Still there’s something for the denizens of the suburb to celebrate - Harborne Kitchen is there as the jewel in its dining out crown, indeed it’s a jewel in Birmingham’s dining out crown - the Good Food Guide lists it as ‘exceptional’ - and judging by a Friday lunchtime service is doing remarkably good business in these troubled times with hipsters and the comfortably off retired and everything in between there relishing the fine dishes that emerge from its open kitchen.

  It was a day of solid rain which did nothing to enhance the appearance of the High Street. But spirits were soon raised by the professional warm welcome on arriving at the restaurant, the pleasing chat with the front of house staff and the accepted suggestion of an aperitif of white port and tonic with a slice of orange which was sparklingly refreshing and reflected well on the Lisbon elite who apparently quaff it all the time.

  Seated at my table, I was appalled at how badly the younger diners seated near by were eating their food - forks used as shovels delivering huge lumps of food into gaping mouths, huge chunks of bread shoved into oral cavities while leaning forward with their heads almost resting on the table and - horror upon horror - gabbling on in voices loud enough to be heard by all the other diners in the room with their mouths full of food. Horrible. I wish the middle classes would return to teaching their offspring how to eat their food in polite company. This is unlikely to happen as we are now on to the second generation of middle class diners who eat like four year old labradors and are not in a position to correct their brats because they themselves know no better. There is also now, sadly, very little polite company.

  Putting the rest of the diners aside, the restaurant was comfortable, had a pleasing if metropolitan atmosphere and the service was top notch, unimpeachable in fact - glasses of water and wine were kept topped up, dropped napkins were replaced instantly, diners heading for the lavatories were guided to their destination. I chose the ten course Tasting Menu priced at £100 which proved to be extremely good value and a delight to look back on afterwards.

  To start, there were two excellent amuses gueules - the first a full bodied flavoured, aged cheddar gougère textured with walnut and then the signature Jamie’s chicken and white chocolate - a supremely luscious chicken liver mousse invigorated with white chocolate served on a crisp (Blog 211 - January 2022 - has described some of the dishes previously but it’s a pleasure to remind oneself of past and present  items of happiness).

  Next another pleasingly punchily flavoured dish of (inevitably, I suppose) chalk stream trout (delicious but possibly an ingredient which needs to be given a holiday by chefs) on a slightly stodgy brioche with tasty herrings roe and Hollandaise. While the dish was pleasantly flavoured it lacked the elegance of many of the other dishes with a large stripe of Hollandaise draped over the middle of it like a folded duvet.

  Another of Jamie Desogus’ old familiars came along next - the malloreddus, this time served with an adventurous combination of chopped English asparagus and morels and a delightful snowfall of Parmesan covering it. I am not a pasta man and gnocchi give me little pleasure having so great a mass for so small a volume (the gnocchi that is, though this may also be said about myself I suppose) but this was pleasant though again I believe asparagus, when we have it in season, should be enjoyed for itself - the star of the production, one might say - and not chopped and immersed in a milieu of other things.

  Along came another one of Desogus’ favourite ingredients - smoked eel, this time used to surround a satisfactorily cooked plover’s egg and served as a clever, though rather salty, scotch egg soothed with a nice pea velouté and precisely cooked peas and broad beans - an explosion of summer.

  The prawn head and kohlrabi tartare with nasturtiums which followed was full of the right sort of flavour and we marched on to the absolutely excellent, beautifully cooked, generously portioned ‘fillet of cod’ with sea purslane, tiny gorgeously sweet pickles and an almost malty velouté. This may have been my favourite dish and certainly not one to miss.

  The meat course - 21 day aged sirloin and ox cheek -  too, brought with it great pleasure - finely cooked and a well of flavour further enhanced by a full-bodied beef fat sauce and crispy onions. The smoked pomme purée was of a consistency which rendered it practically drinkable

  Baron Bigod remains on the menu providing the basis for a cheese course correctly situated before the desserts. I was not terribly keen on the dish employing the cheese when I wrote about it in Blog 211. I am now a true adherent of Baron Bigod - delightful on buttered crusty bread with a covering of not over sweet honey - and enjoyed the course on offer on this more recent visit - small balls of apple gave texture and sweetness. 

  Then to the first dessert of raspberry, raspberry sorbet, crème fraiche ice cream and aerated white chocolate alongside a happy little beignet filled with raspberry jam. Finally came a generously sized banana mousse with 72% chocolate encasing it and a refreshing lime sorbet to balance the dish. A lovely way to end a fine meal.

  So, once more, back out on to the wet streets of not-at-all Hungry Harborne after a visit to an ‘exceptional’ restaurant asking myself who am I to argue with such a sound judgement. Head Chef Tom Wells had been in the kitchen and delivered one of the courses to the table and a fine job he was doing.

  Rating:- 🌞🌞