361. Spain In Bristol - Gambas and Bravas.

 

  I am invited to an acquaintance’s birthday meal annually in a rather cheerless commuter town near Bristol and it’s difficult to find somewhere reasonably priced in the area where one can stay with one’s dog. Hence I usually stay in an overpriced moderately mediocre gaff belonging to a continental chain (which promises more than it delivers) near Temple Meads and which reflects closely the decline of England’s hospitality industry as the number of little pleasures, comforts and services the hotel supplies to its guests are gradually taken away from the guests (do they think we don’t notice?) while the room rate increases rapidly. But enough of that. 

  There are a number of recommendable places at which to eat Sunday lunch in Bristol but on my annual November visits over the last couple of years I have eaten at Gambas in Cargo 2 in Wapping Wharf and a very pleasing Sunday lunch I have eaten there on both occasions. So, though I was tempted to branch out and do something different this year, I once more made a reservation for lunch at Gambas, the restaurant being within a Sunday afternoon relaxed pace walking distance from my hotel and the weather being what it is in this late autumn and doing its best to dissuade one from travelling very far to other parts of the city. The was a strong wind and frequent outbursts of charmless drizzle.

  And so, though it may be repetitive, here is another report of Sunday lunch at Wapping Wharf. The interior of Gambas, warm, atmospheric and inviting, looking particularly attractive as one enters it, with  the wind howling outside and the rain lashing Cargo 2, a conglomoration of independent businesses all located in a large two storey building constructed from containers. The lighting is just right, the warmth (including that of the welcome) is just right,and the diners are just rightand give the restaurant its identity. 

  There’s a very self-aware, flamboyant middle-aged couple, self-consciously Bohemian in appearance, both wearing fancy hats (the man determinedly ignoring ancient etiquette that men do not wear their hats at the dining table, though, I suppose, he might just have been hiding his baldness); a man in his thirties eating a bavette steak, cutting off pieces for his small daughter who was sitting by him at the counter and dressed in a pretty floral frock; a good-looking, well-healed couple in their early thirties, looking to me like a pair of young doctors on a first date, he, neatly bearded and trendily bespectacled, talking too much and she, at times, looking bemused (I considered whispering to him that he was trying too hard); everyone there well off and living the Bristol life. Through the widow, a replica of Cabot’s ship, the Matthew, could be spotted through the crepuscular mirk of the afternoon, Atmosphere. Atmosphere. Atmosphere. If I were a painter I would have run riot recording on canvass this scene with its interesting characters and I would have felt like Toulouse Lautrec at the Folies Bergère.

  There was a regular menu and a special menu made up of small plates as on previous visits; some of the items on the latter were not available, I was, I suppose, having a rather late lunch. I could not resist the salt cod croqueta which was cooked to be enticingly crispy with a nice creamy, subtly flavoured interior. The patatas bravas were, it’s true, a little less bravas than I would have liked but they were generously portioned and went well with the tender, tasty, accurately cooked 84 day aged Belmont Estate beef picanha which was aptly matched with a smooth celeriac purée and a jus which I might have liked to have had just a little more of.

   Gambas is the sister restaurant to the equally excellent Bravas in Clifton, a stone’s throw away from Clifton’s railway station and nestled comfortably in the heart of this profoundly middle class hipster community. Clifton is an upmarket version of Moseley or Kings Heath and where Stirchley or Harborne may strive to radiate shabby chicness, Clifton is head and shoulders above them both in the obvious wealth of the locals and their success in recreating an English Bohemia for the 2020s. It is clearly a socialist population living very comfortably under the Conservative government which they would no doubt be the first to complain about. 

  I lunched at Bravas in early August on a warm and bright sunny day which added to the pleasure of it all. Given the choice of eating outside or in the interior dining area I chose the latter but was sat at the window looking out so it seemed that I got the best of both worlds. I was able to sit watching what the locals were up to - though this was midweek there appeared to be so many young people lounging about, doing nothing useful apart from immersing themselves in whatever was appearing on their mobile telephone screens. Why on earth were these people not at work?

  I turned my attention away from the uselessness of youth and concentrated on the menu which had many of the same dishes as Gambas, the meals were being  as small plates, to be delivered to the table as and when they were available. In view of the heat of the day, a cold Gazpacho-like soup proved to be appropriate and was served with a remarkably generously sized piece of tuna and an egg. This was excellent and if it wasn’t authentically Spanish then it should have been. This was looking very promising. 

  I inevitably opted for patatas bravas which were very good, crispy and nicely salted and served separately from the spicy sauce. Salt-grilled wild red prawns were very well cooked with garlic and chilli and the croquetas I ordered were crispy and very tasty. Best of all, and a contender for my dish of the year,  was the fabulous, quite superb presa a la plancha, delicious beyond imagination Iberico pork with charred rosemary. A very fine dish.

  The denizens of Bristol are very fortunate in having Bravas and Gambas on their doorstep. We have Purnell’s Plates which I have seen described as serving authentic Spanish dishes but to be honest, and it pains me to write it, the restaurant really does have some way to go before matching the Bristol duo.

Rating:- 🌝🌝

360. Sublime Folium. Pensons To Close.

 

  Once more to the Jewellery Quarter, this time with an old school friend whom I have seen again only recently for the first time in almost sixty years (the world was very different then, Wilson had recently been elected as prime minister ushering in a new socialist, liberal, licentious age for British society, Lyndon Johnson was President leading the USA’s fight in the Vietnam War, Twiggy was the face of Britain, William Hartnell was Dr Who,The Beatles were gods of music, you’d have to search far and wide to locate a Chinese or Indian takeaway or restaurant, pizza restaurants were - to the best of my memory - non-existent, and the Ploughman’s lunch had only recently been invented by those charged with marketing cheese; dining out was a world away from where it is now.

  And so, with pleasant anticipation, to Folium, where dining out is effectively the antithesis of what it was in the sixties when, as a boy, I had last seen my old school friend. Folium is a restaurant where one feels one can dine without anxiety, it is smart and chic in an understated way. At Friday lunchtime it was a two person act - Ben Tesh calmly and precisely working away in the open kitchen and Lucy Hanlon equally calmly and charmingly delivering the fine fare to the diners. This is a very fine restaurant - none of the fireworks of some other upmarket city centre/Jewellery Quarter restaurants but possibly all the better for that. It’s possible to sit back and really enjoy the food there without having to shout over the music to engage one’s dining companion. Sometimes a peaceful meal is a blessing we should all be glad of. The ambience, like the food, of Folium is now finely honed. I like it.

  I chose the shorter five course menu for us. Given the quality of the food this was very good value for £80. We launched into our lunch with a familiar amuse gueule - in this case familiarity did not breed contempt. This little savoury - a smidgin of exquisite and deeply flavoured chicken liver parfait nestling in an elegant swirling burnt onion crisp summed up Ben Tesh’s cooking perfectly - accurately executed, attractive, even beautiful, but not flashy, deeply flavoursome, frequently gorgeous. 

  As usual, the in-house baked bread and cultured butter were delicious and then on to a great seasonally flavoured starter of warm savoury custard with roast chicken dashi and black winter truffle. The truffle gave everything it needed to but the dashi and the savoury custard were not beaten back by it, indeed they were enhanced. The custard had a lovely texture and the total made for a memorable dish.

  Then there was a fish course or maybe the first of two fish main courses. This dish featured some perfectly cooked turbot with Arbroath smokies. This was the least satisfactory dish of the meal with the smokies completely overpowering the subtle flavour of the turbot and it seemed a pity to allow such a fine luxury fish to fall viciim to an overbearing flavour of smoke and nothing else. Perhaps the smokies are best held back for breakfast.

  Next, a scintillating piece of glistening line-caught cod, its cooking timed exceptionally to the very second - just look at the sublime transluminescence of it in the picture below, a veritable mother of pearl sitting in the dish, bathed in a ponzu espuma and accompanied by a delightful, lusty savoury beignet - ‘fried bread’ - with a pleasing texture.

    We opted for the pleasing selection of British cheeses served with a lovely fruity homemade malt loaf, crispy homemade crackers and an unobtrusive but apt apple chutney. The  palate cleanser worked very well for me - refreshing but lacking in aggression - frozen yuzu with marshmallow and ideally textured crispy rice.

 

  The dessert proper was toasted hay ice cream (when hay is mentioned on a menu I always thing of Winteringham Fields in north east Lincolnshire and indeed Ben Tesh did once work there) ably assisted by 

miso and textured with buckwheat. Finally two familiar but fine mignardises - a wonderful sunflower and cep fudge macaroon and the signature whiskey and peat butterfly bun.

  Folium, thankfully, remains a towering feature of the Jewellery Quarter dining scene. Discrete and placid, a place to visit when a peaceful meal of remarkable dishes is required. 

Rating:- 🌝🌝

  Sadly, the day I dined with my old friend at Folium, the news was released that the Michelin starred Pensons at Tenbury Wells, where the respected chef, Chris Simpson, heads up the kitchen, 

was to close permanently on 22 December 2023 with the management there citing that the decision to do so was made after careful consideration [of] its future commercial viability”. Pensons had opened in January 2019 under the leadership of chef Lee Westcott and was awarded a Michelin star just 10 months later.  Simpson took over from Westcott at the end of 2019 and not only held on to the star but lead the restaurant to achieving the award of a Michelin Green star for sustainability in 2022.

Chris Simpson of Pensons 

358. Plus Ça Change.

 

  The West Midlands dining scene is ever evolving and necessarily so as diners find themselves as cash strapped as the days of the banking crisis and financial collapse brought on by the profligate spending of the Blair-Brown government. What goes around comes around.

 Now the post-COVID and Ukraine war-linked worldwide rise in commodities prices has seen enormous increases in the costs of all facets of the dining out industry with the result that those diners who were contemplating eating out have thought twice about it and doubly so as the younger section of that market, in well-paid jobs in modern industries which did not exist a generation or two ago and which are not demanding in the amount of effort they need to put in to them allowing them much time for leisure, have found their mortgage costs soaring so that a much larger part of their generous salaries has had to go to paying their housing costs rather than allowing them to go nightly to the Jewellery Quarter or Digbeth to quaff their negronis or espresso martinis.

  Restaurateurs and chefs have been pulled up short by the threat to their businesses in the fall off in the numbers of diners. It took a while for them to come to terms with it all. Naturally, the government was blamed for maintaining what was viewed as an excessively high VAT rate on the hospitality industry. The feeling was that if VAT was cut then there would be a significant cut in the cost of a meal to diners and they in turn would come flooding back into the less-than-full restaurants. But considering how much a cut in VAT would reduce the cost of a meal in comparison with the vast increase in prices of commodities, energy and staff costs (increased due to the COVID- and Brexit-related exodus of hospitality staff of European origin) then possibly the hope that a VAT cut would have a significant effect on encouraging diners to return to restaurants was always rather over-optimistic.

  Now, rather like the various stages of grief, chefs seem to have put aside the phases of anger and depression and (one-sided) bargaining (with the government through social media) and finally arrived at acceptance. And with acceptance comes renaissance and a sense of relief. Multi-course, expensive tasting menus are pushed into the background and suddenly everyone’s offering meals with fewer courses and at lower prices. La Grande époque culinaire des Anglais may well have reached a natural conclusion which is a death that some will not mourn. Yes we have long had ‘Modern English’ cuisine but sometimes it has been a triumph of style over substance. And much of the population has been untouched by it, if only because the price for them has been prohibitive though they may never have had the will to try it even if it had been cheaper.

  A recent edition of the Birmingham Post has published a report that Kray Tredwell (sadly the author of the piece failed to spell the chef’s surname correctly) of 670 Grams, recently visited by me, is tired of tasting menus and all that frippery, and instead is going to cook the sort of food he enjoys cooking. Which I suppose begs the question of whether a chef should ever cook food that he doesn’t enjoy cooking.

 Tredwell will introduce menus based on small plates (yes, this is the era of the small plate it seems, everyone’s doing it). Formality in dining out takes a further step backwards I think. But Tredwell steadfastly keeps his eye on his Michelin status - and why shouldn’t he? - as these are not just any sort of plates - he is planning beef tartare with an oyster emulsion, Wagyu rib with KT pickle, shrimp with kimchi and cured carrot and cured monkfish with date and tomato wafer. There will be side plates of beef-fat potatoes with smoked vinegar and Mayan Gold-roasted onions in beef garum and desserts are to include caramel tart and fig cake. Which all sounds very alluring and doubtless in line with Tredwell’s inventive and often ingenious creations with which we are already familiar.

  Elsewhere, Glynn Purnell has a Spanish-style restaurant serving ‘plates’ in Edmund Street and a ‘plates’ restaurant in Coventry, a reborn ‘bistro’, and we may soon expect ‘plates’ from Alex Claridge in his soon-to-be-opened second restaurant presumable in the former Atelier. Luke Tipping is offering short lunch menus at Simpsons and we must see what Brad Carter is planning if his sojourn in Evesham comes to an end at the end of the year. Everywhere there’s revolution in the air for Birmingham and West Midlands diners.

  I have two upcoming reservations for the new Six By Nico which will be the Birmingham branch of the chain of that name and which was originally founded in Glasgow by Nico Simeone in 2017. The chain now has branches in various British cities as well as Dublin and its fare may be considered as falling into the affordable range which fits in nicely with what I have discussed above - £39 for a six course tasting menu with an optional £30 wine flight. The restaurant opens on 30 November and the opening menu, which is changed every six weeks, is to be a ‘chippie tea’, as shown in the following illustration - 

Nico Simeone

  Whether the dishes will be more a triumph of style over substance - prettied-up soupçons of cheap ingredients, I will no doubt soon discover. Still this is an interesting development in opening fine (-looking) food to the masses in these times when prices are high and even Good Food Guide inspectors are moaning (as in a recent article) at the number of restaurants charging well over £100 for tasting menus which all contain the same predictable ingredients - chalk stream trout, truffles, wagyu and so on. How much of a problem will this be for the city’s established upper echelon restaurants or is it just an irrelevance since they will always have a culinary elite population of prospective diners ready to stump up the cash for those more special ingredients and styles of cooking which the elite restaurants offer? 

  It’s telling that the first menu seeks to appeal to basic English working class food enthusiasts by serving dishes which might originate in a working man’s fish and chip shop (by the way, native Brummies have never called them ‘chippies’) and interesting that Simeone, or whoever is responsible for the menus in the dining establishments attached to his name, should feel that the chain’s Glasgow roots should be emphasised by the serving of a dessert on the theme of the deep fried Mars Bar. This is an alien dish to Birmingham - I’ve never seen any being offered anywhere before here in the West Midlands - but if Brummies are prepared to embrace Sushi or Vindaloo then I suppose Deep fried Mars Bar may not prove as revolting to the city’s diners as it ought to.

  I look forward to my cut price meal if only to assuage my curiosity. But there is some preprandial doubt - a low cost six course meal is almost unappealing when I consider that a good plate of fish - fine cod, please note - recently costed me about £17 in Weston-super-Mare’s excellent Papa’s, a fish and chip shop for all classes. Mushie peas were a startling £3.50 for a small tub of them. In comparison I am nervous at the thought of being served the inferior coley in my ‘chippy six course tea’. Still, I’m game to see what’s going on.

Excellent cod and chips at Papa’s but at a price.

The seaside atmosphere of Papa’s - 

359. Dining With The Faultys At The Council House.

  

There should be theatre involved when dining out but not, we hope, drama. Certainly dinner should not be a tragedy, or for that matter, a comedy to any great degree but a chef who can inject wit and a sense of humour into his fine dishes will usually be among the more successful of his profession. 

  While restaurant dramas are more often set in the kitchen than the dining room, one salle de manger, which has become familiar to several generations is that situated in the fictitious hotel restaurant, Fawlty Towers, allegedly located in 1980s Torquay, which is presided over by the misanthropic snob and hotelier Basil Fawlty, his domineering and long suffering wife Sybil, both unably assisted by their waiter, the hapless Manuel who originated in Barcelona.

  More than a decade ago a stage version of the comedy, or perhaps it should be named a restaurant version, of the programme was introduced in which diners pay to eat in a theatre or somewhere else suitable to be served a meal by the awful trio.

  When I saw that Faulty Towers The Dining Experience was coming to Birmingham for a limited run and that it was to be staged and served in the rather grand banqueting hall of the Council House, then I resolutely hurried to bag myself a seat at the table, so to speak.

  Everything kicked off in the bar area where Basil had his first opportunities to berate Manuel for his errors of English-Spanish misinterpretation and then the diners moved into the marbled dining room for the two hour performance which included vignettes of some of the famous scenes of the television programme. The first food to appear were the delicious little brioches rolls which Manuel largely threw at the diners and then , served by professional waitresses, delicious tomato and basil soup which was much better than I might have expected though a little cool, an inevitable result of the shenanigans taking place around us. At one stage, as the hilarity increased, the chef’s dentures were located in one diner’s bowl by Mr Faulty as he prowled around the banqueting suite conversing with his guests.

  After Manuel had sung “Viva Espagne” whilst standing on a table, Sybil had had several opportunities to berate her unappealing husband, Basil had attempted to place a horse racing bet without Sybil becoming aware of it and Manuel had paraded Basil, his pet ‘Siberian hamster’, around the dining room, the Faultys and their assistant took their bows to well-deserved applause and the meal proceeded with a wonderful chicken supreme, delicious beyond expectation, succulent and tasty with the subtle flavour of tarragon and accompanied by an accurately cooked fondant potato and nicely textured carrot. This was really very, very good.

 

  Nor was the blueberry crumble cheesecake in any way disappointing. This had been a great meal with good entertainment and all in a grand setting.