249. Black Cod.

 

  After a second visit to Lulu Wild in Brindley Place it’s hard not to conclude that this is one of my favourite restaurants in the city. Lunching with a companion, we were very rapidly made comfortable and at ease in this splendidly exciting modern East Asian restaurant with impeccable front of house service. I had previously visited the restaurant by myself and enjoyed enormously a range of dim sum and we therefore chose the Wild platter, eight different pieces of dim sum, randomly picking four pieces each and both of us enthusing about every mouthful.

  My companion was delighted with his delicious-looking prawn stir fry but I was overwhelmed by my astonishingly superbly cooked miso marinated black cod which was devised by the chef, Nobu Matsuhisa - it was not a second over or under - and thoroughly delicious. A luxurious pairing with accurately cooked asparagus made this one of my favourite, probably the favourite, fish dish of the year so far. We also enjoyed sharing a bowl of egg fried rice.

  For dessert I chose matcha and passion fruit sponge - an excellent light and tasty piece of pleasure - sitting on lime infused vanilla crumble and served with honey and raspberry compote and vanilla sorbet. It was a pleasing end to the meal especially consumed as it was with a paired Yozushu Kodakara (a liquor made with yuzu from Kodakara prefecture) with soda which was pleasingly refreshing.

  Lulu Wild is a fine restaurant based on my two visits there. Both the food and the service appear to be consistently excellent. It is currently on my list of favourite Birmingham restaurants. The Executive Chef is Malaysian-born Derrick Chen who worked previously at the Michelin-starred Hakkasan in London.

  Elsewhere in Brindley Place, it seems that the site of the former Michelin-listed Edmund’s where first Andy Waters and then Didier Philpott were head chefs and afterwards Maribel where Richard Turner was Head Chef for twelve months, and which has been closed since the start of the first lockdown is to become  an establishment called The Gorilla Cafe, “the place for lunch, brunch and bicycle repair”. I give it six months.

  Finally, after a visit to Birmingham  a few weeks ago by a Hollywood actor, Tom Cruise, who stayed at The Grand Hotel and famously had his terrifyingly expensive motor car pinched whilst it was parked outside the hotel and also visited Asha’s where, it is claimed, he thought the curry was so good he ordered, like Oliver Twist, a second helping, a second Hollywood film star, Johnny Depp, fresh from winning a £9 million court case against his former wife, stayed in the Grand on the same night as Lucy The Labrador and myself were there. Again, like Cruise, his hosts thought it appropriate to entertain him with ‘a curry’ and, it is reported, a restaurant on Broad Street, Varanasi, hosted him and his entourage at a cost of £50,000 with him leaving staff “a large tip”. Birmingham is certainly beginning to be the place to be seen.

  The staff at The Grand were very discreet about Depp’s presence at the hotel but I became aware of the hotel’s celebrity guest when we were leaving the building only to be greeted by a large group of Depp enthusiasts, mainly young women, waiting for anyone coming out of the building just in case it was their hero. The group told me for whom they were waiting and patted and fussed the dog. Previously I had thoroughly enjoyed my Full English Breakfast served in Isaac’s restaurant which is once again brought out fresh from the kitchen rather than being left for the customer to serve themself from a buffet. Each item on the plate was delicious except that the homemade ketchup was too acidic for my taste. The scrambled egg was particularly fine and the bacon and sausage were, er, grand.

248. Folium.

     Folium is a very fine restaurant in Caroline Street off the picturesque St Paul’s Square in which the gorgeous eponymous Georgian church where my maternal grandparents were married exactly 100 years ago is situated. The only problem with location is the walk from the city centre to the Jewellery Quarter which means having to cross over Great Charles Street where the pedestrian bridge is vile and really needs someone in the council to sort out the ugly, filthy monstrosity.

 Still when you get to smart, modern, bright Folium the horrors of the walk there are soon forgotten and an excellent welcome is extended to the diner. Chef Ben Tesh can be viewed creating his art in the open kitchen - quietly, methodically, precisely, productively. It was in August 2016 that I first experienced Tesh’s original, sometimes challenging, always tasty food with its overwhelmingly excellent and varied flavours. I still have the first menu and dream that one day I will visit Folium, perhaps for a ‘Greatest Hits’ menu, and eat again his extraordinary Potato porridge with coffee grinds and toasted yeast, a Marmite of a dish if ever there were one.

  But let us travel forward to now - that is - June 2022. The dishes are as extraordinary and precisely prepared as ever. Firstly, gorgeous amuses gueles in the form of wonderfully tasty, pretty golden smoked cod roe sitting like little pebbles on larger stones with more yellow at the base in the form of a Mayan gold potato. Then supremely delicious lamb tartare with English wasabi and then more sturdy flavours in an appetiser mocking in a happy way the flavours of oyster. Already the meal had established itself as being about striving to entertain and please the palate in as many ways as possible and succeeding in that goal.

  The first starter was a delightful savoury custard lifted further by roast chicken dashi and truffle, then char hitting home with raw vinegar and radish and then a very impressive asparagus with Exmoor caviar from the only establishment in this country, so I was told, that farms sturgeon

.

The fish course (not that fish hadn’t already made an appearance) was Cornish turbot cooked in beef fat served with baked potato butter. Alas this dish didn’t really chime with me, the texture of the fish was not quite to my taste and the baked potato flavour of the butter was so powerful and overwhelming that I could not pick up the flavour of the turbot which seems a great pity for such a luxury ingredient. As I wrote above, sometimes Ben Tesh’s dishes can be challenging.

  I enjoyed the Guinea fowl which might be described as a piece of Guinea fowl sausage and the cep alioli was excellent. I forgot to photograph the dish but it was visually neat and pleasing. 

  The predessert of frozen horseradish with sorrel was delicious and it gave me so much pleasure I felt it should be a part of my normal daily diet. The dessert of sunflower cream with birch syrup was equally enjoyable - light and refreshing and generous with the flavours it imparted. The meal rounded off with some very happy petit fours - an utterly delightful tiny chocolate tart with cep caramel and a wonderful little bun with a whisky cream surmounted by little butterfly wings.

  I hope Folium continues to prosper. These have been difficult years for various reasons almost since  the restaurant opened. Tesh’s dishes are as adventurous and imaginative, though obviously not as flamboyant, as that to be found in the Jewellery Quarter’s other notable restaurant, Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness. Both are extremely talented and passionate chefs and both make enormous contributions to realising Birmingham’s gastronomic scene as a force to be reckoned with.

250. The Downfall Of The Hotel Restaurant.

 

  I was mildly amused when reading between the lines, as a great between the lines reader, and also not being averse to occasional schadenfreude, to read a recent Blog of a middle aged Birmingham food blogger, termed in these modern times - an influencer - with an apparent self image of being a sophisticated 17 year-old who takes pride in being invited to notable restaurants whilst being generally inebriated, that the writer seemed not to have been invited to an opening of a new hotel restaurant here in Birmingham. Rather bitterly he wrote that he was, “curious to try it” but that a friend had already informed him that what was served was “just a curry….”.

  I look forward to our influencer’s own impression of the recently opened Indus restaurant at the Park Regis hotel. The Influencer refers cynically to the restaurant’s by-line, “inspired by a love of India” and makes a comment about the way chefs who are brought to the UK from abroad are employed to produce dishes of little significance which hardly reflect any love of anywhere. Which may or may not be the case. However I do feel an inclination to visit this new restaurant out of curiosity and also with the history of dining in the city in mind.

  In the latter part of the 19th century and first decades of the twentieth the smart restaurants in which to eat were located in hotels. In earlier times those who ate away from home dined in religious institutions, then inns, taverns, coffee houses and clubs. Even before the French Revolution, as we know, Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau opened the first modern restaurant in Paris around 1765 or 1766,  Le Grand Véfour was opened by Antoine Aubertot as the Café de Chartres in the Palais Royale in 1784 and as French aristocrats were dispossessed or even done away with by the revolutionaries, their domestic staff, including their talented cooks, needed new employment and the development of restaurants grew as these workers took up jobs in them. In 1786 the Provost of Paris issued a decree giving restaurants official status and in the same year Antoine Beauvilliers opened the magnificently luxurious La Grande Taverne de Londres in Paris.

  In 1815 Marie-Antonin Câreme, whose career started in pâtisserie, came to London to work as chef to the Prince Regent. There he published the first of his books which would lead to the domination of English dining by French grande cuisine as the culinary style served in dining establishments of quality in England throughout the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, an early English food critic (see Blog 151), was regularly referring to dinners eaten in the fine restaurants located in London’s notable hotels and firstly at the Savoy and then at the Ritz, L’Escoffier was entrenching French cuisine as the mainstay of English dining out for decades to come. 

  In provincial Birmingham, restaurants located in the city’s smarter hotels were often the places of choice to dine out in style. Even when English dining out had moved on through the period of rationing during the Second World War and socialist austerity which followed it, the era of the post-rationing culinary nadir and the rise of Mediterranean and then south Asian cuisine, good quality hotel restaurants often provided the most likely places to find good British food. Thus in the first red Michelin Guide Great Britain And Ireland Guidebook published in 1974, three of the seven listed Birmingham area restaurants were located in hotels most notable of which was the Burlington Hotel near New Street Station. The Burlington was listed by Michelin from 1974 until 1979.

  The Plough And Harrow’s restaurant had a Michelin listing from 1987 to 1990 and at the time many would have said it was the best place to dine in the city. Not surprisingly perhaps the Head Chef between 1987 and 1990 was none other than Andreas Antona who went on to open the Michelin-starred Simpsons in Kenilworth, moving it later to Edgbaston where it retained its Michelin star (see Blog 249). Chef Andy Waters also worked at The Plough and Harrow before going on to work with Antona at Simpsons. The pictures below depict the hotel itself and a visit from the then distinguished Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Randal Brew, in 2007.

  

  Perhaps the most successful of all was the restaurant of the Swallow Hotel, (now The Marriott), called Sir Edward Elgar which was probably as close as it possibly could have been to being Birmingham’s first Michelin-starred restaurant. This restaurant was listed by Michelin from 1991 to 2002 and during that time in May 1998, its Chef de Cuisine, Jonathan Harrison, was given the role of preparing the menu for the world leaders attending the G8 Summit when it was held in Birmingham. The meal was served in the Pavilion of the Botanical Gardens. Harrison left his job at The Swallow in 1999 but during his time there, in 1993, he was awarded the Roux Diners Scholarship. Prior to that, his predecessor, Idris Caldora, had been runner-up in the National Chef of the Year awards. Sir Edward Elgar restaurant was listed by The Good Food Guide rather late in the 2001 edition and in doing so added to Birmingham’s then total of 7 restaurants mentioned by the Guide as one of the two highest scorers, the other being another hotel restaurant - Number 282 At The Hyatt which received a Michelin listing for just one year only in 2001. It’s worth noting that there was also a second restaurant at The Swallow, more relaxed, cheaper and smaller, bistro called Langtry’s.

More recent photographs of Jonathan Harrison and Idris Caldora -

  It may be said therefore that Birmingham’s hotels played an important role in providing sites for good quality dining for many decades up until the beginning of the 21st century when dining out began to change dramatically as chefs and restaurateurs chose to open their own restaurants without ties to a hotel (though in London of course the great hotels are still homes to highly regarded restaurants). As the most talented chefs began to work in dedicated restaurants so they were not available to work in and maintain the highest standards in hotel restaurants and so hotels became far less important as places to dine out unless they served as convenient in-house places to eat for resident guests.

  The steady decline of the provision of food in hotels in Birmingham in the last twenty years is sad in many ways. Looking at some of the previous great names it seems that food is now just an afterthought to be provided for the peckish resident rather than the lover of gastronomy. The now Best Western Plough and Harrow gives this advice - “For lunch and dinner guests can order from Deliveroo and consume it on the premises in one of the lounges, bars, guest room or al fresco! Hotel will provide crockery, cutlery & condiments upon request” How the mighty have fallen.

  The once towering (literally and metaphorically) Swallow (Marriott) offers a range of burgers, nachos, ‘chips n’ dips’, fish and chips, steak and so on. I don’t expect that the Chef from there will be organising the food for the banquet the next time the G8 drop in on Birmingham.

  I dined at Isaac’s in The Grand Hotel yesterday evening. The dishes were reasonable with pleasing choices and the atmosphere and setting make dining there a worthwhile experience. I enjoyed myself but I still think that The Grand needs a grand restaurant with fine dishes rather than, or perhaps as well as, the fries and steaks and burgers of Isaac’s.

  My starter was spicy and enjoyable - Florida cocktail with meaty chunks of lobster and crayfish and shocks of heat and citrus and the bitterness of chicory. Very good and quite clever.

  Then very pleasingly baked halibut - again meaty, tasty and well seasoned. This was served with cheering little clams, caviar and saffron sauce with Provençale vegetables which again were well cooked but I should have liked some pervading garlic and more powerful tomato flavours running through them.

In place of a formal dessert I thoroughly enjoyed a ‘shake’ (milkshake) peanut butter ice cream with lots of honeyed peanuts in it. Great fun and very tasty. 

  It was a very enjoyable meal and Isaac’s is now an important part of The Grand and there’s some excellent cooking going on there but I’d love to eat something in a room which recalls the hotel’s Victorian origins both in decor, atmosphere and cuisine.

  As for the Influencer’s thoughts, at the head of this piece, on a new hotel restaurant, Indus, which may or may not have some quality, the knowledge that it exists tells me that I should at least give it a try. 

  

  

  

247. Simpsons’ Platinum Jubilee Tasting Menu.

 

  Simpsons is in great form. And very astutely a very limited run of Jubilee Tasting Menus are on offer. And being the first person to arrive for lunch on the first day of the special menu I can claim to be the first member of the paying public to have tasted it. My own Jubilee claim to fame. And in the presence of culinary royalty (see below) it was altogether rather fine occasion.

  Two cracking good starters to jiggle up the jubilee tastebuds, one cheesy and eggy, the other a fine Coronation chicken served on a leaf of lettuce. Then along comes a finely drinkable Pimms Royale and Simpson’s signature bread with Ampersand butter and then down to the serious stuff.

    An exquisite plate of cured Chalk Stream trout with caviar and oyster and pickled cucumber. Then perfectly cooked Brixham turbot with lobster, slices of courgette and a sublime champagne sauce. Luxuries all fit for a reigning monarch or an ordinary old punter like me out to enjoy himself at this Jubilee time.

  The meat course was so very enjoyable. It was Cornish lamb, again cooked beautifully, tender and tasty, with green and white asparagus, wonderful morels, Jersey Royals cooked to a perfect texture and peas all with a fine sauce and, as there should be, mint. Immaculate.

  Desserts were finely judged - ‘Cherries Jubilee’ followed by the wholly enjoyable ‘Platinum lemon trifle’ which was the spot-on choice of dessert for the occasion. Silvers of gold, subtle bursts of ginger, precise lemon flavour. A trifle of distinction. Afterwards coffee with three excellent petit fours. For once (well it was a special meal) I let rip with the four wine pairings, being drawn in by the Stopham Estate Pinot Grigio 2018 which I always enjoy and the Chapel Down brut from Kent was lovely with the glitzy desserts.

  I last visited Simpsons a year ago and was not particularly happy but everything was in order, finely cooked, finely served, and now at last, I am in love with Simpsons.

  Finally, who was that discreetly in the corner, Chef Patron Andres Antona and Chef Clare Smyth? Apparently so.

246. Alex Claridge’s Menu That Was.

 

  Two evenings after being among the privileged dozen to experience Alex Claridge’s Menu That Never Was (see Blog 245) I was back at The Wilderness to enjoy, I hoped, Alex Claridge’s current Menu That Is (or Menu That Was depending on how soon after this piece was written the reader is casting their eyes over it). There were old favourites and new.

  I often express an opinion that I could quite happily enjoy an extended evening of nothing more than canapés in a restaurant somewhere and the three amuse gueules served at The Wilderness confirmed how much I would like my canapé-only fantasy to be realised. These were absolutely first rank - the little pastry filled with wagyu tartare and Comte cheese I had enjoyed just 2 evenings before, a scintillating crab XO doughnut and a delightfully flavoured celeriac enhanced by the turn and taste of hazelnut

  However my fantasy was soon revealed as foolish as more substantial courses appeared on the table before me.

  Firstly pleasingly mildly flavoured mackeral with another blanco and finger lime, light and fitting for early summer. Then more fish in the shape of delicately cooked cod, perfect in texture, precisely balanced with a broth studded by little pieces of iberico pork. Then a return visit to Claridge’s The Carrot 2022 which is one of those dishes which makes the diner stopping questioning the need for courses based on a single vegetable.

  And then the meat arrived. I paid a £25 supplement for the wagyu beef tartare extra dish. This is a lot of money but it is a great dish and very much worth investing in for the pleasure it brings. Such joy has to be tasted. Then back to the regular menu with Lavinton Lamb Caesar - a well-cooked loin with belly bacon

decorated in chess-board format. A work of art for various reasons.

    Then comes a dish of beautifully cooked Cornish duck breast served with unobtrusive chicory and blood orange sauce. I would say that it would be hard to better showcase the flavours in this dish.

    Next the by now familiar but always welcome Ch-ch-changes, the mini-banana-flavoured white chocolate banana that isn’t and then a very welcome dessert using up end-of-season northern rhubarb to delicately flavour mascarpone with texture derived from puffed buckwheat. Soothing and delicious. Finally the well-judged and delightful chocolate dessert - ‘ceremonial cacao, 25 year old balsamic, vanilla’ and finally, finally it’s  Hotlips again,

  It is not possible to understand Alex Claridge’s passion for his work until one sits in The Wilderness witnessing the intense processes involved in producing these remarkable dishes and to listen to chef’s own words about the road, with its many potholes, that has led him so far. It is all very impressive and admirable.

  I try not to presume to give an opinion about how influencers (which after all is basically what the Michelin Guide inspectors are) should be rating the restaurants they visit but it is preposterous that The Wilderness has not thus far been awarded a Michelin star when one compares it with other restaurants.

  It appears that there are plans for the restaurant to move around autumn-time to another site in the Jewellery Quarter which is exciting but a little sad given the history of the various restaurants that have served meals in the building (see Blog 157) and The Wilderness’ own extended time there but perhaps a new site will finally bring those who should know better than me to their senses.