267. Pulperia Adieu.

  It came. It delighted. It has passed.

  I had a reservation for Sunday lunch at Aktar Islam’s  Pulperia which I have enjoyed many happy times before when the bomb shell dropped, firstly in the social media and then in the hoary Birmingham Post, Pulperia was to close within days - Chef Aktar was quoted as saying, “With the current climate we simply cannot operate at the standard we want without outpricing our customers. Consumer habits have changed and we feel we’ve come to the end of our journey”.

    Pulperia was born just at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and closed almost as soon as it had opened. Then, only when the trials of the lockdown were over was it able to really get moving. It was soon listed by Michelin and quite rightly too. Its remarkably good value Sunday lunches became legendary among those who know. Spectacular tasty and tender beef with all the trimmings in generous portions. A great meal at a great price. 

  And so there I was at the last ever Sunday lunch to be served in this great and good looking restaurant. Service had always been excellent and the management impressive. Thanks to all for making Pulperia what it was - its life was short but memorable. This was a restaurant to be forever mentioned in the book of the history of Birmingham cuisine. May flights of angels sing theE to thy rest.

  For this farewell I didn’t change my ways. I had a lovely lychee martini to get me in the mood for this celebration of Pulperia’s life.Then the very tasty chorizo starter served with a coleslaw and admirable heritage tomatoes.

  Then the miraculous three slices of gorgeous, delicious, perfectly tender beef - no restaurant I can think of can offer this meat so absolutely spot on -  we shall not see its like again. With the beef came a cornucopia of vegetables - roast potatoes of course, creamy cabbage and leek (my favourite accompaniment), enjoyable carrots and cauliflower in a cheese sauce, a top rate Yorkshire pudding, a light and tasty gravy and a mild zap of horseradish sauce. The portions were very generous - more than my gastrointestinal tract could cope with - I’m not complaining - but this meant I could not contemplate consuming a dessert - an old man has to know when he’s had his fill.

    Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - the hospitality industry moves on - but I feel sad at Pulperia’s passing. I always looked forward to going there. She should have died hereafter; there would have been time for such a word. But nothing is forever except The Mousetrap (theatre not cheese). I asked if I might have a menu as a souvenir and was kindly given not just a menu but the historic menu cover. Thanks and farewell.

Rating for the last time:- 🌞.

  The previous evening I had dined in Isaac’s in the Grand Hotel where I was staying in company with the labrador. This restaurant is coming along quite well. I quaffed a particularly delicious Sazerac while contemplating the menu options and settled on what turned out to be a highly delicious Burrata salad with surprisingly tasty macerated heirloom tomatoes (heritage tomato dishes have often been quite disappointing at various places I have visited in recent months - not today’s Pulperia I hasten to add) along with red onion and sweet raspberry vinaigrette which really pushed the flavours along.

    

Then to a main course of finely baked and delicious halibut with lots of caviar, a saffron velouté and Provençal vegetables. Sadly the dish was served a little cold and the vegetables didn’t have an air of robust Mediterranean peasantness I should have liked to experience but the fish entirely made up for these misfires and could easily have been eaten in isolation and have invoked great pleasure. I also had some delicious chips as an accompaniment and these were very fine chips. I‘d have them any day.

     Dessert, a sundae, was alas quite disastrous. It was a terrible cacophony of flavours - everything bar the kitchen sink lurked in that long glass. I could not finish it.

  Isaac’s is getting there. I enjoyed much of what I was served. Rating:- 🌛

266. Lamb’s Of Sheep Street

 

  A beautiful autumn afternoon. The dog and I had a quiet, slow amble along the bank of the Avon up to Holy Trinity Church having arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon a hour or so before and settled into our regular room at the Shakespeare Hotel. I thought I was going to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre that evening to revisit the latest, rather successful production of Richard III but when I looked at my tickets I discovered that I had a seat for a day later (fortunately I was staying at The Shakespeare for a couple of days) which raised the question of where I should dine this first evening.

 Returning to The Shakespeare, the answer became apparent as I passed the Michelin-listed Lamb’s of Sheep Street, two or three doors down from the hotel’s side entrance. As shown in Blog 262, Lamb’s has held a Michelin recommendation for far longer than any other restaurant in the town - continually since 2000 (during which time period many other Stratford restaurants have fallen by the wayside). The Lamb’s restaurateurs must be doing something right. I dropped in on the restaurant and reserved a table for later in the evening.

 Later in the evening … the restaurant was busy enough so that casual droppers in could not be found a table. I was given a table in the pleasant, cosy downstairs dining room. The atmosphere was absolutely spot on and the service equally pleasing - polite, efficient, patient. The menu is a little perplexing what with 2 or 3 course meals at an excellent set price, ‘fish specials’ and a quite extensive à la carte. I was in a mood for fish but the choice was skate, which I always feel to be inadequate almost anywhere it is served or a seafood linguine, but there was hake on the set menu but not on the à la carte. I enquired about the availability of the hake as an à la carte item and the waitress revealed that the hake was well and truly available.

  So as a starter I had a pleasing crayfish cocktail with sliced avocado, pink grapefruit and shredded salad leaves - pleasant and enjoyable but not particularly startling with flavour - perhaps some more citrus might have done the trick.

  The hake was cooked beautifully - a grand piece of fish treated properly by a chef who clearly knows how to cook fish. It was accompanied by well cooked basmati rice, very edible spinach and a very mild curry sauce which might have benefited from a little more heat though to be fair the dish was all about the hake and if it had been completely unaccompanied it would have lost nothing.

  For dessert I chose caramelised hazelnut parfait which was certainly not lacking in flavour nor texture. However the dish would have benefited from having an additional flavour - something sharp perhaps - to contrast with the unremitting flavour of the parfait.

  So - a good meal, far from outstanding but with some excellent elements particularly the hake. It’s nice to have a straightforward three course meal at a reasonable price and Lambs delivers just such a meal. A visitor to Stratford can do a lot worse than dine there. Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

265. The Wilderness, Atelier c/o Robert Wood, Opheem

 

  A pleasingly gastronomically mid-autumn busy week with the evenings dark once more and The Grand Hotel busy and fun, with one or two local celebrities in the Madeleine bar and, since I know them, to have a short chat with. One is a prominent local politician whom we inform that we are off to dinner at The Wilderness; he looks excited at the prospect of dining there and tells us that he loves the place but then says he only once ate there - when it was a pop-up in Dudley Street. Later at the restaurant, I told one of the front of house staff we had been talking to the politician and he said how much he loved the restaurant only to be told with enthusiasm, “Oh yes, he was here just last week”. Why can’t politicians tell the truth?you ask yourself. There’s rather a long time difference between 2016 when The Wilderness was located in Dudley Street and one week ago with it firmly situated in Warstone Lane.

  No matter - my guests and I, as would be expected, had a splendid evening at The Wilderness. Chef Alex Claridge was not to be seen - I suspected he was overseeing the pre-opening of the cocktail bar at Atelier (see below), with Robert Wood but the kitchen’s proceedings were under the excellent captaincy of Head Chef Marius Gedminas. 

  The wonders came thick and fast - firstly, the impertinence of pizza with a profoundly fabulous beef tartar. There was the delicious silliness of a lychee flavoured ‘slushy’ served appropriately in a little cardboard cup; then the sophistication of a humble lamb rib with peas and then spot on duck with fine sauce, the menu gradually winding its way to very pleasing desserts. Claridge has not lost any of his wit and cheekiness and Gedminas executes the menu faultlessly. Rating - 🌞🌞.

  The next evening was the first evening of being open to the paying public of the wonderful new cocktail bar, Atelier c/o Robert Wood, situated in the previously unknown Newhall Square off Newhall Street. At 5PM, with the mid-autumn twilight descending on the city, I arrived at this chic, welcoming, bright establishment to be greeted very nicely by Wood himself, his staff and Alex Claridge who is part of the venture. I might claim that I was the first paying customer to be served there once I was very comfortably sat in a delightful cosy chair, beating even a group of influencers, mostly in the early stages of middle age and on the edge of hipsterity, who turned up to enjoy what was available on the menu while self-consciously preening themselves. All part of the dining scene of the 2020s and amusing to watch.

  There was a menu of delightful-sounding original cocktails on offer - I started with a very pleasing light drink and then turned the page and requested the four part menu in which each drink was centred on the flavours of a different season, starting with spring and working through to winter. A nice concept and executed very splendidly. Spring (‘Harvest’) - cherry blossoms and rhubarb - worked well but summer (‘Parklife’) - the remarkably robust flavours of nettle, linden leaf and grass - was absolutely brilliant; then autumn (Wicker trug’) the season of plums, damsons, elderberries and sloes hit the right note and winter (‘Truffle pig’) brought with it a riot of Christmasness and foraging in the deepest part of the wood - English truffles and apples).

Rating- 🌞🌞

  I felt better than perhaps I should have done after drinking five cocktails in two hours having thoroughly enjoyed myself but it was time to head back to The Grand stopping en route for supper. I had curry fixed in my mind and was thinking of  Itihaas as the place to procure it but I seemed to have missed the restaurant on my return journey and so walking past the previously unvisited Nepalese-style Jo Jo Bar and  Lounge I resolved that the very large and spacious dining establishment would be my source of nourishment for the evening. There was only a party of four people besides myself in the restaurant and the two young men in the group were loud and out to impress the women accompanying them. Despite this I soldiered on bravely. The first item to arrive were poppadoms which were somewhat singed and not particularly pleasant - the accompanying tomato and onion pickle and inevitable raita were of little interest.

  I chose from a ridiculously vast menu a very edible starter of pretty decent steamed jhol momo (stuffed dumplings accompanied by an adequate tomato and sesame seed sauce) and then opted for a Kathmandu biryani which looked quite attractive cooked as it was sealed under a flat bread. But it was not good - much of the chicken inside was overcooked and there was no flavour of interest in the biryani nor the accompanying sauce nor even the raita. I struggled to eat even a fraction of the dish. This was one of the worst meals I’ve had recently - not dire by any means, I suppose, if one accepts that restaurants should be turning out, at not immodest prices, dishes with little evident enthusiasm put into preparing them and which are greatly sub-optimal. I presume that this was my first and last visit to Jo Jo Lounge.

Rating:- 0 

  Thank the Great God of Gourmands, therefore, that it was arranged that I should meet some very old (in both senses of the word) friends from around the country for a reunion dinner at the sublime Opheem the following evening.

  I’ve covered it many times and will say little more than to comment that the restaurant moves from strength to strength. Chef Aktar Islam was busy supervising the kitchen and bringing out some of the dishes and meeting his diners. The place was bursting at the seams with satisfied customers and each dish was  - unarguably - impeccable. The tasting menu is long - the sheer time involved in eating it make such menus a little exhausting - but each second spent at the table in Opheem is an investment in gastronomic pleasure. From the several spectacular appetiser snacks - they’re so good that you feel you should break out into French, so let us call them amuses gueules, through the several courses - some very familiar but often reworked to their ever increasing benefit - bhutta (grilled corn on the cob with tangy spiced butter), heritage tomatoes (rassam), aloo tuk (Chef’s  potato dish sensationalised with tamarind), infinitely precisely spiced Orkney scallop with gorgeous tamarind sauce (tisria), meen mappas (finely cooked, meaty monkfish and king prawn enhanced by coriander), pao (now evolved into a mini kebab on a tiny milk loaf), lababdar (perfectly cooked saddle of lamb with shockingly tasty slow-cooked lamb keema and an apt smoked sauce) through to the desserts and then, back in the lounge, to the inventive and gorgeous petits fours included a small and refreshing mango ‘Magnum’ and chocolate and fudge and babas and jellies, this is a feast surely as good as that which is coming out of two star restaurants. I must fit in at least one more visit before the next Michelin awards and Birmingham sees its first two star restaurant  getting the recognition it deserves. Rating - 🌞🌞🌞.