283. Winter Begins - Atelier, The Wilderness

 

  A second visit to Robert Wood’s sublime Atelier. My dining companion with whom I would be moving on to The Wilderness, was mesmerised by the place, “Where did you find out about this?” he sighed wondrously. I tried to look sybillesque (in a male sought of way) as only a great and wise wizard and fount of all knowledge might be entitled to look, “Oh, you know ….” I tailed off. “E mails, the internet, somewhere like that.

  Wood presented his new winter menu printed on a lovely Christmas card-style idealised picture of the  good looking building which is home to Atelier. I was pleased that there are now also nibbles to accompany the drinks. My companion chose Slask, apparently one of 30 Finnish words for snow, slask being the term applied to rather slush-like snow, and he received I suppose what might be a very upmarket, pleasingly alcoholic and hyper-sophisticated and adult version of the slush puppy. I chose a cocktail which actually looked like a drink - Gifts From Persia, “saffron, sweet lemon, gold, franckin ensemble and myrrh” - and I was delighted with my choice. I think we worked our way through a couple more each of the items and then headed for Warstone Road looking forward to finding out what delights Alex Claridge’s restaurant had in store for us.

  I noticed that Alex Claridge himself was not there for more than about an hour and Head Chef Marius Gedminas was on holiday so one of the sous chefs was in charge of the kitchen that evening. The first course was Big ‘Mac’ Flatbread which was another manifestation of the restaurant’s beef tartar. The bread was served cold and apparently should have been warmed - it certainly seemed to need to be - and was taken back to the kitchen for the bread to be warmed. It certainly improved the dish. 

   Then lamb’s sweetbreads were served with nice crispy coatings but they did seem slightly overcooked. Next came trout and then ‘seaweed salad’ which has to be an acquired taste and unfortunately neither of us had acquired it. I do not think it enhanced the menu which was proving to be remarkably challenging. 

  Mutton served with carrot was nicely cooked but quite heavily seasoned with what tasted like white pepper and the accompanying keema cruffin contained very little keema and really the cruffin (a croissant-muffin hybrid) didn’t work for either of us and might have been better substituted by a little pie or pithivier.

  We paid an extra £25 each for some finely cooked wagyu and the meal closed with a fine little cacao tart with vanilla ice cream. I assume the presence of a tartlet in the final course was the reason for presenting a different form of pastry in which to place the keema in the lamb course. The Wilderness rightly challenges its diners with food it serves but perhaps this particular meal presented one or two more challenges than I felt up to dealing with.

282. Autumn Ends, Winter Begins.

 

    I had hoped to visit Shropshire or The Cotswolds during November but with various trade unions trying to bring down the government by fomenting strikes by their various members and particularly in the railway industry, arranging travel even around the West Midlands counties was fraught with uncertainty.

  Hence I found myself roaming less widely and once more taking a three day break in Birmingham itself, which Time Out has recently judged to be the second best place to visit in Britain (after, rather improbably, Eastbourne of all places). I had reserved a table for dinner at Orelle several weeks ago to see what an evening experience there, looking out over the near and distant city lights, would be like.

  And quite spectacular it was. The restaurant itself was fully booked, a lot of smartly dressed diners out to soak up the upmarket atmosphere in this pre-Christmas time. There was little evidence of the )Cost of Living Crisis’ here on the 24th floor of the recently opened building on Colmore Row. No-one that evening looked as though they were choosing between ‘eating and heating’.

  The service as usual was close to immaculate and the meal got off to a fine start with a couple of tasty gougéres and a generous amount of bread with beautifully crispy crust and butter.

  To start I chose what turned out to be a somewhat subdued ham hock terrine riven through with black pudding and served what I took to be pickled vegetables. There was very little flavour in the terrine - it seemed rather half-hearted - and there was no contrasting sweet-acid flavour in the vegetables. There was more salt than I would have wanted and it was all rather dismal.

  My main course of pork loin and pork belly was hardly any more exciting. True, the helping of pork was. generous - more than I could manage - but its temperature on arrival was cool and again there was no contrast in the rest of the dish to the meat itself apart from some tasteless halved small plums  Eating it was just going through the motions. I was becoming depressed. I thought my spirits would be raised by the appearance of the dessert trolley. However, it did not appear. I was simply asked what I should like from the menu and the ordered Paris-Brest was duly delivered unadorned and unloved and not very much enjoyed for that matter. There was little left to do but pay the bill and head back to The Grand for an early night. Still, the lit-up city and the bright lights of the restaurant itself had been pleasurable so the experience, though expensive, had not entirely been a failure.

  In its recommendations of what to do in Birmingham, Time Out recommended starting the day coffee at Waylands Yard (though, to be precise, it does not specifically recommend eating breakfast there) which is  conveniently just around the corner from The Grand Hotel, in Bull Street. Why should I not follow that advice? I did so and was pleased to find a spacious dining area, not too busy at 9.30AM, helpful and charming serving staff and an interesting menu. Less pleasingly, about 10AM, the place filled up with hipster types, there to buy takeaway coffees (can’t they make their own at a fraction of the price?) but by then I had consumed my chosen breakfast, whether or not that was a specific Time Out recommendation, 

  The breakfast was excellent. There was a fine pork/beef sausage, two supremely perfect poached eggs, excellent crispy, spicy house baked beans and a hash brown - tasty and substantial - plus sweet little grilled cherry tomatoes and a couple of good slices of sourdough toast. If Time Out was not specifically recommending the breakfast it should have been.

  The day was just beginning and in the evening cocktails at the sublime Atelier and dinner at The Wilderness lay ahead, of which more….

280. Purnell And Roux Revisited; The Menu.

 

  How can our restaurants survive the continual slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? COVID, cost of living crisis, plague of locusts, river Rae turned to blood, plague of frogs and so on. What hard times these are for those who have chosen, no matter how misguidedly, to set up a catering business and who hope to stay in business. Well, one way at present, seems to be by holding collaborations with visiting, preferably celebrity chefs. Having only the previous week basked in the sublime cooking of  Lisa Goodwin Allen (by which I mean she was doing the cooking not that she was being cooked) at Simpsons I now found myself, very willingly, at Purnell’s preparing too eat the fruits of a collaboration between Glynn Purnell and Michel Roux Jr, true, not for the first time but on this occasion without the additional input of Tom Kerridge.

  Glynn Purnell’s latest twist on his panisse (now spiced carrot) appetiser was excruciatingly delicious and in the expression of Brummie Asian flavour recalled one of his Great British Menu winning dishes - the legendary and much plagiarised monkfish masala. Roux’s Belgian endive tart with mimolette cheese seemed a little anaemic in flavour in comparison. Purnell provided an excellent starter of carpaccio of Herefordshire beef with explosively tasty charred red wine octopus which really made the dish and it was freshened with a chive crème fraiche. Roux gave us (unplanned) Scottish halibut with smoked eel and what seemed like a completely unnecessary nori sable biscuit. Perhaps the biscuit had been planned to add more texture to the scallop dish which had been planned but which had had to be abandoned when insufficient quantities of the shellfish were not obtainable for that evening. The halibut was satisfactory but hardly exciting and was mine just a little bit over?

  Upwards and onwards. Purnell served up fine venison with an emphasis on parsnips as an accompaniment.  This was perfectly satisfactory, though I had enjoyed more Lisa Goodwin Allen’s venison dish served at the Simpsons collaboration the week before. Glynn Purnell’s dish was fine but not thrilling.

  Roux was responsible for the dessert which was mysteriously presented in cloches. This was a chocolate Balvenie whisky tart served with coffee crémeux and chantilly cream and an unnecessary shot of Balvenie whiskey. The flavour was brutally strong and the pastry far from perfect. The course was not a great success. 

 

    The mignardises, in contrast, were very pleasurable and the diners enjoyed the two man stand-up routine from the two notable chefs. I was pleased to have bought the semi-autobiography of Michel Roux’s father, Albert Roux, and to have him sign it for me. 

  Though a frequent visitor to Stratford to see what the latest travesty of Shakespeare the RSC has come up with, I have to say that my visits to the cinema are now just about once a decade - the last visit was, I think, around 2014 to see Macbeth. The news this year of the release of a movie with excellent actors - masterly, anxiety-inducing Ralph Fiennes, the very funny Nicholas Hoult and Anna Taylor Joy, the personification of attitude, centred on fine dining and associated menace put me in a state of intense expectation for several months until its recent release. 

  I was unable to go to the excellent Everyman cinema at the Mailbox on its opening night as it clashed with the previously discussed Lisa Goodwin Allen - Simpsons collaboration but I made sure that I was at the matinee performance the following day. How luxurious cinemas are now. Admittedly the performance was not well attended - only 4 or 5 other people were in the audience - but I had an excellent seat and was served coffee and a very reasonable hot dog (alas the sausage was a frankfurter and not a sound British-style pork sausage) and I settled in to view what Chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes) was serving up to his guests which, needless to say, was more than they bargained for.

  Nicholas Hoult was a fine foodie delivering some great lines convincingly and making the food-loving audience member grin and cringe in equal measure; surely even the most thick-skinned couldn’t help but recognise something of themself in Hoult’s character, Tyler. Fine gastronomy turned to uncomfortable doubt when Chef served his diners a course of butter without bread and after that the meal became something the average Tripadviser would feel they had a good reason to publish a moaning review about. Chef Slowik’s restaurant, Hawthorne, served several dishes devised by San Francisco-based chef Dominique Crenn (who describes as a creator of poetic culinaria). Tyler certainly enjoyed them. Perhaps Crenn should be sought out to come to engage in a collaboration here in the most exciting place to dine in Britain and see what happens (hopefully nothing like the outcome of The Menu).

  I was delighted to be able to obtain a poster of The Menu being sold on E Bay - it will be a fine addition to my food art collection and as I’m sure The Menu is already on its way to being a cult classic, a likely investment in that particular form of art.

281. Slow ‘N’ Low At The Wilderness.

 

  The highlight of this year’s Ludlow Food Festival (see Blog 264), beyond doubt, was the now traditional Fire and Feast event held inside the castle itself on Saturday evening and the highlight of the event was the mesmerisingly, stupendously delicious truffled beef prepared and served up by Andy Stubbs. As he circulated to talk with the diners he chatted and confirmed that he was close to opening a restaurant in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter after years of running his slow cooking, live fire street food business from a mobile stand at venues such as the Digbeth Dining Club and food festivals. He began his business in 2013 after being made redundant from his previous non-food related employment and eventually successfully crowd-funded the establishment though he said he had had problems along the way.

  But now the restaurant is close to its opening date and to fill in till then Alex Claridge, who told me that he had known Stubbs from the days when he was doing a Nomad ‘pop-up’ himself in Kings Heath’s Garden Cafe, had offered Stubbs the use of The Wilderness facilities on days when the restaurant would not normally be open for service. And that meant that an opportunity existed for a very promising alternative Sunday lunch.

  The menu was made up of small dishes with a couple of larger ones. I kicked off with an unusual and powerfully flavoured Rita From Austin cocktail, the nature of which can be guessed from the list of ingredients - poblano peppers, fresh citrus, jalapeño and  mezcal. If that didn’t set me up in the right frame of mind for what was to come then nothing would.

  After a little debate, I settled on the pair of smoked brisket and ox cheek chilli tacos with cheese, pickled onion and lime. The meat flavour was very robust and the pancake-like tacos on which the meat rested made a comfortable bed for the strong taste sweetened by the little pieces of pickled onion and livened up with lime. This was a dish which announced that Andy Stubbs had arrived, was passionate about what he did and that he was going to assail Birmingham with his style of food. To Birmingham’s benefit of course.

  The other dishes of my order came out together, a stupendous ex-dairy short rib, the meat falling from the bone (well near enough anyway) with fresh and textural ‘kraut slaw’, delicious house smoked sausage served with a sweet and pertinent chilli de Arbol BBQ sauce and cosily Sunday lunch-style pleasing ‘Beef fat spuds’ with crême fraiche and herbs (these are how potatoes are served to the good souls who have led a good life and made it to Heaven).

  It’s rather nice sitting in The Wilderness for Sunday lunch with the friendly, familiar faces of The Wilderness staff bringing one exuberantly tasty, solid, powerfully flavoured, unpretentious food to eat at a comfortable pace. I find I have just written myself into making another reservation for a repeat Sliw ‘n’ Low lunch very soon.