421. Back To The Jewellery Quarter (4) Albatross Death Cult.

 

  It would be wrong to say that Alex Claridge’s Albatross Death Cult has not had an impressive effect on me. It is really very, very good (litotes). Head Chef Marius Gedminas was there at the pass (though to be fair the whole set up really works as a pass) and told me that Michelin had been in touch and that the Guide had requested that its photographer been given time to come along and take pictures of this unique-for-Birmingham restaurant. Inclusion in the Guide therefore seems likely in the near future. I believe the restaurant is extraordinarily good and may well do an Upstairs (Tom Shepherd’s gaff) and rapidly advance to a star. We will see.

  On this occasion I was accompanied by a dining companion who has quite marked mobility problems and could not cope with climbing up on to the high stool at the counter but she was kindly and very comfortably accommodated with me at the tables in the antechamber and our food was served there and enjoyed thoroughly. The restaurant goes from strength to strength. Marius informed us that there were some new dishes and others had been tweaked and, as far as I could tell, all to their good. Each dish was impeccable and quite delicious and each showed not only a brilliance in the chef in conjuring up often quite fabulous flavours but they were also remarkable textured. Some of the dishes had a little more spiciness and were none the worse for that - indeed they were improved - and there were some which may already be termed signature dishes which basked in the brilliance of their original state.

 

  After a familiar (but was it previously served in The Wilderness?) oyster based dish - a variant of a brilliant classic start to fine meals of the past - amuses gueules - tasty dainty croustades and tarts with sea bass nicely matched with jalapeño and gorgeous tuna belly partnered by hot strawberry sauce and splendidly crispy cannelloni filled with smoked pike roe and crowned with leaves. Then to close this act, glistening gorgeous Cornish mackerel sashimi and then another croustade filled to the brim with golden smoked trout’s roe. You can tell this was all going very well. And it continued to do so.

  Some old friends made their appearance - sweet crab with apple and sorrel, majestic hamachi textured like a fairy’s pillow and raised to new heights with the flavour of sesame. Then plump, meaty, tender mussels with a smattering of Iberico with a throaty hit of black pepper.

   Scarlet prawn and prawn’s head sauce were acutely deeply flavoursome (not photographed) and the final savoury took the familiar form of beautifully textured Chalk stream trout slapped about a bit with Tom Yum and emerging from it triumphantly.

  A single dessert (for once I should have liked two) - the exquisite dish of sushi rice ice cream with nori crackers. Few desserts will give such pleasure as this. A single petit four put the meal to bed and it slept the sleep of the Good.

  A return visit just a few days after the one reported above but this time for lunch saw the same menu being served and it was as equally pleasurable as the previous visit. Clearly ADC is consistent in what it serves which is what the professional Guide inspectors claim they are looking for. Obviously ADC is soon to make its appearance on the Michelin internet site but the question is whether or not it will earn Alex Claridge his first well-deserved Michelin star come the 2025 Michelin Awards ceremony.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞.  7 & 16 August 2024.

419.Back To The Jewellery Quarter (3) - The Wilderness New Menu And Folium.

   There was summer weather, a floundering new government, dreadful violence in some towns and rioting. Normal for France I suppose but there was no French-style restaurant to dine in where I was. Still, the Jewellery Quarter was quiet enough that evening even if August was shaping up to be a fiery last month of summer. And it was the first evening of the new menu at The Wilderness. How could I resist being there? The menu came in four parts or perhaps four acts each with their own individual scenes. Certainly the sets were more ambitious and satisfying than most of the plays put on at Stratford in recent years but had the director given us a satisfactory production and were the actors - the dishes - delivering their culinary lines as perfectly as we might hope from a class act?

The first Act was made up of the amuses gueules and the opening scene brought us a fine performance from a dainty little tart and and an equally dainty crostini with an appetiser centred on beetroot and taramasalata and crowned with a pretty beetroot jelly and the other rendering on to its audience pleasant, fresh summer green peas encased in nori and looking very pretty indeed.

  Next, now into Act 2, a 2024 edition of the delicious beef tartare dish playfully called the Big Mac and then an almost inevitable mackerel dish, the fish soothed pleasingly with apple and sorrel. Next came the visually magnificent beetroot and ajo blanco - the beetroot in its several forms was enjoyable and the ajo blanco was just the thing for a summer evening. Think the Plaza Mayor and sitting out under the sky of the gathering night, the Madrileños and turistas, all milling around and preparing to dine at their own pace till 1AM.

  The vision passes and here I am in a smallish restaurant with 80s music pumping out in the historic Jewellery Quarter which is probably as romantic as Birmingham can get (and it is indeed).

  After a successful course titled Carrot (served as a piece of very good steak) which I forgot to photograph I then found myself dining from a plate with the inscription, The tigers have found me and I do not care and putting in no effort at all to muse on the meaning of the statement. I marvelled at the natty little combination of courgette slices with the flavour of lemon verbena and a roof of nasturtium leaves. 

  Undoubtedly the least successful dish was that titled Aliums and wasabi which when viewed on the menu has one sitting up sweating in the suspenseful anticipation of a mega-flavour bomb only to be rewarded with what sadly, really did seem to be a damp squib. I wanted intensity, possibly painful, I wanted the dish to lift me up, turn me upside down, swing me around by my feet, slap me about a bit and thrash me with the powerful bullying of onion, garlic and horseradish and instead my body sat firmly in my seat, subdued by the hurt of disappointment.

   Joy returned in the form of a magnificent scarlet prawn with the very, very prawny-flavoured sauce made from the unfortunate creatures’ heads. They did not die in vain as they provided a memorable accompaniment to the tender sweet crustacean. Nicely cooked too was the subsequent meaty monkfish with a cauliflower purée and a coffee sauce. 

  This impressive meal was not done yet though I was starting to feel comfortably full. There came along nicely cooked quail with BBQ cabbage which did its job though it could hardly be described as exhilarating and which did no harm.

  The curtain rose on Act III - unusual dill, lime and yoghurt refreshed in its own way and the peach with tonka was light and pleasing. Act IV brought a successful curtain down with a very pleasing and admirable canale and a mignardise of blackberry and ginger.

  The Wilderness continues to evolve and innovate, never standing still, often thrilling, always providing food with authentic passion combining talent - even genius - with flair and inventiveness. One never knows what is coming next. A pride of Birmingham. 

Rating:- 🌞🌞. 1 August 2024.

  The following day, still in the Jewellery Quarter, somewhere a little calmer, reassuring, steady, comfortable, more relaxing - lunch at Folium, somewhere I had only recently visited but a place I frequently need to dine at for the sheer pleasure of it. Lunch with an old friend who is also a Folium enthusiast. 

  The menu was unchanged from my recent previous visit. Each dish was as exemplary as before. Lucy’s service was perfectly, quietly, calmly delivered and Chef could be watched meticulously preparing and presenting the dishes. The dishes are detailed in Blog 417 and there is no need to go over the details of the all round brilliance of the meal again. I merely add a photograph this time of the gorgeous sourdough bread, freshly baked every morning on site, served at the restaurant which must be my favourite bread served in any restaurant I have visited over a long time. The crust so crispy and the centre soft and tastebud-tinglingly flavoursome. Chefs - if you’re going to serve bread,  make it magnificent and if you are uncertain, Ben Tesh will show you how.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞. 2 August 2024.

    It was good to see celebrities choosing to dine at Folium while they’re in town, At Folium that lunchtime was Thomas Plant aka Thomas Forester, who has featured for many years as one of the experts in the programme on antiques, the BBC’s Bargain Hunt. Clearly a man with good taste in food as well as good taste in antiques.

420. Zindiya, Moseley.

 

  Zindiya. located in a Moseley side street, not far from Chakana, serves what is termed Indian street food to eat pleasingly not in the street but in a pleasant, spacious, comfortable dining room, with lots of natural light and strings of fairy lights lined up across the ceiling, an open kitchen at the distant rear of the restaurant and the atmosphere of a popular neighbourhood diner as one suspects it might look and feel in India itself.

  The menu is fun - cheerful and colourful and divided into sections - chaats, side dishes, large plates, curries, breads and rice and grills - all very tempting and, like an old Woolworth sweets counter, to be mixed and matched as the diner wishes. The service is pleasant and efficient and a feeling of happy anticipation and contentment soon sets in. There were three of us at lunch at that allowed for a good range of dishes to be ordered.

  I ordered the delightful pani puri - wafer-thin, crispy, slightly flattened wheat balls filled with a joy-bringing sweet sauce based on tamarind on a mixture of tender potato, onions and chick peas with a watery mint sauce to be poured into the puri though it has to be said that flavour of mint was a little too subtle. Still, an enjoyable dish. I also ordered the moderately hot, spicy gunpowder potatoes which were admirably tangy being prepared, as they were, with chilli, spring onions and coriander.

  How can one resist the allure of onion bhajis. Zindiya’s turned out to be nicely sized, beautifully golden and crispy coated though the interior was a little too dry and woukd have definitely benefitted from the inclusion of more onion. As onion bhajis go,they were nevertheless, pretty decent.

    One of my dining companions selected chana chaat which proved to be singularly unremarkable and he made little progress in working his way through the numerous chickpeas but my other fellow diner chose beetroot chaat, which I sadly forgot to photograph, and derived much pleasure from the various elements which she all worked together very nicely.

  Two of us opted for the excellent lamb curry, the spicing of which was spot on for us, though I myself would have liked a sweet element as part of the dish to balance the dryness and mild sourness of it. The sauce was beautifully thick and substantial and the lamb was lean and tender and we both agreed that it was an enjoyable dish for we with our middle of the road western palates. We ate the curry with a shared nicely subtly-flavoured garlic  garlic naan and well cooked steamed basmati rice. Our companions was very satisfied with his butter chicken.

 

  Two of us chose light desserts from the list on offer - I had a surprisingly generous helping of cardomom-flavoured kulfi which was nicely flavoured and refreshing and my companion’s palate was greatly refreshed by a generous serving of mango sorbet though in reality, what came along was a mango icecream, though she thought it was none the worse for having an imposter identity.

  If I lived nearer I would be quite happy to visit the charming and highly affordable Zindiya on a weekly basis.

Rating:-🌛🌛🌛🌛. 9 August 2024.

418. Back To The Jewellery Quarter (2) - Dinner At Txikiteo.

Recently Txikiteo (pronounced Chikiteo) in Frederick Street was added to The Good Food Guide list of recommended restaurants. It is located in the same spot as the former Tierra which had also found a place in The Good Food Guide though I had never got around to visiting it (but it has now reappeared in 1000 Trades located in the building opposite Txikiteo so maybe I will still get to visit Tierra Tacos as it is now named one day in the future though it is not included in the increasingly eccentric and eclectic Good Food Guide).

The Good Food Guide is striving to be cool, trying perhaps a little too hard, a sort of Anti-Michelin Guide which remains unpleasantly snooty and elitist and far too self-aware in a Gallic sort of way. The Good Food Guide published its list of 100 Best Local Restaurants on 24 July - only three West Midlands restaurants made it to the roll call - the Kilpeck Inn in Herefordshire, Chapter in Edgbaston where the cooking, at least on my previous visit, has its faults and the very trendy Tropea in Harborne which seemed to me to be alright when I lunched there but certainly not achieving the heights that countless others, including the Michelin inspectors, feel that it has reached.

But I digress. I was back in the Jewellery Quarter in Frederick Street where decades ago, as a schoolboy, I used to work in the summer holidays as an office boy in a crumbling costume jewellery factory for the princely sum of £4 17s 6d for a forty hour week. But it kept me out of mischief. As I ambled down from the tram station past the flamboyant Chamberlain clock stranded as it is in the middle of a busy road junction, then past the building which had been home to the makers of Miracle Jewellery where my teenage summer days had been passed in meaningful employment (the workers there used to joke asking the question, “Why do they call it Miracle?”, the answer being, “Because it’s a miracle anyone ever buys it”, I took in the change which had occurred in the area - young, smug-looking people who must have just finished work for the day (if they had ever started it) sitting at outdoor tables of various bars, glugging cocktails, the men unshaven and dressed in shorts flashing their tattooed legs, the women, if anything somewhat smarter I thought, all so different from the days when the Jewellery Quarter was a hive of activity and productiveness from where products were despatched to around the world. Plus ça change.

Regardless, Txikiteo looked appealing with its pink frontage and deep yellow signage. It was 5PM. I was the first diner to arrive and I had the choice of spot at which to sit. Seating took the form of fashionable circular high tables with high chairs to match. Personally, I prefer a good old fashioned table with its legs a normal length and no accompanying sensation of high anxiety but I was quite comfortable and deduced that this was quite an effective way of using the limited space available. I liked the white tiled walls which were used as a notice board of what was on offer. I felt very comfortable in Txikiteo from the word go.

  The menu was made up  mainly of small plates - though Spanish-Basque style food was on offer the rather clichéd ‘tapas’ was avoided -  so familiar in the mid-2020s and enabling a vaguely anarchic structure to the meal so food came out of the kitchen when it was ready not in the form of starter-main-dessert and all the little tiddly bits in between them. Txikiteo was demonstrating all the features of new dining out - little structure to the meal, no formality, rusticity, a blast of foreign exoticism. And it worked.

Of the dishes I chose, the first to emerge from the kitchen, and understandably quite rapidly, was a pretty plate of heirloom tomatoes - red, yellow, purple (the colours of the flag of the socialist republic in Spain in the 1930s but I don’t suppose anyone was aware of the significance of the colours and I doubt any statement was being made by serving them). This was an enjoyable, light summer dish. Choosing to eat tomatoes in Britain is fraught with the risk - nay, the likelihood - that flavour is not going to be an English tomato’s strong point. But whether or not these particular examples of Anglotomatoism were even a stone’s throwaway in flavour terms from their Mediterranean cousins was hard to judge as the sherry vinegar and garlic dressing rendered unto them a pleasing and satisfying flavour. 

The main meat dishes - steak or pork - came as ‘big plates’. I chose the pork chop with Pedro Ximenez sauce. This was a robust, rustic, generously portioned dish, the pork acceptably tender and the sauce giving it just the right note of flavour. Alongside it I dived into a plate of equally generously portioned ‘new potatoes’, baked in their skins and served with an excellent mojo verde (a Canarian green sauce made up from coriander, garlic, cumin and olive oil. This was all a great pleasure, 

  Finally, though I lusted after some Basque cheesecake, I could not instead resist opting to indulge myself in a large bowl of scintillating Morello cherry sorbet. A powerfully flavoured dessert, just right for a vaguely warm summer evening.

Rating;- 🌛🌛🌛🌛  25 July 2024.

417. Back To The Jewellery Quarter (1) - Lunch at Folium.

 

  The Jewellery Quarter is certainly the place to dine at present - The Wilderness, Albatross Death Cult, Folium and now Txikiteo, located at the site in Frederick Street of the previous well thought of Tierra which I never quite around to visiting.

  Firstly lunch at the always delightful Folium. I have described visits there on several previous occasions but it’s always satisfying to describe the most recent experience at this soothing, delightful establishment (see also Blog 409). It’s just nice to turn up there, be greeted in a calm and welcoming way, to have the table set out taking notice of one’s previously chosen menu - short or long tasting - to order one’s gin and tonic and take advice on what wine to sip. It’s my favourite restaurant in the city, I think it really is, to go and enjoy a relaxed meal in a lovely modern little restaurant with really excellent food - each dish immaculately cooked and presented and, delicious. There’s probably a Folium in Heaven for those who’ve been good enough to get there. Outside, it was one of those rare hot days in this mediocre summer, but the air conditioning was on and did its work in making this visit to Folium even more of a joy. 

Sadly, whenever I visit there, few other people seem to realise what a gem this place really is. This particular Friday lunchtime, apart from myself, there was just a couple dining there. The restaurant should be overflowing with diners. I was interested to hear that many of those who do dine there are older people who have moved to the Jewellery Quarter rather than the cool young JQ flat dwellers whom one would expect to be the dining denizens of the area.

In several previous blogs I have mentioned and included photographs of the exquisite amuse gueule- the little cylindrical burnt onion crisp containing a small blob of rich, heavenly, exquisitely smooth and well flavoured chicken liver parfait and also the fabulous, freshly baked sourdough served with salt and cultured butter - the bread’s crust as wickedly crispy as anything dreamed up in the bakeries on Olympus where it is served to Zeus and stops him hurling thunderbolts. The warm savoury custard served with the most deeply flavoursome roast chicken broth and generous shavings of Wiltshire truffle has now really taken hold of my soul and the line caught mackerel was gorgeous though again, as on my previous visit, the English wasabi was more subtle than I felt it needed to be.

Then supremely perfectly textured Cornish lobster with a fine and tasty lobster head sauce and the little beignet, which I have grown to love very much, for mopping the remains of the sauce.

  The meat main course was outstanding. The A5 was wagyu was delicious and the knife cut into it as though it were the proverbial butter. Beside it was a fabulous item - a piece of endive grilled and then marinated so that when served it was brought with it the shock of sweetness and, just at the end, the hit of bitterness that we might have expected all along. This was flavourshock without doubt. Then the two desserts - the half frozen yuzu filled with zinging yuzu icecream, a true palate cleanser and then the familiar toasted hay icecream with texture from puffed rye and the perfectly judged sweetness of caramel.

  Two mignardises brought up the rear - a gorgeous freshly baked brown butter Madeleine paired with Cotswolds whisky cream, like ambrosia - something else to persuade Zeus not to exercise his thunderbolt throwing area - .and the sticky butterfly macaron (though this time the wings had gone missing), gorgeously gooey in texture, giving shelter to cep fudge.

There is nowhere better to eat in Birmingham. Ben Tesh remains a craftsman and artist of the first order.

Rating:- 🌞🌞🌞   15 June 2024.