EATING FOR BRITAIN: BACK IN BRUM (PURNELL'S & LASAN)

When I lived in Birmingham, The Jewellery Quarter was exactly that, the area of the city filled with diamond and gold merchants selling wedding rings to engaged people. It was not the nicest place in the world and, although not unsafe in anyway, not really an area of Birmingham that you would have any call to visit unless you were in need of something sparkly.

Move on twenty years and, like so much of the city, The Jewellery Quarter hasn’t half changed with its streets now filling rapidly with bars, clubs and restaurants. Even at lunchtime as I headed off to find my restaurant of choice, it was buzzing and it is little wonder that Glyn Purnell decided to open his eponymous restaurant on its fringes.

Purnell came to fame as the chef at Jessica’s, one of the city’s original fine dining establishments and he set up his own restaurant a few years ago to considerable local acclaim and now has one Michelin star.

It is not a particularly welcoming room with a slightly austere bar leading down to an awkward “L” shaped dining room where dated looking black tables were already filled primarily with couples taking advantage of the lunchtime offer of three courses for £20.

The service is full on Michelin but very engaging and I was soon served some superb bread with, heaven forfend who would have thunk of such a thing, butter that was not straight from the fridge.

Amuse too was straight out of Michelin 101 with a blob of uninspiring sorbet topped with blackened rice. I am never quite sure why people both with these. I’m a good northerner and like free stuff as much as the next person unless the next person happens to be a cabinet minister, but unfortunately most amuse add nothing to the meal except delay.

£20 only gets you a couple of choices per course, but fortunately there were things at each stage that I really wanted to try. To begin I plumped for a ham hock and chicken terrine. Despite hitting two of my “most hated” buttons being served on a slate and being subject to that little smear trick with the back of a spoon that every nitwit seems to do these days, it actually turned out to be very, very good indeed, each flavour coming through individually and working together and the terrine itself with superb texture and at the correct temperature.

Likewise a main course of slow cooked ox cheek with vanilla dipped potatoes (which worked better than anything that sounds so ghastly has any right to) and more of that new season asparagus. The meat retained a bite, but shredded beautifully with a fork, and the sauce, while rich, lacked the ferocity that now seems the norm for so many high end dining meat courses. Even a couple of slivers of pear, flopped over the cheek like dead Indians over the back of a cowboy’s horse did little to detract from stunning cooking.

More spot on flavours followed with dessert as I was presented with a fresh as you like rhubarb sorbet sitting on top of a perfect Pavlova, which crumbled to reveal a slightly chewy centre

Purnell can cook up a storm, there is no doubting that, the quality of the ingredients and the flavours and textures he draws from them are up there with the best, but there is a sense of unease in his presentation and something so awkward about the plating, that it is hard to escape the feeling that he longs to escape the constraints of serving Michelin star list tickers and offer up something more relaxed.

I may not rush back to Purnell’s, however if he ever does decide to open a more casual dining restaurant, I am not ashamed to admit that I would use a small child to club myself to the front of the queue.

After walking lunch off with a stroll along the canal and around the Jewellery Quarter, I made my way to supper at Lasan, one of Birmingham’s most highly regarded Indian restaurants, where I was to be the guest of the good people of Marketing Birmingham who had been helping me arrange meetings with producers.

Lasan’s owners had just been on a pilgrimage, which had taken them to all parts of India in search of tradition regional dishes and recipes, which they had brought back with them to try and recreate in Birmingham. This had resulted in a tasting menu comprising nineteen courses ranging from “South Indian Tiffin” of idli with sambar to minced lamb kebabs from Luckhnow and, instantly recognisable to someone with my background, Shorshe Mach, a whole fish cooked Bengali style in mustard.

The tour round India may have been a great challenge but so was eating the vast array and huge portions of food that kept being brought to the table. At first I assumed that we were being given special attention because the owners knew my hosts, but all the other tables were filled and all appeared to be receiving the same food as us

In a menu of this length, not everything is going to be perfect. The use of snapper instead of the hard to find hilsa fish meant the Shorshe Mach lacked the sweetness that comes form that boney river fish and some of the kebabs were a little on the dry side. But, on the whole it was an excellent effort to represent the hugely varied cuisines of India and I managed to make it to the end of the menu and polish off a warm gulab jamun covered in another Bengali speciality, Rabri, traditionally made by repeatedly cooking sweetened milk until it forms a skin until all you are left with is a thick rich custard.

I am not sure how long the tasting menu is going to be on offer, but, if you have the constitution for it, it is well worth a try.

EATING FOR BRITAIN:BACK IN BRUM (EDMUND'S & THE GREAT BRITISH EATERY)

I used to live in Birmingham, although looking back on my short time there nearly twenty years ago, it seems like another lifetime and, as I drove my car into the car park of the Brindley Place complex surrounding the gentrified canal area, it almost seemed like another city.

I was back for a few days for my EATING FOR BRITAIN trip and, although I had two dishes very firmly in mind for my visit, Balti and Curry Goat, I decided give myself a couple of days to explore the city that had been home to me and my now ex-wife for eighteen months nearly two decades before.

As I said, it has changed almost beyond recognition, particularly around Broad Street where the complex, built in the 1990’s, bristling with chain restaurants, bars and clubs, surrounds the rejuvenated area around the Midlands Canal and forms a buzzing centre where once there were only derelict warehouses and seedy streets.

It’s smart alright, with a range of the usual high end hotels, including my own, the excellent City Inn, providing accommodation for those visiting the conference centre or the NIA, but there is still very much the feeling that it has been superimposed onto the area rather than having developed organically and consequently it has little of its own character.

The same too could be said of my first dining port of call, Edmund’s Fine Dining, co-owned by Michelin starred chef, Andy Waters and relocated from its original home in Henley-on-Arden to a sterile corner of Brindley Place where it offered a lunchtime menu of unchallenging and polite food for local business people.

I had arrived early, just after they opened and had the place to myself for most of my meal, taken from the set menu, which offers two courses at £19 and three at £21 including coffee.

Despite the seemingly excellent value, the food did not really deliver and elements of both execution and ingredient were found wanting. A starter of seared cep covered tuna was prepared pink and elegantly presented, but any taste of the main player was overpowered by the mushrooms used to coat the fish. The green beans in the salad lacked crunch and the tomatoes lacked ripeness adding nothing to the dish but a dull pink tinge.

The main course was a little better, with a flaky fillet of cod coming with a sauce of milk that was “smoked” presumably through using it to poach smoked fish and a perfectly prepared poached egg that broke to release the yolk over a bed of spinach leaves. It was a harmless but unremarkable dish that stays with me now only because of the fact that they had left the slimy skin on the fish, which I had to peel off before I could continue eating. Skin should only be left on fish if it is cooked to a crisp. Otherwise it is just, as this was, really nasty.

It speaks volumes that perhaps the best elements of the whole meal came with my first tastes of new season asparagus, lightly cooked to a crunch and some of the best boulangere potatoes I have ever tried. Excellent, but not enough to raise the lunch from the blah and not enough to make me ponder on an additional course.

Service was terrific and deserving of the added service charge to the bill and, by the time I headed out again, it was dealing with more customers all more bothered about matters of business import than the food being placed in front of them. From that point of view, at lunchtime, Edmund’s serves its true purpose serving inoffensive food to people with other things on their mind.

If it had been a case of so far so blah, my next meal in Brum hit the spot. After a morning chatting with the good folk of HEFF (Heart of England Fine Food) I was dropped off in front of The Great British Eatery, a relatively new fish & chip shop near the Five Ways Roundabout. If I am honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it. The name screamed irony and, when I heard that it was the brainchild of two young guys, I had a strong premonition of experiencing the nonsense that seems to be prevalent in many new chips shops in London.

I should have known better than that. Matter of fact Brummies don’t really do irony and as soon as I walked into the small chip shop with its counter seating, the smell of beef dripping told me that things may just be alright.

I got chatting to the two owners, Conrad and Andy and, while they dished out my large portion of fish chips and peas, they explained how they had set up the place because they couldn’t find any decent chippies in Brum and how they had almost gone bust until they earned The Seafresh 5* award marking them out as one of the best in the country.

There is no irony at The Great British Eatery just really very good fish & chips indeed. The fish is fresh and perfectly cooked, the batter bubbly and crisp, the chips the correct size, colour and texture and the peas, the right colour and consistency. Not rocket science but seemingly beyond so many. Including a soft drink it set me back about £7 for enough food to make sure that any more meals that day would be unnecessary.

It’s not all perfect. Pickled onions were overly sharp and tough and a fish cake I sampled was on the dry side, but for two people who have only been making Britain’s national dish for a few short months, Conrad and Andy are doing a good job and deserve every bit of success they get and others could do well to note.

Nearly twenty years before I had decided it was time to leave Brum when I found myself saying “tara-a-bit” instead of goodbye to a customer. Now, as Conrad said the same as I left The Great British Eatery and walked to my hotel, I was actually rather glad to be back in one of my favourite cities.