Review: Marmalade Bistro, Birmingham

This is the new restaurant attached to the REP theatre, right in the middle of Birmingham. We stopped for a quick meal of small plates after a performance at the Symphony Hall next door. Sorry, no photos – way too dark for my phonecam.

I like the decor and ambiance, slightly mad hatter with the jaggedly scrawled quotes on the wall and all the bare cable lighting strewn about, with big velvet curtains framing the windows. Service was young, friendly and still learning the ropes. We ordered a few small plates between us along with some chips.

I’m really unconvinced by the triple-cooked chips. They were very chunky and not even remotely crispy. If they were on the menu as “saute potato chunks” then I’d feel that I got what I ordered, cos that’s what they were.

My main problem was the garnish. On two of our plates we had a little pile of yellow, spotty, wilting watercress. That betrays real lack of basic thought. If I pulled that out of the fridge at home to have with our dinner, I’d say to Maureen “oops, the watercress has gone” and throw it in the bin. Putting it out on a plate in a restaurant says to the diner: “hi there, I’m happy to be serving you food I wouldn’t want to eat myself!”

Blech. Wonder what else is on our plates? How old is the fish in these crispy fried nduja fish bites (a bit overwhelmed by their spicy mayo dip)? What about the white pudding served with this pig cheek (nice enough plate, this one)? And are these thin sliced of grilled honeydew melon unripe enough to give me indigestion? They were served with sesame seed coated halloumi and a big blob of black olive tapenade, and might have been a nice idea but the melon was too unripe to have any flavour.

The menu is quite inventive. I don’t think it was written by the guy in the kitchen. And I don’t think he or she is yet up to delivering it properly. Maybe they’ll improve?

Review: Nut Tree Inn, Murcott

I like my DSLR camera. I’m a keen (if decidedly amateur) photographer when travelling the world, but I could never bring myself to pull it out in a restaurant. It surely just screams “food blogger!” and I never want staff to guess I’m a blogger. I’d love to say that this is a highly principled position, that I don’t want to receive special attention or free treats and have my unbiased review in any way compromised. It’s not that at all, I just feel too embarrassed by the whole thing. They might ask me difficult questions about food! They might smirk into their aprons if I can’t recognise an ingredient! They might assume I am read by thousands rather than… er… dozens? Maybe a dozen?

This is an introvert thing, by the way. We think far too long and hard about how other people perceive us, and often end up missing out on some really interesting interactions because we don’t want to put ourselves forward and end up saying something daft. Better to say nothing. On the other hand, this does mean I’ve only been picked out as a blogger on one or two occasions and my reviews are otherwise 100% unbiased. High principles achieved through social awkwardness – ta-da!

The Nut Tree Inn is a few miles out of Oxford, and although a pub it has given most of its rambling rooms over to dining, along with the white tablecloths and decent cutlery required for the tasting menu.

Beautifully firm tablet of smoked salmon to begin, with whipped horseradish cream. Good stuff. This followed by a piece of good chicken liver parfait and a dense but perfectly acceptable brioche. The apple chutney wasn’t strong enough company. Nice piece of hake for the fish course, the strong fish paired well with bourguignon onions and panchetta.

Our main course was Charolais beef: roast fillet and slow-braised shin. Mmmm… good beef. The fillet was a very flavour-packed specimen, roast to perfect pink. The shin gave a good contrast, all meaty grey fibres of umami. This was a plate of meat, the swipe of potato puree and sprig of watercress nothing more than incidental garnish. Good gravy.

The pre-dessert was an eggshell full of gooey salt caramel topped with milk chocolate mousse and popping candy. I really loved it, a proper grown-up easter egg (and this from someone who hates milk chocolate). It was followed by a passionfruit souffle with matching sorbet. The souffle was a cracker, perfectly risen with the flavour running right through it. The sorbet was good too, but I’m not sure that what I needed with my passionfruit was more passionfruit!

So, good meal. Everything very well cooked. It’s £55 for the tasting menu, which I’d count good value. But for me the style of cooking wasn’t ambitious enough for a tasting menu: three courses of these classic dishes would be a perfect posh pub lunch, but when I sit down to a tasting menu I’m looking for some kind of culinary journey. Still, a good place to know just a stone’s throw off the M40 near Oxford.

Review: East India Cafe, Cheltenham

Anyone who reads this blog knows that my favourite Indian restaurant is The Chilli Pickle in Brighton. And this is because it is not just a curry house. It’s not a good local curry house, it’s not a curry house with fine dining pretensions, it’s not an actual fine dining curry house. It’s a modern Indian restaurant, trying to bring some of the authentic flavours of India – muddled up with a few modern British ingredients – to a happy south coast audience. And there’s far too few of them. So I’m really delighted that something a bit similar has popped up in Cheltenham.

The East India Cafe is easily missed, tucked away in a basement on the Promenade. Through the doors there’s a bijou 24 cover restaurant with furniture and decor to conjure up the idea of the Raj, and an eclectic looking little bar with a few seats for cocktails. It’s a brand new venture from completely first-time restauranteurs, and it looks good. I felt perfectly chilled (especially after a decent negroni) and the service couldn’t have been more friendly.

We started with a plate of phuchka – another regional variation on the pani puri – very good mix of flavours with a strong buzz of chilli, and the puri shells were interestingly bubbly in texture, like pork crackling. Wikipedia tells me there are at least eleven names for these: Gol Gappa, Pani ke bataashe / Patash, Pani puri, Phuchka, Gup chup, Pakodi, Phulki, Tikki, Padaka, Phulki, Pani Ke Patashe. I know I’m going to like a restaurant if they serve them, whatever name they happen to pick.

Next up I had a couple of lovely little grilled lamb chops, while Maureen picked out keema chicken; two small fritters with a nice texture, a strong curry leaf flavour and a surprise garlic mayonnaise accompaniment. Hey, it worked. My lamb chops came with a “lasooni chutney” which was a smooth, spicy, garlicky paste I hadn’t tried before. Also delicious.

For main course I ordered a cardamom roasted guinea fowl. This was a beautifully cooked piece of bird, still juicy, and the cardamom was there too (it better be, ’tis my favourite spice!). The sauce was creamy and almost there – just a tiny bit unbalanced, perhaps the cream not cooked out. Maureen’s allepey sauce with her sea bass was spot on, though; sweet, sour, fishy, and with a heat that built up. The crispy sea bass was nicely presented, but just a tad over. Both dishes came with good pilau rice.

Apart from decent cocktails to begin, we drank down a glass of ghol and a masala chai. The ghol is like a light, refreshing version of a salt/spice lassi. Refreshing? It was so refreshing it refreshes the meaning of the word refreshing! Their masala chai was good too, not over-sweet, and with a very savoury spice mix in it.

Apparently chef has never cooked in a commercial kitchen before. For me, that instantly explains and forgives the couple of dropped notes during an otherwise delicious meal. Give it another six months and I’ll bet those dishes will be perfect. In the meantime, I reckon the sense of hospitality and authenticity at the East India Cafe make it well worth a visit any time. Expect to pay £25 for three courses.

Review: Old Passage Inn, Gloucestershire

Dear front of house. When a diner asks you for a recommendation, maybe between two or three dishes, they aren’t really asking you to name the best dish on the menu. They’re just undecided, they just want you to help them make their mind up. Batting the question back at them with a headmistress-y “I can’t recommend for you, they’re all good” is just unhelpful and unfriendly.

Okay, while I’m at it. If your fire alarm goes off in the middle of starters, deafening the whole dining room and leaving them wondering if they need to flee the building, when you manage to switch it off after a couple of minutes you might just want to pop ’round the tables and apologise/reassure your guests? It’s not like you had more than a half-dozen tables, it wouldn’t have taken a minute.

Well, and just on the subject of unfriendly. Yes, yes, your menu says that coffee comes with petit fours. But when three people out of a table of four order coffees it does look just a teensy bit mean when the plate of little delights set in the middle of the table quite pointedly only has three of each and three forks. It’s a choccy and a bit of nougat, why not show a little generosity?

Ha. And only a couple of posts ago I was saying that I scarcely ever mention service! Well, if the food at the Old Passage Inn had been magical I perhaps wouldn’t have. But it wasn’t really memorable enough to make an engaging blog post out of otherwise.

Unlike the Sportsman, the Old Passage Inn makes no pretense of being a pub; it’s a dining room, with clumpy chairs and art for sale on the walls. Little ambience, especially when not full. We started with some hot bites; crispy breadcrumbed oysters and smoked haddock croquettes, both pretty good if decidedly unrefined. My starter of treacle cured salmon with pickled beetroot and ginger syrup was okay; I enjoyed the strong treacly cure on the beautiful salmon, the ginger was clever, but the beetroot didn’t pair properly with it and there was a creamy element missing. Maureen’s fish soup was a super-pungent number, with the French accompaniments of gruyere and saffron mayo.

For mains we had a chunky piece of stone bass, served with wilted gem lettuce, cockles, diced apple and some very tasty little crab arancini. This was a good dish, nice combination of tastes and textures, uncomplicated presentation. Maureen enjoyed it to. My dessert was a slice of creme fraiche tart, a delicate form of creme brulee with a neatly caramelised top and some chewily pleasing bits of candied orange.

With mains at £23 the Old Passage Inn sets out its stall as a classic old seafood restaurant, but I’ve had comparable fish dishes for £16 at various good pubs. The various service glitches may have coloured my view, but I honestly don’t think the cooking at the Old Passage Inn stands up at all in quality to a similarly priced fish restaurant like The Sportsman. Despite being relatively close to Cheltenham, I’ve no plans to return.

Review: The Sportsman, Kent

The eerily drab Kent coast on a moist, cold November day with the last few leaves dropping from the trees. It’s gloriously Dickensian. The Thames estuary is a huge grey blanket the same colour as the sky and you can’t see across to the other side. The Sportsman doesn’t look like much from the outside; an old white-painted redbrick building in stark isolation with a muddy car park at the front and a cluster of caravan chalets out the back. Inside it’s quite different. A big, airy pub interior painted in warm antique tones with scrubbed wooden tables and comfortable chairs. It’s one of those well-balanced places that hasn’t lost its identity as a pub in spite of being a top-notch dining room.

We went with the tasting menu, and tuck away three delicious oysters to begin with, then a couple of smashing pre-starters. There’s a neat stack of chewy mackerel, glistening bright apple jelly and

an almost treacly dark rye bread. Then there’s a hen’s eggshell filled with smoked eel, poached yolk and topped with horseradish foam. MmmMMMmmm. We settle next into a delicate dish of crab and carrot. A bit unmemorable, to be honest; I always want more of the brown meat in these delicate crab salads. The next starter was delicious pieces of roast partridge, served up with crispy skin on top of a celeriac risotto that tasted exactly – exactly, mind you – of the best kind of cheese and onion crisps. By accident or design, it was one of those charming reminiscence dishes.

Next we enjoyed two very good and very different fish dishes. The first was the bravest of simplicity; a single fillet of slip sole on a plate with a little seaweed butter. The seaweed gave us a strong estuarine tang and the slip sole proved to be pleasantly more dense than the more commonly served varieties. Luverly. The second dish, of brill braised in sherry with local hedgehog fungi, was very good though verging on too rich. That might be me, though – I don’t like my fish too rich (see Gamba, for instance!).

The main was foreshadowed with lovely nuggets of deep-fried lamb neck in breadcrumb, to be dipped in vinegary miny sauce. WANT MORE. The mint sauce stays for the main of roast local lamb, a well-executed dish but (ssh… don’t tell chef) not a patch on the lamb neck nuggets! Our pre-dessert was a little quince lolly with some “cake milk” to dip it in (single cream with, yeah, a distinct cakey taste). I love quince, but for it’s fragrance, and they hadn’t captured that. The bramley apple souffle to finish was delicious, a jolly good and very bright souffle with a blob of salt caramel ice cream to deposit in the top.

I enjoyed the menu at The Sportsman, and I particularly enjoyed the surroundings. At £65 it’s good value for sheer quality of produce and cooking. The wine list is good too; in spite of the Michelin-quality food, the wines are pub priced. If I lived near here, I’d be down far too often!