Review: Folium, Birmingham

I think perhaps the most satisfying thing a food blogger can do is review a restaurant “before it was famous”. It is for me, anyway. My list of great finds includes: Casamia, Ynyshir and The Black Swan. Particularly Ynyshir, which I got to before any of the major newspaper critics or any other bloggers. In pre-blog days we also tried The Hand & Flowers and L’Enclume long before the Michelin man discovered them. So have I found another future star with Folium? Time will tell, but I’ve got a good feeling!

After a run of pop-ups to hone ideas, Ben Tesh and Lucy Hanlon have a bright and modern dining room in the Jewellery Quarter. There’s nothing novel about the decor, it’s textbook modern British fine dining grey with a really open kitchen for watching the action. Service was friendly but perhaps lacking polish (they’ve only been open four months). We picked the £65 tasting menu and skipped the wine pairing.

Kicking off, a heart-warming bowl of smoked eel and potato foam, with added umami from a rich chicken stock. Unusual to get a hot dish of smoked eel, it was absolutely superb. Followed up with another spiffy starter, of diced cured mackerel with tiny spheres of pickled cucumber, a soft white wasabi sorbet and oyster mayonnaise. Looked beautiful and ate divinely, with plenty of bouncy flavours.

They made a splendid dish out of kohlrabi, my hat is truly off to them for this one. Long ribbons of the veg cooked to a texture very close to good linguine, doused with a rich and nutty parmesan sauce spiked with truffle flavours and a healthy grating of fresh truffle on top. This was a real treat to eat, I’d have scoffed a whole bowlful happily.

Cod with a mussel and parsley sauce was accomplished, but easily forgotten for the main course. Two plump, glazed pieces of the most delicious salt marsh lamb, with all the fat melting nicely into the meat. The theme of salt marsh was doubled-down with sea kale and plenty of powdered seaweed, and a blob of magic lamb-fat mayonnaise alongside. Very focused. Very good.

Nice pair of desserts to finish; sheep yogurt, spruce, lemon thyme and white chocolate worked just exactly as well as it sounds and showed real finesse. Chocolate mousse and cobnut crumble was equally good. I am a sucker for chocolate and nuts in any form.

This was a great meal, full of ambition and very well executed. The kohlrabi and the lamb were the two dishes that really stood out and, yeah, made me think that I might have stumbled on a restaurant that’s going to be the critics’ darling some day soon. We’ll see. At the very least, Folium gets a proper shout-out from me as a great new option in the middle of Birmingham!