HOTEL DU VIN, BIRMINGHAM '4 s • by Sion Simon
THE last time I appeared in this space I infuriated hordes of Americans by pointing out how poor is their country's restaurant cooking. I'm not going to return all their angry bouncers here, but there is one supposed yorker which just begs to be revealed as the full toss that it is.
The canard in question is that if you leave the fancy salons of San Francisco and venture into the American backwoods, you will find a delightful rustic cuisine of unparalleled freshness, authenticity and charm. This is simply not true. It is certainly fair to say that the quality of 'ordinary' or 'roadside' cooking in the USA is far better than it is in Britain, but there could scarcely be a more lowly ambition. Good British restaurant food having become very good hasn't prevented most of the rest of our public nosh from remaining depressingly bad. But if 'ordinary' US cooking is better than ours, it must be worse — from its greasy burgers and its vulgar deli sandwiches through its lumpen grits and all those bogus gumbo 'cajun specialities' — than pretty much every other rich country in the world. Cajun cooking is a particular bugbear, being always a fantastic disappointment, reminiscent of nothing so much as the way 'Cajun people' speak their French creole: a vocabulary of half a dozen words, a ridiculous accent, yet they think it's the ninth wonder of the world.
And if indigenous rustic American cuisine doesn't compare with that of France, Italy or Spain (it's not on the same planet), neither is 'imported' ethnic food as good in the US as it often is in British cities. The lousiest Chinese meal I ever had in my life was at a highly rated place in New York. Sure, there's an awful lot of ethnic cooking going on in those big American cities, but that doesn't mean much of it's any good.
Indian and Pakistani cooking, on the other hand, is one of the joys of having come back to Birmingham. For most of the years that I lived mainly in London, I complacently assumed that, not being from there, I simply wasn't au fait with the good places to get Asian food. Over the last couple, though, I've realised that it's just not as good there as it is in Birmingham. In my local unlicensed Balti restaurant here (Noorani, on Slade Road) every dish is cooked from scratch, in the open kitchen the other side of the refrigerated butcher's shop counter, from gleamingly fresh ingredients, by people with a really sure sense of what they're cooking and why. At my favourite pub, the Vine, on the corner of Roebuck Street and Roebuck Lane in West Bromwich, the spiced and marinated meat they barbecue in the big room round the back has a succulence and style that many a Parisian chateaubriand would do well to ape.
I decided against reviewing those restaurants, though, because this is The Spectator, and I feel obliged to review places that readers may actually visit. Don't misunderstand me, I have no hesitation in recommending the Vine or Noorani (Frank and Virginia Johnson, a more perfectly Specta
tor-esque couple than which one could hardly imagine, went to the former and said that they liked it).
But I think it more likely that greater numbers of Speccy readers will find their way to Birmingham's new Hotel du Vin. The chain having begun in Winchester and then spread to Bristol and Tunbridge Wells, it's the source of a strange satisfaction that the fourth hotel should be in Birmingham. By all accounts, it's a pleasant place to stay, though I myself haven't seen the rooms. The two bars, which I have seen, consist of a louche cigar-bar type place downstairs, in which slightly self-conscious solicitors start off serious but soon become ribald. The one on the ground floor, just off the lobby, is more relaxed. The staff are notably professional and pleasant.
The restaurant, the faded panelling of which strongly resembles its siblings, does not pretend to be more than a bistro. Starters are around a fiver, mains about f13 or so. I started with a squid and chorizo salad, in which three very broadly cut rounds of floured deep-fried calamari were topped with such thin slices of fried chorizo as would best be called crisps. The squid was perfect: succulent and very sweet indeed. I couldn't at first see the point of the chorizo crisps, but later learned that, eaten as one mouthful with their squidy pals, they make a nice mix of textures and tastes. Between the three circles of squid were three drizzles of a nice salsa verde; and in the centre of it all sat the obligatory pile of leaves, sparingly coated in a good dressing which had hints of anise and perhaps anchovy. This was a nice dish, with good, clean, fresh flavours; it reminded me of Marseilles.
The centrepiece of my main course, being lightly breaded on the upper side, looked like a fillet of John Dory, but wasn't. In fact, it was the tail half of a fish which still needed boning; not that I minded so doing, just that the way it was presented tricked me into tucking in as though it were a fillet, thereby getting a mouthful of bones and making a bit of a mess. That crisis over, the fish itself proved perfectly pleasant, if unremarkable. 'Crab veloute', on the other hand, was an understatement: more of a soup than a sauce, big chunks of veg and big chunks of crabmeat slithered through a suitably velvety veloute (strange that a sauce reduction should be sort of onomatopoeic, but it is). Some wilted baby leeks made up the numbers at the bottom of the pile. A little parcel of herby linguini sat slightly bemused on its own. Tossed with the crab veloute (as it soon was by me), it would have made a fine starter. Overall, the dish erred on the dull side, largely because the John Dory failed to leap from the plate. But the garnishes were good, and compared with what it cost, it was excellent. For more than which it is hubristic to ask.
Hotel du Vin, Church Street, Birmingham; tel: 0121 236 0559.
Previous page
