July 2008 Archives

The long-established balti house Al Faisals has expanded to opened what it claims to be the country's first halal Italian restaurant.

Piatto has opened the Ladypool Road in the heart of the so-called Balti Triangle.

I've yet to visit, but the idea intrigues me. I'll let you know what I reckon when I've popped along.

Whatever happened to the idea that we should actually relax over lunch?

Habitually I scoff my sandwiches whilst working at my computer screen and most of the colleagues do the same.

Walk through the city centre and you'll see people scurrying along whilst devouring their sarnies or baguettes.

I guess it's a result of the increasingly busy lives that we live that we can no longer linger over lunch.

I despaired on this site some weeks ago about the difficulty in finding good quality fish and chips in this city. Now, it seems, my prayers may have been answered.

The Great British Eatery is a new takeaway (with a few seats and tables) at Broadway Plaza, Five Ways, which offers freshly prepared fish and chips plus other (no surprise) British classics such as bangers and mash.

I just chatted to one of its co-founders Conrad Brunton, who's worked at the Fat Duck and Simpson's and seems passoonately committed to quality.

I'll be watching with interest Gary Rhodes's new series about authentic Chinese cookery starting on the UK Food channel tonight.

I don't altogether enjoy his style of presenting, but he's always struck me as a master craftsman with a genuine love of food and his books are excellent - crammed with well-presented, interesting recipes that are sometimes challenging but never over-difficult for the competent amateur cook.

His take on Chinese cuisine will be interesting, though I doubt many of us will tempt his recipe for snake soup.

I usually flick through Saturday and Sunday's posher newspapers and I'm always amazed how infrequently their restarant critics review anywhere outside London.

I've not collated the figures and done the sums, but I reckon well over 90 per cent of their reviews concern restaurants in the capital city.

Now I know that London has more restaurants than other towns and cities in the UK, but I suspect the vast majority are fairly ordinary places that wouldn't get reviewed were they located in, say, Bradford or Barnsley or Birmingham.

When the temperature rises as high as it has today, you can usually guarantee that the smell of barbecues will pervade our neighbourhhoods.

But that hasn't happened where I live. I've been outdoors most of the day and haven't detected a scent of lighting fluid, burning charcoal or over-cooked sausages. Strange.

I wonder whether we've endured so many disappointing summers that we reckon we can no longer rely of the weather to allow us to cook and eat outdoors so have given up trying.

Smeg is a range of cookers with a high reputation and the sort of name to set some people (me included) sniggering. But right now I'm not smiling.

In the fridge is a magnificent free range chicken which I'd intended to roast for Sunday dinner.

Just across the kitchen is a Smeg cooker, the oven of which has stopped working and which will not be repaired until next week at the earliest.

The overgrown, untended and rambling wilderness that is my back garden has few flowers, but does at least have a number of fruit trees.

There are cooking apples, sweet apples, plums, damsons and greengages. Plemty of them this year, as it happens.

Which is pleasing because there's something especially satisfying about eating food from your own land.

In which universe does a combination of mandarin orange sorbet, mint foam, passion fruit, rack of lamb, various vegetables and a wheat salad seem a good idea?

This combination was served to me at a friendly backstreet restaurant in the beautiful old part of Mallorca's capital Palma this week and was horrid.

While the individual components of the dish were fine - with the exception of the mint foam which tasted like something you'd spit our after brushing your teeth with Colgate - there were simply too many flavours screaming for attention of the plate.

At least one food supplier seems to have hit on a new ruse to increase its profits by cashing in on rising oil prices.

A restaurant owner told me at Taste of Birmingham last night that the company has begun to levy a 50p fuel surcharge for each delivery.

He points out that the same lorry makes deliveries to numerous establishments in the same area so is raking in loads of dosh.