Damascena, Moseley

So, that award that I’ve been begging people to vote for me on.  I won it.  Officially Best Food Blog in the Midlands for 2017, two years after starting this little old heap of rubbish as a bit of fun.  I happen to love writing this blog; it’s a diary of my hobby, a chance to vent and also to give praise to those that deserve it.  It’s given me headaches, arguably broken up a long term relationship and definitely given me a new partner who shares the same love that I do for edible bits on a plate.  For that alone it is worth it.  It’s opened more doors than it’s shut, introduced me to new friends I’d have never met, and given me a few new enemies.  I’m chuffed to bits that I won.  If you voted for me then I sincerely Thank You.  Honestly, the support I received was genuinely overwhelming and far more than I deserved.

Now enough of the humbleness – that shit doesn’t suit me one bit.  Let’s get back on to the food.  I won this award on Monday night, an evening that cascaded badly into the very early hours of Tuesday with a collection of people that should know better, but rarely do.  When we finally awake the girlfriend decides to treat me to a celebratory lunch a very short stroll away at Damascena.  She does this for two reasons; 1) It is the closest option and she has tiny little legs, and 2) she has impeccable taste.  Of course she does, she’s with me.

Damascena used to be Moseley’s worst kept secret.  We’d whisper it’s name and flock there together for mint tea.  I once sat in there during the depths of winter and watched a man in shorts tell his first date about his troubled relationship with meat.  It’s that kind of place.  I love it, but so does everybody else:  The place is always full, even when they recently opened a second branch in the city centre.  It’s why I used to stick to ordering it on Deliveroo instead of fighting the crowds.

We order way too much food that still fails to hit £25.00 for the two of us.  I insist on the M’sakhan because I always do.  The long marinated brown bits of chicken thigh have tang and pepperiness from sumac and olive oil which seeps on to the flatbread underneath.   Roll it up and chomp away.  Another flatbread is smeared with a course mixture of spiced minced lamb.  It’s pungent and aggressive and possibly the best £3.15 you will ever spend.

I’ve never had a savoury pastry here before and I know now why.  Its a weak link on the strongest of chains, the cheese and dried mint mixture too bland to threaten anything.  A comment is passed that it tastes like the cheese stuffed pizza crusts which is too accurate and observant to ever come from my mouth.  The proper treatment for bland cheese follows; halloumi marinated and charred, so that the middle only offers relief from flavour.  The pops of pomegranate from the sweet and sharp salad it comes with are a lovely contrast.

A mezze defeats us and we ask for it to be packaged to take home.  Later on we take the folds of supple flatbread to the best hummus in the city.  We fight over roasted potatoes turned amber by hot spices before dredging them through creamy m’tabal.  Baba Ghanuuj is another home for the flatbread, the aubergine deftly spiked with garlic and showered with lemon acidity.  There are peppers and tomatoes roasted until the texture has merged into one, heavily seasoned and softly spiced.  It’s a lot to take in and we almost forget to pick at the lightly dressed olives.  £7.95 will buy you all of this.

It’s taken me a long time to properly write about this place, partially down to laziness, though mostly because I shared that same dreadful opinion that us Moseley folk should keep it to ourselves.  It’s a frankly ridiculous notion; food this good should be embraced and shared across the city.  Damascena get flavour as good as anywhere.  Now get in the queue and try it yourself.

9/10

 

 

 

Rajdoot, Birmingham

We live in a society that isn’t kind to restaurants.  One that eats them up and spits them out.  One that is so fickle it could be a contestant on Love Island.  A staggering 90% of restaurants in this country fail within the first twelve months. Why? I don’t bloody know, I’m not a restauranteur; I’m an over opinionated twerp with a keyboard. But the ones that I have seen demise with my own eyes have been poorly judged concepts (lobsters), rotten locations (sea food restaurants above Café bloody Rouge) and just bad luck (Comida, you were brilliant and you’ll be back). It almost puts me off my dream of a little Italian restaurant of my own. Almost. The restaurant business is not a lottery, it’s a cleverly thought out line of ticked boxes and processes, as my good friend Barry Sherwin has pointed out to me on many an occasion. And he knows a thing or two about opening these places. So there.

Once past that opening year it’s no guarantee that it’s an easy ride. Profitability and longevity are the two things that the industry craves, and to achieve this takes hard work and constant reflection. The machine chugs along, driven by trends and an ever changing customer focus. React or die, it’s as simple as that. Take a chameleon approach and you might see two, maybe five, even ten or twenty years if you’re really lucky. But fifty? There can’t be too many successful businesses that even dream of reaching half a century. Rajdoot have, which is a crazy number given that I would have been but a twinkle in the eye of the raging hormonal body of my fifteen year old pubescent father when they first opened in 1967. I struggle to comprehend pieces of furniture that are fifty years old, never mind places to dine at. How they have achieved this is too much for this pea brain to take in.

Maybe a good starting place for an explanation would be the service. It’s old school slick, customer orientated and polished to a high sheen. We are seated in a plush waiting area and watered, given menus and then taken to a sultry dining room way bigger than it first appears, which is a talent they share with me.  Our corner table is adorned with thick white linen, preloaded with crisp poppadum’s and a spritely chopped onion salad.  A singular candle sits on one corner, more a romantic gesture than a lighting requirement.  At first I assumed they were going all out because they knew I was coming, though it would later transpire they had no clue at all about me.  I like that.  They go to this effort for everyone.  Which probably goes someway to explaining the buzzy dining room on a midweek night.

What also explains the mostly full room is the food, which, on our meal here puts it in the upper echelons of its type in the city.  Its wonderfully traditional, rich and decadent.  We share a platter to start that is probably too much food to successfully proportion our meal.  Like we care.  We each devour the mini fillet of chicken shaslik we have each been portioned to, and make light work of crisp samosa with the most fragrant of potato and pea filling.  We cloak batons of shish kebab with onion kulcha which, with the ingenious addition of mint yogurt, turns it into the most delicious lamb sandwich you could wish for.  Only the tandoori chicken lets the team down for being on the dry side.  It still gets eaten.

We go for two of the chefs recommendations for main.  He clearly knows what he is talking about.  On paper the Murgh Kebab Masala looks like a tarted-up description of a chicken tikka masala.  Thankfully, it is nothing of the sort.  The kebab is a tightly packed mixture of minced chicken and herbs that have been skewered and blasted through the tandoor until the outside is charred and the centre is just cooked through.  The sauce is nutty and complex, heavy on the spices that trouble the nasal passages, not the other ones.  I just wish there was a little more of it.  I want to glaze the supple garlic naan with sauces this good, and whizz it the individual grains of pilau rice.  The other main was a lamb chilli bhuna that doesn’t disappoint.  It’s heady and spicy, littered with chilli and chunks of pepper.  The tender lamb is a testament to the virtues of patience.  We wipe the bowl clean with the last shreds of the naan.

They make both gulab jamun and kulfi in-house here, so we request a smaller portion of each to try both.  Indian desserts are often a massive disappoint, but these were lovely.  The gulab jamun was not over soaked in syrup, the kulfi delicate and sprinkled with crushed pistachios.  They work surprisingly well in the company of each other.  If you can find room for dessert, I suggest you harass them into doing the same for you.

I’d not eaten at the Rajdoot before this.  I guess that I’d been scared that a business open for that length must be old fashioned and reliant on the aging regulars for custom.  I couldn’t be any more wrong.  It’s done fifty years because they serve precise and comforting Indian food with the sort of service that shames many a Michelin starred restaurant.  It is rightly a stalwart of its kind in the city.  I already cannot wait to go back for more.

8/10

I was invited to dine at Rajdoot by Delicious PR

Adil’s Balti, via Deliveroo

The Deliveroo menu for Adil’s is littered with warnings, instructions, and goading’s for us feeble Westerners. Are you the kind of fool that orders mango and lime at Nando’s? I pity you if so, but you can order the Maliah which is ‘suitable for Kurma eaters’ whilst hanging your head in shame. Those ‘feeling brave’ are instructed to order a Vindaloo, a statement that usually makes me as brave as I am stupid. And then there is the curries described as ‘not for the faint hearted’, a clever turn of words that appeals to idiots like me. I can’t turn that stuff down; it’s a red rag to a bull, a picture of Princess Diana to The Daily Mail. It’s the stuff I live for, the fuzzy wave of pure heat that pulsates through my veins and escapes via sweat on my brow. By telling me I that it is not for the faint hearted I have to order it, despite knowing all too well that my body will hate me for it. Which, 16 hours on, I can confirm that it does.

So, yeah, Adil’s Balti. Those not familiar should know that it is the original home of the Balti in Birmingham, maybe even the UK. It resides in the Balti Triangle, where nostalgic fiftysomethings go for a ‘real Balti’, armed with a six pack of Carling. All of this is fine. I go there, quite a bit actually. It’s dependable and consistent and they do chilli bhaji’s that might even trump the naan as the greatest thing to dunk into a curry.  I’ve written at length about it back in the early days of this blog.  If you were one of the two people that read it back then congratulations, if not, please let me tell you about the recent meal I had courtesy of those dandy people at Deliveroo.

Pani Puri is the first thing to enter our gigantic gobs.  The puffed up shells arrive intact as we crack open the top and pour in the spiced water to neck in one go.  They are delicious, all umami and spice.  Paneer tikka is charred on the heavy side and is all the better for it.  The bland cheese has taken on all the marinade, transforming it from a nothing to something extraordinary.  We fight over the last piece.

 

The Balti’s do not disappoint. A lamb Balti Jalfrazzi is the ideal bastardization of complex masala and spice. The bite of pepper is welcome with the softly braised meat and heat that grows on the palate. And then there is my curry, the Balti Chicken Chilli Masala that I have been teased in to ordering with the provocative wording. It as subtle as The Suns disdain for Corbyn, a punch in the mouth of chilli; as fiery as a hungry Jeromy Clarkson. It is relentless in the best possible sense, a full out attack on the body. I love it, even if the look on my face says otherwise. The meat is tender, the sauce pungent and vibrant. I use the pilau rice to coax the last of the sauce on to the fork because a yellow garlic naan, the colour of a radioactive warning sign, goes untouched.

I’ll end with the gushing bit, so if me sucking on the proverbial nipple of Deliveroo isn’t your bag, please close down the window now and resume your normal duties. It’s meals like this that make me love Deliveroo in the way that I do – restaurant quality food delivered to my front door in under half an hour. It allows me to be lazy, to watch TV and eat dinner in my pants without compromise. To treat myself to one of the better curries in this part of the city without leaving the door. It’s the most convenient of treats. When you can get somewhere the calibre of Adil’s I fail to see why you would ever consider another option.

Deliveroo supplied the credit for this meal.  For money off your first order, please see the following link roo.it/simonc3898

Pieminister, Birmingham

My history with Pieminister goes back some way.  I used to buy them so frequently from Waitrose that a former colleague of mine, a lady by the name of Penny Stubbs, wrote to them and got me a signed cookbook for my birthday.  I was the original groupie, a V.I.Pie whose purchase was always one Chicken of Aragon for me, and always a Heidi for the former vegetarian former partner (*shakes fist in jubilation/anger*).  The girls in Harborne Waitrose used to poke fun at my inflexibility.  I once ate six of their pies in four days at Isle of Wight festival.  Cut me back in those days and I bled pie.  I like pie.  More particularly, I like Pieminister.

So this is a difficult one for me, because by all accounts my relationship with Pieminister should have led to it being the greatest opening in Birmingham since my mothers legs parted and I popped out back in ’82.  The reality is that it left me yearning for my own pie, with my own accessories, in my own home.

We cut straight to the chase and dive in with the main event.  My dining companion likes her Moo pie, which is generous in beef filling.  She does not like the mash which is oddly floury and bland, or the beef and port gravy that is bitter and gloopy.

I try one I have not eaten from the supermarket.  A green Thai chicken curry pie that is oddly muted in flavour.  It needs more punch of seasoning, more kick of chilli, an elbow to the head of vibrancy.  It basically needs a Thai boxing lesson.  I take fries at a supplement with chilli seasoning that are the best thing on the plate.  A jug of chicken gravy should never have been there (it was supposed to come with tzatziki which eventually arrived when I asked), and I wish it hadn’t.  It was acrid and destroyed anything it came in contact with.  Jalapeños are ordered as an addition that I don’t require in hindsight.

We skip dessert and finish off the cocktails that are good value if you catch them at the 2-4-1 period like we did.  I leave a little jaded.  Like the moment I have dreamt of for the last six years ends with this.  The fact is I still love a Pieminister – they are easily the best pie in any supermarket.  I will just stick to eating them at home with my overly buttery mash and thick caramelised onion gravy.  I have safety there, where I know that the salt pot is easily within reach and I have two firm hands on my potato ricer.  That’s where the good stuff happens.  But for now the dream is over.  Only a shut supermarket and a craving would see me go back.

5/10

Pieminister sent me a voucher to cover a proportion of the bill

And now the plug. I am up for Best Food Blog at the forthcoming MFDH Awards. If you are reading this before the 4^th June please give me a vote here http://www.mfdhawards.co.uk/vote-now/