Imagine that. Imagine the second city of any other country having no restaurants. Imagine asking the concierge at a hotel in Los Angeles if he could recommend somewhere to eat, and being told: “Ooh, you’ve got me there.” Or Lyons. Or Turin.
I loathed Birmingham. I loathed the fat girls who tottered down Broad Street on their silly shoes. I loathed the Bullring, the haircuts and the way that accent made everyone sound subnormal. If Einstein had been from Birmingham, nobody would have taken the theory of relativity seriously.
Birmingham, until very recently, was like a rugby player’s bath after all the water has drained out: empty in the middle, with a ring of scum round the outside. But now, as you no doubt know, there’s a spotty department store and some fountains. And to complete the metamorphosis, it has two restaurants — both of which, worryingly, have been given one Michelin star.
In my experience, a single Michelin star means the owner has been concentrating on the food to the exclusion of everything else. And the food, for me at any rate, is only 10% of the dining experience. Give me a white tablecloth, good company, elegant glasses, no draughts, perfect service from waiters who never interrupt anecdotes, lots of ashtrays, clever lighting, and, frankly, I’d be happy with a cluster of skunk’s dingleberries served on a bed of wallpaper paste.
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Of course, neither of the new Michelin-starred restaurants in Birmingham allows smoking in the dining room, so we used a pin to select Simpsons in Edgbaston, asked if we could come at 8.30pm, and were told no, because there were some people coming then. In other words, you come when we say, you don’t smoke and you will be allowed to genuflect at the altar of our chef’s magnificence. Well, we all thought as we headed up the M40, this is a bit like going to church.
Of course, AA Gill would have taken Elle Macpherson and the Pope, but, this being me, I took my wife, who’s a brunette, and a couple you’ve never heard of. There was Kate, who thought that going to Birmingham was “terribly exciting”, and Will, who says his favourite food is jelly.
Simpsons has a car park with marked-out spaces for a dozen or so cars. Quite what cars they had in mind when they were painting the lines, I can’t imagine. Not our 4WD Volvo, that’s for sure. And there’s a similar lack of room in the bar. When the man on the next table decided that what he’d really like for a starter was his girlfriend and set about eating her face, I was so close, I could hear every slurp. Mind you, she was a lot more appetising than most of the stuff on the menu.
The real puzzler was the way the puddings and the main courses seemed to have been mixed together. So the roast coquelet came with hazelnuts and sherry-vinegar sauce, the pigeon came with pear, and the venison with fig marmalade and juniper-berry sauce. I know it’s a personal thing, but I don’t like sweet and savoury in my mouth at the same time. It’s why I wouldn’t ever choose trout-flavoured ice cream. Or Eton mess garnished with cocktail sausages.
Still, I thought I’d give this mix’n’match cuisine a bash and started with seared duck foie gras with — wait for it, a roast banana and some banana purée. Strangely, the combination tasted like a Zip fire lighter. But then my wife’s seared scallop in Indian spices, with a caramelised cauliflower purée, was like Vim. Of course, your usual correspondent, who understands the history and science of food, would know why our dinner tasted of various household products. “Fig marmalade in February?” he’d scoff, knowledgeably. “Well, of course it’ll taste like Fairy Liquid.” But all I can do is tell you it was horrid.
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Kate’s main course was the big disaster, though, because it seemed to have the same flavour and nutritional value as one of the napkins. Me? I ate an entire pig. Its blood, its belly, its feet, the lot. That was good(ish), as was my wife’s mushroom risotto — although her green salad didn’t turn up for ages and then, when it did, was actually made up mainly of tomatoes. Will didn’t know what he was eating because he’d burnt his tongue that morning on some railway tea.
All in all, then, a fairly disastrous culinary experience, which is of no consequence to me because I don’t care about the food particularly. What I did care about, however, was the overbright lighting and the Herculean obsequiousness of the staff. The head waiter was a clever and decent cove, but the others were way, way too effusive. They need to relax, dim the lights and provide some bloody ashtrays.
But here’s the thing. As I retired to the bar afterwards, I had a chat with some of my fellow diners, all of whom were BMW M3-driving, golf-playing local businessmen — and they absolutely loved the place. They loved the notion of telling their colleagues the next day that they had eaten in a Michelin-starred restaurant and that it had cost £60 a head.
And this is my problem. I am used to eating out in the capital and was using metropolitan standards to judge a restaurant that’s in Birmingham. That’s unfair. Yes, Simpsons would last about five minutes in London. But how long do you think The Ivy would last in Birmingham? They’d be horrified at the tattiness of the customers’ clothes and disgusted to find shepherd’s pie and fish and chips on the menu.
Eating out in Birmingham, or any big provincial city, is not something you do because you can’t be bothered to cook. It’s something you get dressed up for. So you want it to be formal. You want to be treated like a king and lit like a film star while they bring you mountains of incomprehensible food that you couldn’t make at home, even if you wanted to.
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Pigeon and pear? Banana and duck liver? That’s far too pompous for me. But when you’ve lived in a city that has had no restaurants at all, it’s the bee’s knees — served on a bed of black-olive gnocchi and flying-fish wasabi.
Simpsons
20 Highfield Road, Edgbaston; 0121 454 3434
Lunch, Mon-Sun, 12.30pm-2pm. Dinner, Sun-Thu, 7pm-9.30pm; Fri-Sat, 7pm-10pm