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'It has the hallmarks of something that could be rolled out to a town near you. Be afraid'
I'm asking my Brummie chum where he eats in the city and he says, "Manchester or London." This seems a bit harsh, especially since we're in what looks like a genuinely exciting addition to Birmingham's burgeoning dining scene, and it's neither balti nor Michelin-botherer.
Actually, I'm not entirely sure what it is meant to be. The website announces blithely: "We've taken inspiration from the grooviest country kitchens." Would those be ones sponsored by champagne salesmen? Staff wear Moët-embroidered tops, there are Veuve Clicquot cushions on the attractive, canal-side outdoor seating and flashy bottles of Bolly among the window display's Colman's mustard tins and couthy provisions.
But it looks fresh and appealing, plant-filled and bright; the staff are sparky and friendly; and we can see a huge grill thing in the open kitchen (it's a "barbacoa", a pure charcoal indoor grill and, according to the verbose menu, the UK's only one). Lovely, lovely, tra-la-la.
We settle in for a top meal. I'm even prepared to overlook the overdone Fleet Street theming, all newsprint and blackboards promising "Daily's" [sic]. It's Fleet Street, Birmingham, chaps, on the fringes of the Jewellery Quarter, not London's former heartland of journalistic excess. The menu talks its sweet talk: "Fantastic meat suppliers… happy animals… Hereford and Dexter beef… farm on the north Yorkshire moors." They mix a fine, spicy bloody mary and the Cloudy Bay is frosty. And then the food arrives. And my Birmingham native pal becomes… no, not outraged, downright incandescent.
There's pâté, grey and weirdly runny, with impenetrable sealant. ("Mattessons and candlewax," rages the pal.) It's bitter, as though the livers haven't been properly trimmed. Baby back ribs arrive slathered with something we're about to see a lot of: tooth-rottingly sweet, brown gloop. There are a number of sauces on the menu, and we endure several, but they're all riffs on that gloop. It's as if they have vats of the stuff in the back, in a darker, Nibelungen-run kitchen hidden behind the showcase open job, ready to customise into "FSK #1 meat sauce", "tonkatsu" or "Diane". The rib meat is fibrous and overcooked, not in a falling-off-the-bone way, but in a lodged-in-your-teeth-all-day way. Calamari have the air of items released from decades of cryogenic freezing. They loll off the fork, as flaccid and weary as a Playboy magnate. Their "aïoli" simply isn't: it's a lurid yellow dollop that's never met a clove of garlic in its miserable life.
It gets worse: a fine bit of steak, nicely charred and pink, has a new kind of torture inflicted on it: "coffee and chipotle bbq" sauce, aka brown gloop that tastes as though it's had Nescafé and Tabasco flung in. There's a side dish of cabbage and leeks. I can't really complain, because they're just that: ignorant great chunks of the veg boiled in water, no other cooking or seasoning. Chips are pallid and wan. Most heinous are "barbacoa-grilled lamb cutlets": unrendered fat, no crisp, caramelly bits. They sit on vegetables billed as roasted but virtually raw, including "crushed" potatoes. The only thing that's crushed here is the spuds' amour propre. They purport to be served with "redcurrant jus", but guess what? Yup, brown gloop, differentiated from its colleagues by being even sweeter. We don't have puddings. Our insulin levels couldn't stand it.
The depressing thing is that, underneath the cackhandedness, the lumpen crowd-pleasing, there's evidence of fine produce. But it simply doesn't stand a chance against the force of the concept. And the towering might of the gloop. Fleet Street Kitchen is the brainfart of a bunch of businessmen who are colonising Summer Row with their other outlets, Mechu and Après. It has the hallmarks of something that could be rolled out to a town near you. Be afraid. As the pal points out, "This monstrosity should be bundled into a sack and rolled out straight into the canal."
• Fleet Street KitchenFleet Street, Islington Gates, Summer Row, Birmingham, 0121-236 0100. Open daily, noon-midnight (7pm Sun). About £35 a head, plus drinks and service.
Food 3/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Value for money 2/10
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