VISIT BIRMINGHAM!

In a spat reported by the BBC, Times writer & food critic Giles Coren said "if I'm going out of London to eat it's more productive to leave the country." This in sneering reference to the food in Birmingham, which seems to have won praise elsewhere. It turns out that there are FOUR restaurants in Birmingham that have received kudos from the Michelin guide. London has 62 Michelin-starred restaurants.
There are five in Dublin, three in Bath, and three in Bristol.

What's almighty flabberghasting is that there are any at all.
In the British Isles.

Yes, I know. That's an undeserved sneer; Britain has come a long way since the darkness of the twentieth century, and they've learned how to cook. It IS a miracle.
Credit for that development goes to the increased availability of quality ingredients and the British penchant for travelling to warm places in the Mediterranean when on holiday. Exposure and being able to purchase a variety of excellent products inevitably inspires.
This is not your grandmother's England.
Rationing ended quite a while ago.
And the Victorians are dead.
Along with their tastes.

The BBC article referenced above is Food fight: Is there culinary life outside London?, published on the 5th of February.
It makes for some interesting reading.


"Sorry, I've eaten in its posh ones and they're not my sort of thing at all -- just a bit rubbish."


I'm sure that's quite unfair. After all, Giles Coren is British, a Londoner, and a food critic, and therefore beyond a shadow of doubt a repulsive and stuck-up twit. A frightful snob.



Every time I've been to London, I have ended up with both acid indigestion and constipation that tormented me for several days. This was entirely due to the food, because no matter how irritating the natives of a place are, they seldom affect my bowels. Londoners, while almost universally loathsome, are no more remarkable in that regard than the people of Oakland or Marin County. The next time I visit Blighty, I am resolved to travel north to Birmingham.


BIRMINGHAM, MUSLIM, FOX

Per well-publicised reports, there are an inordinate number of Pakistanis or some such in the city, to such great extent that delicate Americans fear to go there lest they be forced to eat curry. Given that our diet is largely based on ketchup and potatoes, perhaps that fear is well-founded.

Nothing, I imagine, could be worse for the standard-issue white Anglo-Saxon Protestant than a healthy diet full of flavour.

That, of course, explains our school lunch programme. After a steady routine of blah canteen food for several years, damned well everyone has acquired very white tastes.
More than our ideals and the 'Great American Dream', this holds us together, and unifies us against a world we fear and do not know.
It is the most English aspect of American civilization.

Having grown up without the blessings of either Londonian snobbism or Yankee culinary paranoia, Birmingham sounds like a fine place.
If nothing else, the Desi khanna ought to be excellent.
Nice roti-shoti: chawal, dal, aur parotha.
Obviously achar is available.
Nimbu and aam.
Laziz!


伯明翰 — 唐人街

A further curiosity, the Wing Yip grocery market chain (榮業行 'wing yip hong') was founded in Birmingham by Woon Wing Yip (葉煥榮 'Yap wun wing') in 1969. It sells edible food. For people.
There is a Chinatown there, with Cantonese restaurants and dim sum, so there must be a Chinese bakery also, as well as a chachanteng or similar place where one can get Hong Kong style milk-tea.
These are important considerata.






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