Brasserie, Sidbury, Worcester, (01905 611 120).
Meal for two with wine and service £80
The story so far: last year, after more than a decade in Ludlow, chef Shaun Hill closed down his Michelin-starred restaurant the Merchant House, causing foodies to rend their clothing and soothsayers to declare the advent of the End of Days as predicted in the Book of Revelation. Or at the very least, the demise of Ludlow as a gastronomic centre. (This does seem to be the case; Claude Bosi's Hibiscus, which has two stars, is also now leaving town.)
I never ate at the Merchant House, which marked me out as a complete numb nuts because people I trust said the food was worth the journey. Hill subsequently turned up as 'director of cooking' at the Montagu Arms in Beaulieu, where it wasn't. Apart from the desserts, most of the food was clumsily executed by a bunch of cooks who weren't Shaun Hill, and the waiters wore baggy white gloves as if they were about to perform an internal examination.
A few months on and Hill has resurfaced, this time in Worcester. He is now overseeing the kitchen of the Glasshouse Brasserie, a restaurant of some vintage which has recently been relocated and rebuilt. It is a shiny, angular space of grey slate floors and walls and stripy banquettes, which has been designed within an inch of its life. In the loos there are crocodile skin-textured tiles on both floor and walls, and lift music thumps throughout. It's that sort of place.
Happily, this time, the food is spot on. Last week I hyperventilated over Theo Randall's cooking, which risks making more gushing praise look like empty hyperbole. I am happy to take that risk. The pheasant pudding with which I started my meal was my dish of the year: a proper steamed suet casing, as comforting as that implies, hiding pieces of pheasant and morels. On top, for crunch, shards of crisp, salty bacon, and leaves of deep-fried sage. Underneath, the kind of dense game gravy (not a jus, never a jus) which almost had me lifting the bowl and tipping the contents straight into my gob. Instead I asked for a spoon. I'm well dragged up, me.
For the main course I chose for one of Hill's signature dishes, monkfish with cucumber and mustard sauce. At the Montagu Arms it had been underwhelming: overcooked fish and watery sauce. Here it made total sense, the dense monkfish standing up well to the slippery slices of pickled cucumber and the boisterous grain-mustard sauce. I finished with the pudding selection, which means I tried everything. The star was a perfectly executed Muscat creme caramel, but the crunchy nougatine parfait and the squidgy treacle pudding deserved serious spoon action, too.
The problem here is the service. It's welcoming. It's enthusiastic. It's also completely amateurish. All three of the tables next to me either received the wrong dishes or only parts of their order. It's the sort of place where a waitress will come up and say, 'Are you all right for drinks?' when in front of you are full glasses of wine and water. The short wine list, admirably, offers everything in third-of-a-bottle carafes. I ordered one, and what came was a glassful. I pointed this out to a waitress, who didn't have a clue what I was talking about. It took the maitre d' to twig that he had given me a half-measure.
But - and it's a huge but - the food really is good, and even if the staff don't know what they're doing, they do seem pleased to see you. And it is early days. Will Worcester become the new Ludlow? No. But it does boast a restaurant serving really nice food and in this part of England there aren't many of those.
