I went to Birmingham in search of a good meal. Instead I was served a good idea, and they are not the same thing. Anybody who has stayed at a branch of the Malmaison hotel chain will not be surprised that they are responsible for the good idea. A lot of what Malmaison does is good. Their hotels boast a modicum of style, a black-polo-neck-and-red-lipstick flash of design flare amid the horror of Corby trouser presses and breakfast buffets festering in their own fat which is on offer at most other British inner-city hotels.
Malmaison also takes food seriously, promoting their brasseries as stand-alone ventures, and to good effect. The food is a clutter of British and French stuff - think fish soup or game terrine to start, with duck breast or braised lamb shoulder shepherd's pie to follow - and on the few occasions I've eaten at one, I have not left the place twitching with homicidal rage as I do when I eat in the restaurants of other hotel chains. It's more than workaday, less than accomplished. They are to eating out what Davina McCall is to television presenting: slick and professional, occasionally diverting but never astounding. I mean this as a compliment.
At the beginning of this year, Malmaison introduced a new 'Home Grown and Local' lunch menu at just £15.50 for three courses. The premise is straightforward: a short menu of dishes made with ingredients from within a 30-mile radius of each branch. Big business supports the little guy and all that, Waitrose- style. This presented me with a startling possibility. If I went to the Birmingham branch and ate well from this local menu, I could prove once and for all that there is good food available in the West Midlands (outside of the estimable Jessica's). This would be a good day's work for me, because I have eaten badly in that part of the country far more often than I can possibly deserve. I mean, I know I'm a horrible person, and that the thing I did to the tadpoles in my back garden when I was six with the hose pipe and the twine deserves punishment. But really!
So it drives me nuts that lunch didn't go according to the script. It started well. Actually, it started brilliantly. The staff were genuinely friendly in a manner that suggested they hadn't learnt their people skills from a wipe-clean set of cue cards. The room, though a little heavy on the black - the staff wear black, the floor is black, the tables are black, the dividing slatted screens are black, the banquettes are upholstered in dark- brown leather which might as well be black - had a jolly Friday afternoon buzz. It was full of middle management trying to work out how drunk they could afford to be on the last afternoon of the week. I was brought great crusty French bread and with it a dish of proper tapenade.
I was also charmed by my starter: a generous disc of Malvern goat's cheese, breaded and deep-fried to a firm crispness without completely obliterating the cheese, served with a mouth-filling, molasses-and-treacle-flavoured pear chutney on a leaf salad. Hurrah for Malmaison! Hurrah, even more, for the West Midlands!
And then it all went wrong. Still trying to purge the memory of Langtry's, I ordered the toad in the hole, made with 'award-winning Lashford sausages'. I could tell you lots about Lashford's because the menu comes with notes on producers, but that would eat into my griping space, so I won't other than to say the sausages themselves were impressive porkers. The rest of it was a disaster. The Yorkshire was floppy and dull. A good Yorkshire pudding should be a cartoonish object, bigger than can ever be necessary, like a Hollywood starlet's collagened lips, only brown and crispy (somewhere, that simile fell apart). It was doused in an onion gravy with all the grace and subtlety of Marmite. I ordered a side of creamed cabbage with bacon, and though the vegetable was fine, the bacon was in big, fatty, undercooked chunks, complete with hard, bristled skin. You know how it pains me to leave any part of the pig uneaten, but this I couldn't manage.
At the end I had a 'spring roll of apple' - a cinnamon-spruced apple puree, wrapped in pastry and fried - and it was as bad an idea in the mouth as it sounds on the plate. It was not a fritter and it was certainly not a spring roll. It was just a disappointing finish to a poor meal. To be optimistic for a moment, Malmaison has multiple chains and presumably, therefore, multiple local menus drawing on a plethora of different local ingredients, and some of them will have to be good. Sadly, however, the one I tried wasn't. Experience tempts me to suggest this has something to do with Birmingham, but I can't bear the thought of all those grinding emails from Edgbaston. So instead I'll say it was just bad luck. It's not what I'm thinking, though.
