Simpsons, 20 Highfield Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham (0121 454 3434). Meal for two, including wine, £120
Simpsons, a Michelin-starred restaurant which has recently relocated from Kenilworth in Warwickshire to Edgbaston in Birmingham, has almost all the attributes you would expect to find in a restaurant at this level. There is a lounge at the front of this Georgian mansion with modern leather armchairs, and at the back there is a glass-walled dining room tacked on to the footprint of the building like the fringe on a skirt. There are tables covered with snowfields of crisp linen, shiny glassware, olives the size of plums and a wine list three inches thick. The menu offers cep risotto, monkfish with oxtail ravioli or veal sweetbreads to start. There is beef fillet or breast and leg of duck or red mullet with squid Provencal. Naturally for pudding there is a souffle, a creme brulee, a lemon tart and a trio of stuff fashioned from chocolate.
Simpsons lacks just one thing: passion. This is a restaurant run by people who don't go to restaurants. Or who, when they do (for surely they will protest) pay attention to all the wrong things. Nobody who has thought hard about what kind of experience they are trying to offer would conclude that a looped tape of 'popular classics' arranged for jazz piano trio is just the thing. I didn't want to hear a plinky-plonky arrangement of Will Young's Leave Right Now the first time, as I arrived, let alone again while waiting for pudding.
What will infuriate self-styled 'cuisinier' Andreas Antona (there is also an 'executive chef' and a 'head chef') is that I have no criticisms of the technical ability on display here. The kitchen knows how to cook its lumps of well-sourced animal protein. The monkfish was firm without being dry, and the oxtail ravioli which accompanied it had been precisely manufactured. The sweetbreads were handled sensitively, ditto the beef fillet and the duck. They can make sauces from a carefully prepared demi-glace and they know how to mash potato to an appropriate silkiness.
The problem is the total absence of character. This is a safety-first menu, engineered for the Audi and Beemer drivers of this leafy Birmingham district. Any crew of chefs with experience of top-flight kitchens could have put it together. Foamed sauce with the monkfish? Tick. Creamed ceps with the steak? Tick. That pudding menu says it all: souffle, lemon tart, creme brulee, chocolate trio. Just typing those words makes me want to nod off.
When you are the first restaurant with a Michelin history to arrive in a city as once starved for good places as Birmingham, you ought to try a little harder. I'm not talking molecular whizzbangery and innovation for innovation's sake. I mean character, distinction. Something that tells you the meal could only have been cooked at Simpsons. I'm also not keen on the huge windows that let you see through to the kitchen. I don't want to see chefs cleaning the stoves while I'm finishing my main course.
On the plus side Simpsons' arrival says good things about Birmingham in which, until two years ago, there were no quality restaurants. Then Jessica's arrived, followed by Paris at the Mailbox. When a city has enough good restaurants for me to be picky about them, it has finally landed on the gastronomic map. And that has to be a good thing.
