Review: Mint in Sutton Coldfield
Mint
52 Thornhill Road, Little Aston, Sutton Coldfield 0121 353 0488
Verdict 6/10
Tracking down a tasty treat in Sutton that’s well worth the wait.
I have just had lunch courtesy of what may be the hardest working kitchen in the West Midlands.
Mint, which is in Staffordshire, or possibly Walsall, or possibly Sutton Coldfield, depending on how happy you are with your own sense of social standing, is run with a “never say die” attitude, and that is greatly to be admired. As is much else about this place.
We went for Sunday lunch. I initially tried to book for the preceding Sunday but was told it was full.
Rather than being disappointed, I was filled with cheer because it means Mint is restaurant to which diners return, and I can say, hand on heart, that I don’t return to many and I hope you don’t either because a lot of them don’t deserve your patronage.
However, joy turned to trepidation when I learned the restaurant also opens, from 10am to 5pm, for Sunday brunch. The late-brekkie sounds marvellous – Manx kippers, eggs Benedict, omelette Arnold Bennett, chorizo and eggs and the full Monty, featuring Clonakilty black pudding. No revolting hash browns either. For £14.50, they’ll throw in a glass of Champagne.
Then there is the fact that Mint opens for dinner on Sunday night and the menu here isn’t just a gentle tweak with lunch, the Yorkshire pud cast aside for puy lentils. There are completely different dishes, including “18-hour blade of beef” and a rabbit stew with faggot.
This then is a Sunday service dreamed up by the criminally insane.
Having eaten at Mint, I am not worried about the food – but I am worried about the sanity of the chef. Although when I say worried, obviously I’m not really that bothered because everyone knows chefs are bonkers, working crazy hours, trawling the internet at 3am for inspiration, culinary or otherwise.
Insanity is part of the job spec. Even so, Matt Warburton, who mans the stoves at Mint, takes bonkerdom to new levels with his work ethic. The place only shuts on Mondays and I hope he doesn’t burn himself out. Greater Birmingham needs people like Warburton in the kitchen, not the asylum.
I’ve not met him, although I think I spied his right ear and left knuckle when I walked past the door of the steamy basement kitchen. (There’s a picture of his left ear on the website, incidentally.) I don’t envy Warburton’s job, below stairs, in the summer. In fact, I don’t envy it in February.
He is an accomplished chef and will be going head-to-head with some of the best young professionals in the country at the British Culinary Federation/Aubrey Allen Chef of the Year competition on March 1.
Finalists include Matthew Cheal, from Simpsons in Edgbaston, and the judges include someone called Glynn Purnell. So there. For once there’s a news hook to one of these review, the first in more than three years, and I’m feeling rather chuffed.
Mint is situated on the cusp of Sutton Park, just down the road from Sutton Coldfield Golf Club, whose members are considerably richer than yow. Still, you can be considerably poorer than me and afford to splash out on a meal at Mint.
The three-course Sunday lunch offers outstanding value at £16.95. Single courses of mediocre grub are regularly turned out for more than the price of this inclusive carte, and they aren’t cooked anywhere near as well as here.
From the four starters, we tried the white onion soup and the oak smoked salmon, served with salmon mousse and crab beignets (which actually was singular, rather than the specified plural).
After waiting half an hour for the appetisers to arrive, I feared the balloon was about to go up. I loathe waiting for food, I turn psychotic.
No chef is that good. I’d just read about a Michelin-star restaurant in Hong Kong where diners have to wait for three hours. More fool them.
I, at least, had a good glass of white Rhone and a roll (a bread one, not a sexual one). Sally, who is gluten-free and wasn’t drinking (she was driving) had a tough time trying to extract nutritional content from her water.
The soup, when it arrived, was lovely with good natural sweetness and a restorative, rustic texture. It was an object lesson in how to make simple, inexpensive ingredients pull together for the greater good. The salmon was fine, the mousse a little cheesy and the beignet unremarkably uncrabby.
Main courses were thunderously good. The loin of Packington pork was all sweetness and light and my pheasant breast with prune and Armagnac was a delight.
I had ordered it because, masochistically, I was convinced the flesh would be dried out. But the breast was plump, moist and lightly gamey. Very well cooked with good gravy, too. I’d have liked more flavour from the Armagnac, which I couldn’t really detect, and the food would have benefited from coming up from the kitchen a little quicker. Super veg and first-class roast potatoes.
Elsewhere in our party, Polly and Olivia had the roast beef, proper sirloin, which again was well cooked. But here there was confusion. Mint was newcomer of the year for 2009 in the Taste of Staffordshire Good Food Awards (and runner-up as restaurant of the year).
I imagine the sourcing of local produce impressed the judges. On the dinner menu, I noted the rabbit was local, as was the wood pigeon (from Drayton Bassett). The cheese board was stocked with lovely goo from Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire. All commendable stuff.
Unfortunately, the waitress didn’t know where the beef was from. She said she’d ask. She may well have done, but failed to relay the answer.
For desserts, the black forest trifle, served in kilner jars, was fine, although darker choc would have worked better. The treacle tart came with vanilla ice cream, so being stupid I asked for fresh cream. I say stupid because I tasted Sally’s plain serving of ice cream and it was delicious. Someone had clearly put ice cream on my plate and then removed it, cunningly hiding the sludge with the milk jug. They should have started with a new plate, really.
Now the bar for treacle tart has been set ridiculously high by my late granny, whose classic tart required the consumption of at least three pints of water to quell the post-munch thirst. The Mint tart had excellent pastry and was very good, but too subtle for me.
With three glasses of wine, a few soft drinks, two coffees and a tea – and 10 per cent discretionary service – the bill for four came in at £100. That makes Sunday lunch at Mint – wherever it is – one of the best deals around.
Warburton together with owner Dan Ralley have created, arguably, the best neighbourhood restaurant of this class in the area. The food is admirably honest, showing that classic modern British cuisine doesn’t have to disappear up its own backside.
The cooking and friendly ambiance isn’t a million miles from Bib Gourmand territory and goodness knows Birmingham and its environs could do with more of this style of cuisine.
Highly recommended. And I don’t say that often.
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