Where food does the talking
Food critic Richard McComb enjoys an audience with forthright Michelin-star chef Richard Turner.
Timing is everything for chefs and, as I await his grand entrance, Richard Turner’s proves to be impeccable.
I am waiting at the back of his restaurant, in a car park off Harborne High Street, when a shop assistant from an adjoining businesses pops out for a quick fag.
As she opens the door, sound wafts over from the in-store stereo in Cards-U-Like-It. It is playing Snap!’s 90s techno-dance hit The Power, as in “I’ve got the power ...”
On cue, Turner spins into the car park in a vintage Fiat.
Don’t be deceived by the Italian rust bucket or the fact that this Michelin-starred chef is wearing beach attire (beige knee-high cargo pants off-set with flip flops).
If Richard Turner was that bothered about external frippery he wouldn’t have set up shop here in the first place, in suburban Brum.
Sandwiched between a charity shop and a hairdressers, just two short hops from Kerry Katona’s favourite frozen food emporium, we are not in the usual locale of gentrified haute cuisine.
For Turner, it is all about the food. The ambiance of his eponymous restaurant is important to the former £25-a-week YTS trainee and the chef/patron is fulsome in his praise (and rightly so) of his front-of-house team. But everything begins and ends with what he delivers on the plate.
And what he delivers is very good. I had the good fortune to be invited to two private dinners at Turners within a matter of weeks.
One was an Italian wine dinner, run in conjunction with Connolly’s wine merchants, and the other was a showcase dinner for international chefs and delegates attending a meeting of the Delice food network.
Among the foie gras and squab pigeon, the turbot and the langoustine, a dish of roast sirloin of veal with caramelised sweetbreads and summer truffle was a stand-out.
The little touches were done very well too, so a ringlet of squid, the consumption of which is too often comparable to sucking a Greek fisherman’s ear, almost out-punched for juiciness and flavour the Ross-shire scallops.
The reason for this is excruciating uncomplicated: Turner believes ingredients should speak of themselves, not of the chef’s ego.
“This is going to sound really stupid but food should taste like it should taste,” he says.
“It should be properly seasoned, it should be cooked well. Obviously, there’s an awful lot of cooks now that are looking at, I hate the word, molecular gastronomy. ‘We cook at this temperature and we do this and we do that ...’
“What we do here is we cook things properly. If you are sitting down for dinner and I give you scallops with asparagus and something else you know the scallops are cooked for you, the asparagus is cooked for you.
‘‘We don’t blanch off a lot of asparagus before service and then reheat it. We cook it for you. That’s probably one of the reasons we struggle for staff because it puts an awful lot of pressure at the point of service. But I think you can tell the difference, I sincerely do. We try and do everything as late as possible so it is as fresh as possible.”
