Restaurant Review: Henry's Cantonese Restaurant, Birmingham
Henry's Cantonese Restaurant - 5/10
27 St Paul’s Square, Birmingham, B3 1RB. T: 0121 200 1136
There are lots of different ways of choosing a restaurant, from colleagues’ and friends’ recommendations to guides and, quite possibly, newspaper reviews.
However, for my most recent dining experience I adopted an unconventional approach. It’s a method I have not deployed before and one that I think I won’t use again, not because it isn’t informative but if I do become a slave to it there will only be a handful of establishments that fulfil my selection criteria – namely, not getting a rat in my soup.
I refer to the website www.scoresonthedoors.org.uk, which isn’t, as you might think, a celebration of all things Bruce Forsyth, but is in fact an online library of individual food inspection reports, posted by environmental health bods and “suitably qualified enforcement officers.”
The website, in which councils blow the whistle on practices such as defrosting chickens in washing up bowls, uses a star rating, which is actually an “H” rating, H standing for hygiene.
No Hs, or one H, means insect infestation may be just an unscrubbed chopping board away. There are stories of “unmentionables” lurking in the larder but I won’t mention them any further because it will put you off your lunch.
I turned to www.scoresonthedoors.org.uk for one good reason: my wife told me, robustly, she didn’t want our daughters contracting food poisoning before they returned to school for the new academic year. In more than three years of reviewing for the Birmingham Post, I have been ill, due to restaurant scoff, on three occasions, so that’s roughly once a year. (Alcohol-related illnesses have been more prevalent but I have only myself to blame for that and I have learned my lesson, albeit it’s a lesson I’ve been learning since I was a teenager.)
I unquestionably accepted that a bout of dysentery might hamper our girls’ study of introductory trigonometry and Latin declension, so I ran some background checks on a few Chinese restaurants. If I’m honest, the ratings weren’t great on www.scoresonthedoors.org.uk. It was far from a “good game, good game,” as Brucie might say.
Now five Hs would be great, of course. Four would be fine. Being a man of the world, and a veteran of French markets, I’d settled for three. But when you get into one H territory you can’t help but ask yourself a few pertinent questions, like: “Do I really want gut rot?”
It is accepted the inspections relate to a specific date in time and as the website points out, “the score may not be representative of the overall, long-term food hygiene standards of the business and should not be relied upon as a guide to food safety or food quality” – which rather calls into question the whole point of the exercise.
Similarly, one has to be careful about comparisons. Simpsons, for example, gets top marks for its immaculate hygiene, but something called the 99p Store in High Street, Erdington, also gets 5 Hs. I don’t know the place, but it doesn’t sound like they do a lot of cooking. Certainly a 99p degustation menu is a new one on me.
Still, there’s no smoke without fire, and all that.
