Breakfast at the Edwardian Tearooms Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

This week I was in Birmingham for the first time.  My first long term girlfriend was from Birmingham (well, Edgbaston) and was always going on about how cool and groovy Birmingham was but I had a mental image of grim seventies concrete blocks.  

Victoria Square

I was surprised, therefore by the city centre I found there, which was a mixture of old and modern although I did think it didn't look entirely English.  Maybe a touch of northern Europe about it.  I suppose it is in the north (it really annoyed my girlfriend when I said that Birmingham was in the north, but to me it is).  

I did know that it had an exceptionally good art gallery and that is where I headed after my meeting finished unexpectedly early.  They have the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world, including some extremely famous paintings.

Due to my early start I had not had time for breakfast and so even though it was just about lunchtime I went straight to the Edwardian Tearooms in the gallery for brunch. 

I ordered a pot of tea which arrived very quickly.  This was proper loose leaf tea in an enamel tea pot which kept it really hot.  I got a good four cups from this which is pretty good for £2.80.  The tea is provided by Suki and their breakfast tea, which is what this was, is an award winner.  It is a blend of teas from Assam and Tanzania and was quite the best pot of tea I have had for a very long time.

 The cooked breakfast came, oddly, in a soup plate and looks rather small from this picture but that is because the plate was very large.  For £7.95 you got two thick rashers of bacon, two (very good) Cumberland sausages, a large slice of black pudding, a flat mushroom, baked beans (or you could have a tomato) and a fried egg (cooked with a thick white).  Bizarrely they then ruined all this by putting that most worthless of salad plants, watercress, all over it.  Green food should never be included in a cooked breakfast.  Also, I did not notice that if you wanted toast you had to pay £1 separately for it.  So a full cooked breakfast with tea and toast would have been £12.70, which is pushing London prices.  Quality was good though. 7/10 (tea was 10/10).

Large Veuve Clicquot Champagne Bottles in John Lewis Food Hall

I was in John Lewis in Oxford Street the other day, where they have a John Lewis Food Hall (not a Waitrose, as is more usual) in the basement.  They have a pretty good wine department there but what really intrigued me was these three big bottles of Veuve Clicquot.  When I was younger I had one of those big book of facts type books which contained things like paper sizes and, apposite to this post, large Champagne bottle names.  

Now of course I am familiar with and have had magnums and jeroboams but I think this is the first time I have actually seen some of the "Biblical" large sized bottles before.  They had a Methuselah (eight bottles) for £575, a Salmanazar (12 bottles for £750  and a Nebuchadnezzar (20 bottles for £1400).  Now, of course, the equivalent price per bottle (£70 for the Nebuchadnezzar which is nearly double what Waitrose charge for a single bottle) certainly doesn't provide a bulk discount; in fact you pay far more for the privilege of having such a conversation piece.

Certainly, if I was going to drop £1400 on a bottle of Champagne I wouldn't buy one which had been stored in a hot store, upright and under bright lights.  I stopped drinking Veuve Clicquot because there was a period, a few years ago, when they were selling it with insufficient cellaring time.  I gather it is better now, so maybe I should get one for Christmas.  Not one this big, though.  How would you chill it?  You'd have to put it in a bath full of ice, I suppose, or a dustbin.  Not very elegant ,though.  I suppose if you have seven of them there would be enough to give a lady a bath in it.