Eventually, much of London will run away and set up life an hour up the train track in Birmingham. I’m sure this thrills all Brummie readers. It’s something I think each time I pass through the gleaming, multipurpose colosseum that is Birmingham New Street Station, now featuring a John Lewis, a Mac cosmetics, a Mowgli, a Joe & The Juice and dozens of other shiny ways to spend.
Grand Central, the plaza is called officially, but unlike Elizabeth Smart’s character, I have no reason here to sit down and weep. There’s just a sense that something is afoot in this city. Yes, it may be a gigantic building site in places right now, teeming with bulldozers and hoardings saying, “Excuse us while we’re changing”, but the mood everywhere, particularly in restaurants, is growth.
Take, for example, a chef such as Aktar Islam, formerly of Lasan on James Street off St Paul’s Square. Islam was involved in the Lasan Group’s many openings – Nosh & Quaff, Lasan Eatery and Fiesta Del Asado to name just three – but has now stepped out alone with not one, but two opulent, experimental restaurants facing each other on opposite sides of the same street. Opheem is a sort-of-Indian restaurant that uses European techniques – for example, poached cod with sea kale and pakora, or smoked hogget with Kashmiri chilli. Legna, the newer of Islam’s two ventures, is an expensively hewn, prettily lit, innovative Italian restaurant.
Islam himself is a British man with Bangladeshi parents who simply loves Italian flavours. I do not generally rattle off the passport minutiae of chefs in the manner of a Home Office exploratory findings report, but at the same time I find the new era of British restaurateurs nerdily fascinating. It’s still rare to find a British man with a name like Aktar opening a place that serves burrata, bresaola and fritto misto, which says a lot about the modern consumer’s hazy logic on what a chef should be cooking. Islam himself, I notice, takes no prisoners with TripAdvisor commenters who suggest what cuisine he’d be better “sticking to”, rattling out one reply of nearly 1,500 words – or twice the length of this column – informing a diner no longer to darken his doors. My feelings are that if you’re going to serve the likes of smoked eel with blackberry, deconstructed ratatouille and panettone bread-and-butter pudding, my overriding concern would be: does it taste wonderful?
And, from the outset, Legna really does feel as if it should be a winner. The bar area is beautiful: horseshoe-shaped and uplit in golden amber, making everyone look like Rita Hayworth. A sgroppino rosa with pink sorbet and amaretto was a gorgeous neck-rub of boozy sweetness. Service throughout is warm and effusive. The private dining room has a pretty, possibly fake, but Narnia-esque cherry blossom tree “growing” out of the floor. I can think of few prettier restaurants I’ve visited in the past 12 months, or, to be fair, any other that has the chef’s name on the coasters.
Dinner began with promise: great focaccia with aged balsamic, and complementary oysters dressed intricately with vinegary diced capers. No one in the kitchen could tell us what type of oyster, though, which is an answer that cast a shadow on the dishes that followed. Kitchens need to know what they’ve bought and are pushing out.
To clarify, Islam was not himself cooking that evening. An antipasto of smoked eel was breadcrumbed, which stodgily gilds that lily, and turned up on a thick “jam” of blackberries with a horseradish cream. It was neither hideous nor delicious; it simply existed. Some fine-quality bresaola appeared on a plate shielding an unattractive tartare of beef and truffle. A stodgy fritto misto of cod and anchovy lacked any finesse.
By now, my heart felt heavy. I have eaten a lot of celeriac cut into pasta ribbons this year, in many restaurants, and Legna’s version was a slightly sickly affair. The “caponata”, a ratatouille autopsy, was centred rather mystifyingly around two large lumps of stewed, unseasoned, peeled aubergine. The courses rattled on: salt-baked cod on another riff on ratatouille, then a tiny, inelegant panettone pudding that felt microwaved and would have left you feeling shortchanged if you’d bought it at M&S.
Legna was an orchestra playing at full gusto that evening, with one important instrument missing: the kitchen. We left and headed home through the building site that is currently central Birmingham, where 100 other restaurants are soon set to bloom. Whether Legna will flourish with them is uncertain.
• Legna Islington Gates, 8 Fleet Street, Summer Row, Birmingham B3, 0121-201 3525. Open Tues-Sat, noon-2.30pm, 5.30-9.30pm; Sun noon-6pm. About £40 a head; set lunch, £17 for two course, £20 for three, all plus drinks and service.
Food 4/10
Atmosphere 8/10
Service 7/10
