The modern plate turns up like it’s got a publicist. All gloss and angles, sauces flicked or dragged, something fried into a crisp purely so it can stand upright for the photo. You can almost hear it asking which side is its best side. It’s not food as much as content; an edible selfie, trembling under the weight of its own self-awareness. You eat it, sure, but that’s not really the point. The point is that it briefly existed in a square on a screen, liked by people who will never taste it and wouldn’t care much if they did. Taste, in the majority of these curated dining temples, is almost vulgar: a private afterthought to a public spectacle.
I now often crave somewhere that just puts dinner on a plate and leaves you alone with it. No drama, no little speech, no garnish that looks like it’s been applied with tweezers and a sense of irony. Meat, perhaps. One veg. Maybe some potatoes if they’re feeling generous. It doesn’t beg to be photographed because it knows it’ll be eaten, properly eaten, not picked at while someone adjusts the lighting. And when you do eat it, it tastes like someone cared about the right thing; the cooking, the ingredients, the simple act of feeding you, rather than how it might look after a Valencia filter.
Which brings me onto a dinner at The Old Crown, which caters for people like me with a new menu of quite brilliant simplistic cooking, whilst nodding to the grid with lovely branded plates bearing their logo. It was Sophie who spotted it, somewhat ironically, on instagram. “That salmon en croute looks good,” she said, “And those skewers. I’d quite like to go soon”. So we did, straight after a day’s work, me full after already eating all day, and her trying desperately not to get her hair wet the day before our holiday. Still the same Old Crown that squats in Digbeth with stubborn confidence. Still the low ceilings conspiring gently against the tall and the sober. It’s a quiet miracle that something like this can persist while everything around it reinvents itself into oblivion, with a few dozen people on a miserable Tuesday in March musing life over a quiet pint.
I loved my starter. I absolutely adored it. It was a plate of ham with a drizzle of mustard, a quenelle of creamed peas, and some toasted bread. That’s it. The kind of dish that Londoners would go made for and rave about the simplicity, and that Nunn fella would write a thousand words about in Vittles, and quite rightly too. It’s all intent, the kind of dish that sticks with you, not because it looked good, but because it was good. Which, when you think about it, ought to be the whole point. It’s also a mere £7. Sophie strayed the Irish-centric pub classics with the kashmiri chicken skewers, which I’ll forgive given we are a mile away from what was the Balti Triangle. The spicing might be a bit generic but it’s been marinated in yoghurt long enough to break down the proteins when flashed over the coals. It’s also massive, an eight pound feast that Sophie points out is a “flatbread away from being bigger than most mains”. I guess that’s the Irish part of the dish, the want to feed and feed into submission.
We keep going because momma didn’t raise no quitter, and also because we haven’t come out in the rain for half a review. Sophie gets the salmon en croute, another massive plate of salmon cooked to medium well in flakey pastry, with roasted spuds, carrot. spinach, and a mustard sauce cut with parsley oil. It’s very well done; accurate seasoning throughout, flirting with ambition but settling into pub food done extremely well. Same with my braised short rib; beef falling apart at the lightest of suggestion, wet polenta with loads of parmesan, more carrot and greens, and a really good gravy that is full of the heady charm of caramelised onion. It has skill and craft throughout.
We get a rhubarb crumble for dessert to share. Not a deconstructed crumble, a proper one, with tart stewed fruit at the base and a coarse, slightly sweet, crumble. It comes with good vanilla ice cream which, when left to its own environment, will soon become a good vanilla custard. It’s exactly what we wanted. A bottle of Spanish red, five courses between two, and a bill of £45 per head. It feels almost cheap given the skill in the kitchen. A look down the menu shows the usual suspects of burgers and salads and other stuff that a pub like this needs to sell in order to survive, but I have a soft spot for the comforting Irish food. I’ve already been back for the plate of ham and a pint of Guiness, leaving me with change from fifteen quid and a huge grin on my face.
9/10
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