Where to start with Vagabond? The start, surely, is as good a place as any. I don’t go a lot, even less now my mate has moved from the building opposite. I guess I’ve always felt there were better places to drink wine in the city, especially since Majestic hoisted it into their corporate bosom mid-last year. But they do food and the internet’s dull choir of influencers has given its approval, and given I’ve never written about it and I needed to eat a solo lunch figured I’d give it a go. Retrospectively I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish I’d gone hungry. It’s not good. Not good at all.
The cavernous space on Colmore Row is a funny one, lit well on one side, the light pours in and immediately becomes obstructed by the two walls of wine machines. Those machines aren’t cheap, and my struggle to find much in the way of value is not helped by the two cheapest reds being unavailable. The food menu suffers a similar affliction; I wanted the tartiflette because I had an amazing one at Camille the week before. It’s not available. Same issue with ‘vagabond favourite’ patatas bravos. Do they have a potato crisis? Are we suddenly in eighteenth century Ireland? There are thirteen small plate options and (at least) two of them are unavailable.
The three dishes I do get are some of the worst plates of food I have had in Birmingham, yours for £22.50, though my card tells me I paid several quid more for the food and an additional £13 for a bang-average glass of red once the machine started working. The aubergine parmigiana is as dispiriting as a three day work seminar in Swindon, with poor, flaccid slices of aubergine that collapse like old sofa cushions, whilst the tomato sauce – if we are committed to calling it that – is a wan, thin dribble that tastes faintly of aluminium but mostly of raw garlic. And the cheese. Oh yes, the cheese. A queasy rubber of cheap dairy that’s slumped like a collapsed lung. There is no texture. No life. No soul. No skill.
I get jamon croquettes, three balls that smell like an old chippy. Crack one open and the interior oozes out – not luxuriously, not seductively – but with a pale, glum resignation. The jamon, allegedly the star of the show, is absent save for a few wobbly bits of fat. It is sat on a pink snot of chipotle flavoured aquafaba that makes me gag. And then there are the pigs in blankets, looking more like something excavated from a smoking crater, cremated and blackened, and as a chef friend said when I sent him the picture “giving him cancer just by looking at it”. These aren’t pigs in blankets. They’re porky cautionary tales. A warning, really, of what happens when seasonal joy is left too long under a grill by someone who hates Christmas. Or at least hates me. I told them, by the way. And I left those plates mostly full as I walked around the corner for a second lunch. If there is worse cooking than this in central Birmingham we have even more problems than we thought.
2/10
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