Apologies in advance, but I’m going to start this perfect ten write-up by being morbid. I sent my funeral plans across this week. Life, in its very essence, is terminal and approaching forty I should at least recognise that I don’t lead the healthiest life by making allowances for the bad habits and the knackered liver and clogged arteries and a stomach which reminds me it hates me after every meal. It was nothing too taxing; the choice of songs for the funeral, along with a gentle reminder that no vicar who has never met me is going to talk about my life in that same sullen monotone they do with every other goodbye service. If I’m able to see it coming, I’ll write my own eulogy, complete with spelling mistakes and total disregard for the rules of grammar. If death sneaks up on me, I’ll expect my loved ones to step in, but only those capable of reading it without being a snivelling mess. Few things in life worse than a reading where you can’t hear anything through the snot and the tears, especially if I have written the words. Everyone will wear black, not out of respect but because it is slimming and chic. I’ve also agreed with a friend that he will trawl through social media in the event of my death calling out the kind of people who wish you’d fall down a big hole, but piggyback one of the saddest days in the history of Birmingham by pretending to know and understand you for a few cheap likes. He has a list and he has my authority to say that I thought you were a prick. I only wish I’d be around to see it.
I can’t decide if my last meal would be at Ynyshir or Yikouchi, though just writing that I am suddenly worried it has less to do with the food and more to do with unpronounceable names. Yikouchi is a new one to me but I think it’s my favourite place to eat in Birmingham. The frontage is sign-less, almost derelict in appearance, which reminds me of Spuntino in the days when I used to go for a nosh on Rupert Street. Inside it’s part fudge shop, part occasional restaurant. The menu changes daily on the three lunch times and one evening they open. I went once for lunch and fell in love. Head-over-heels, let’s run away together and elope love. I just sat there in silence with a full fat coke until the last grain of rice had gone from the bowl. Their description of home-style Chinese undersells it by some distance. It is direct and unrelenting; the product of being an English couple living in Beijing for six years. It is the food that brings the memories back to life. If I lived in Stirchley I would be here every week without fail.
The lunch menu focuses on gai fan, the cheap dishes served on rice found in the low-cost restaurants of China. I’ve had the gong bao chicken which has a reference point of kung pao but with the flavour ramped-up to eleven. The chicken is treated with care, there are peanuts for bite and green Sichuan peppercorns that numb the mouth with a gentle medicinal quality. There is heat, loads of heat. Heat from garlic, heat from ginger, heat from red chillies. It is put together with little regard for the fragile palates of the average Brit and more done so to be true to its origin. It’s clean and complex. I haven’t stopped banging on about it. Another Sichuan dish of fish fragrant aubergine (incidentally being vegan and free from fish) is the best version I have eaten. The balance of heat, salt, and acidity is perfect.
On an evening service I have ‘ants climbing up a tree’: a glass noodle dish littered with minced pork, minced shiitake, pickled chillies, Sichuan peppercorns, and spring onion, that is one big spicy umami hit. There can’t be many better ways to spend £8 anywhere in the city. There are fried dumplings, each the size of a field mouse, stuffed to the brim with minced pork and chive. The skins of the dumpling have a little bite, dressed in a chilli oil that’s as perfumed as spicy. £7 for six of these is a meal by itself. And fried chicken, the best fried chicken in the city by a country mile, heavily seasoned and brittle, in more of that chilli oil. It’s food which can’t be ignored. Big flavours that demand total attention. The small talk can wait until the last specks are gone.
If I have ventured into hyperbole it’s fully justified. There is nothing I have eaten so far at Yikouchi which I didn’t love. I’m at the stage where I want to eat all the dishes, want to try every single thing that inspired this place to set up shop in Birmingham. It’s the kind of food that excites me; brash and extrovert, not forgetting highly-skilled. Allow £10-25 per person, get there early on a Friday night and walk the few steps to Couch afterwards where the drinks keep on getting better. Get drunk and tell your friends about what you just experienced. There can’t be a better one-two anywhere else in the country right now.
10/10
