This week, Alex Claridge collected his first Michelin Star after 10 years at The Wilderness in the Jewellery Quarter. There’s a lesson in that, and it’s nothing to do with food.
Alex Claridge(Image: Birmingham Mail)
I first met Alex Claridge – Birmingham’s newest Michelin Star holder – more than a decade ago when he was the chef at 1847.
In the all-veggie restaurant (where Land is serving up plant-based brilliance now) in Great Western Arcade, he placed a dish before me that was designed to remind me of any happy moment I might have had in the past while eating a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch.
Tang, zing. Some creamy melting moment. I can’t, honestly, recall anything about any single element except the way it made me feel in concert. That’s the magic of good food.
Read more: Birmingham chef issues powerful ‘persist’ message after Michelin Star win years in the making
Back then, Alex reminded me of someone I couldn’t place, a musician maybe, a painter or a poet.
It felt from the outside like he was filled with the sort of combustible creativity that could either drive something forward at land speed record-breaking velocity, or that might explode and burn your face off.
I liked it.
From Land, he moved onwards to a new venture, Nomad, the little ants laid out ready to be eaten were a big step from vegan cooking and pretty much the main thing anyone seemed to mention when talking of it.
In either coop he was pushed in, the one filled with vegan scran or insects on a platter, Alex seemed uncomfortable with the idea.
As a journalist, I always felt that his annoyance and frustration at the idea of being misunderstood, or labelled incorrectly, was something I both related to and struggled to negotiate in my reporting.
Even writing this now I expect him to message to say I’ve got it all wrong and can I shut up please.
I like that about him too.
Nomad evolved into The Wilderness, finding a home in the Jewellery Quarter, a space that has all of the grit of an old factory but all of the magical, listed splendour a heritage neighbourhood like this deserves.
It was befitting of a ‘rock and roll fine dining’ spot where the chef slung a giant python around his neck for photos and scrawled Bukowski quotes on black walls to turn out plates of delicate produce and exquisite, imaginative flavours before it. Grit and beauty.
And as time moved on, a decade, Alex weathered change in that spot.
His new cocktail bar Nocturnal Animals opening and closing, a pandemic, a stint as the Night Time Economy Advisor to Andy Street, a new opening in the form of a seafood-forward restaurant in landlocked Brum called ‘Albatross Death Cult’.
For a long time, even as a fan of the genre, I wondered what The Wilderness meant by ‘rock and roll fine dining’.
I got the fine dining bit when I went in to try the tasting menu, but outside of the soundtrack and the all-black-everything decor, where was the rock and roll?
When Alex collected his Michelin Star at long last this week, and Michelin commented that they’d ‘seen hard work and persistence pay off’, it clicked.
When Ozzy Osbourne wanted to play music festivals again but Lollapalooza turned him down, he and Sharon set up Ozzfest and travelled the world with it.
When Michelin inspectors kept their coveted stars in their luxe leather satchels, Alex Claridge showed up and cooked whatever the hell he wanted anyway.
Rock and effing roll, man.
A Michelin Star is no small feather in a cap, an acknowledgement and a display of excellence, hopefully more bookings, more visitors.
But the journey, the grind, the graft, the pivoting, the agitation, the challenges, the joys, the misunderstandings and the side-steps had been the point all along. That’s the punk rock, DIY spike.
Sometimes people ask me what I think ‘Birmingham food’ is. Is it the high end expensive restaurants with Michelin acknowledgement? The neighbourhoods with world-class samosas for 50p?
Is it our street food halls or our balti houses? I never knew how to answer.
But now, when I consider what Birmingham food is, I’ll think of Alex.
It’s showing up and staying true to yourself, following your gut and laying it all out on the table where people can pick it up, or not.
It’s forging something from nothing, through fire, and stamping a Birmingham ‘anchor’ hallmark on it, sometimes with your boot and sometimes with a wax seal.
It’s going to Dublin to pick up an award one day, and sweating into your new chef’s whites the next day because the journey doesn’t stop for a star, however bedazzling.
There’s a lesson in that, for every single artistic, compulsive creator in this city.
Don’t wait for the pay-off. Tomorrow, if we wake up, we go again.
The Wilderness is as 27 Warstone Lane, Jewellery Quarter, B18 6JQ.