Cuubo, 47 High Street, Harborne, Birmingham B17 9NT (cuubo.co.uk). Three-course lunch £30; three-course dinner £50; tasting menus £75; wines from £25
Until 6pm that day, chef Dan Sweet, an intense sliver of a man, was moonlighting as a builder. His site: the restaurant we had just eaten in. There were walls that needed an extra lick of paint. There was some grouting that needed doing. The few narrow, slatted wooden panels, which are practically the room’s only design feature, needed a little attention. Then he put on his whites and set about training the restaurant’s new waiter, the tall elegantly dressed man with the tied-back dreads, who is actually a neighbour and was just doing him a favour. He had to be got up to speed because this was the first time he had worked in a restaurant in two decades. Back then the tills didn’t have touch screens.
All of which makes Cuubo, in the Birmingham suburb of Harborne, sound like a rackety pop-up, as unstable on its pins as a newborn giraffe. Granted, it really is new. It had only been open six weeks when I ate there. But there’s nothing immature or nascent about what they’re doing. Cuubo occupies a tiny room. It has a short menu and a small number of seats, just 20 of them. But it bursts with huge flavours, big ideas and massive ambition. Dinner here was an introduction to a storming talent announcing itself to the world, one clever, delicious, well-priced dish at a time.
Like so many great cooks in Birmingham, Sweet spent a few years at Andreas Antona’s Simpsons, learning his craft. A couple of years ago, in the plague times, he ran a classy takeaway called Qbox from this space on Harborne’s High Street, opposite M&S, drawing on his grandparents’ Italian heritage: salads of confit Jersey royals with ricotta, grilled courgettes and lemon, pork with sweet and sour peppers and ’nduja followed by lemon custard choux buns. Then he launched a successful crowdfunder to raise the modest sum he needed to open Cuubo. (I did ask him about the origin of the name but, in all honesty, you’d quickly lose interest if I attempted to explain it.)
You can see exactly where the money hasn’t gone. The decor in a branch of the White Company is garish compared to this. It’s a delicate white oblong, softened only by the yellow up-light from sconces come evening and the deep-varnished ceramics. Crank up some whale music and it would be a great room for a deep-tissue massage. I’m meant to say now that all the colour comes from the food and it almost does, because Sweet does love a strategically placed bloom and a brilliant green herb oil to split a sauce. But he also adores a soft, creamy, rich and deep liquor. And by God, he’s good at them. It starts with a white soup of caramelised onions, as pale and interesting as a Dior model and just as poised. It’s velvet-soft and cheerfully intense, but hidden at first by a thick crust of toasted pine nuts, sourdough crumbs fried in beurre noisette and chopped green herbs. Your spoon breaks through the surface to reveal the earthly pleasures beneath. Perhaps you’ve wondered how a soup becomes a talking point; how a soup becomes something you discuss later in hushed tones. This is how.
It’s one of the starters on a three-course menu, which at dinner costs £50 and at lunch, for a slightly reduced choice, just £30. There’s also a six-course meat and a non-meat tasting menu at £75. Another starter includes a block of braised then crisped pork belly, in a bacon cream sauce that is the very essence of the right sort of breakfast cooked for you by someone who gives a damn, swirled with a full Jackson Pollock of herb oil. Among the main courses there’s a celeriac cream sauce, this time with a pointillist explosion of herb oil, with slabs of salt-baked then roasted celeriac. There are generous blooms of deep-fried kale and together the crunch of the leaves and the softness of the celeriac recall the thrills of young, soft globe artichokes cooked in the “Jewish style” in Rome. Except that here they come with the added glamour of chestnut, apple and, for acidity, pickled walnut. It’s detailed and exuberant. Most importantly, it all makes sense, as if these are ingredients that have been gagging to hang out together for ages.
Let’s hear it then for the best sort of menu writing. How about “sea bream, seaweed butter sauce, potato, lemon, sea herbs”? There aren’t any “describing words” because you don’t need them when all the “naming words” are doing the heavy lifting. The ingredient list is enough for me, but for sake of doubt: the potato is a purée almost as rich and silky as that onion soup; the skin on the sea bream is crisp; the lemon cuts through the shameless and welcome application of dairy fats.
Desserts show the same attention to detail. Blocks of a chocolate delice have both the creaminess of milk and the light bitterness of dark. There are cubes of sweet poached pear, fragments of golden wafer, roasted almonds and, on the side to lubricate everything, a scoop of brisk yoghurt sorbet allowed to reach that temperature where it melts immediately on the tongue. And my but it’s pretty, with its fronds of greenery and the purple burst of edible blooms. Or try the frozen rhubarb parfait with peanut brittle, rhubarb gel, ribbons of candied celery and vanilla ice-cream. Or the chilled lemon custard with salted ricotta ice-cream, lemon curd, pistachio, biscuit and fennel. There’s rare technical depth here; an ability to get it right at all points in the meal.
Just to prove my critical faculties didn’t completely desert me, I should say it wasn’t all perfect. Early on, among the starters there was a crab risotto that didn’t taste especially of crab. If it had been billed simply as a white risotto with roasted cauliflower, it would have been added to the list of hands-raised hallelujahs, for it was perfectly executed. But it didn’t live up to its own billing, or the £5 supplement that came with it. I mention this late in the proceedings, because I didn’t want to cast early doubts on what is, for all its understatement, as exciting a new restaurant as I’ve encountered in a long while. Cuubo is marked on Harborne’s High Street by a tiny khaki sign and a frosted window. It would be very easy to walk on by. Please don’t.
News bites
Amid the extremely challenging trading conditions for the hospitality business, parts of Manchester continue to boom. Industry website restaurantonline.co.uk is reporting that the next huge opening in the city will come from the Big Mamma Group. The Paris-born company operates the boisterous Italian-themed London restaurants Gloria, Carlotta and Jacuzzi, among many others across Europe. They are now taking a site in the city’s new St Michael’s development, backed by Gary Neville’s property company. The Japanese-Peruvian restaurant company Chotto Matte is also opening a restaurant there early next year (bigmammagroup.com).
The Indian restaurant group Dishoom, is opening a second branch of its Permit Room café and bar concept, the first of which opened in Brighton late in 2023. It will occupy the site of what was a Strada on Trinity Street in Cambridge. Until now the city has only been served by a dark kitchen for Dishoom deliveries. The offering at Permit Room includes a 20-strong collection of cocktails alongside small plates of masala whitebait, crispy spinach chaat and the like (permitroom.co.uk).
Michel Roux is not kicking back after the closure of Le Gavroche at the end of January. He has just announced that he will be overseeing a new restaurant at the Crossbasket Castle hotel, south of Glasgow. Trocodero’s, which launches in August, will be open seven days a week and will feature live entertainment every night (crossbasketcastle.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
