An Evening In Birmingham With Daisy, Dinner At Colbeh, 16 August 2017

Daisy is joining the Heavy Rollers again this year, as an honoured guest for the very first day/night test match in England.

As things turned out, no-one other than me and Daisy decided to go up to Birmingham the night before the match, given the later than usual start time for the match.

Last year I reported that Nigel and I found a wonderful new Persian Restaurant, Colbeh, where Bengal Delight used to be. Daisy was suitably envious – she loves a good Persian meal – so I thought she’d be very keen to try the place.

For some reason, perhaps it was finding herself in a strange town, perhaps because she recently discovered that one of her preferred suburban Persians, Boof, has a food hygiene rating of merely 1, she went into “are you sure” mode, trying to check Birmingham hygiene ratings for herself and all sorts. She discovered that Johnny Wongs, a few doors down from Colbeh, has a hygiene rating of 0, which didn’t add to the allure of a Hagley Road eatery.

In the end, my persuasion (that Colbeh really is a top quality restaurant) and Daisy’s hunger held sway, so off we went. Daisy was not disappointed – in fact she loved the meal, as did I.

If anything, I thought the place had improved since last year. Chatting with proprietor Arsalan you could understand why; fanatical devotion to getting the right ingredients and improving the menu over the year. Daisy enjoyed looking through Arsalan’s Persian cookbooks too.

Daisy and I shared the platter of mixed grills, which were outstanding, along with some mast-o-musir and salad shirazi. A lovely Aussie shiraz wine to wash it down, coincidentally with a cricket ball as its label image – very apt.

I said in my Ogblog last year that I would add a TripAdvisor review when I got home. As it turned out, it was impossible to do so last year as the place wasn’t listed on TripAdvisor yet – I tried two or three times over the following weeks then gave up/forgot about it.

So this time I felt motivated to write my TripAdvisor review while I was still up in Brum – it got published more or less straight away – here it is.

Daisy and I wondered whether we could engineer a meal at this restaurant with the lads during the test match – a difficult bit of scheduling due to the day/night nature of this particular match.

But, as you’ll learn if you read the next episode and as evidenced below…

…Daisy pulled it off…as it were.