54 Cornwall Street, Birmingham (0121 200 2323). Meal for two, including wine and service, £130
A while ago I asked the marvellous Angela Hartnett why there were so few women in restaurant kitchens. "Because they've got more bloody sense," she said. The hours are brutal, the culture too sodden with machismo. And then of course there is a biological imperative. Careers in kitchens rarely cooperate with the demands of motherhood. And so for all those great names moving forward – Hartnett herself, Hélène Darroze at the Connaught, Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries – they are still rare, which is ludicrous. I check my watch. Oh look. It's the 21st century. Aren't we beyond this? Certainly when I started searching for a restaurant in the Birmingham area (where I happened to be) run by women, the female-chef pickings were slim. Instead I was directed to Opus, a big city-centre brasserie where both the managing director and front-of-house manager are women.
The fact that women are involved told me absolutely nothing about it. Because what I found was one of the most strikingly masculine joints I've been to in a long time. I don't mean that in a bring-me-a-bloody-steak-and-a-knife-with-which-to-kill-it sort of way, which is a masculine I like. I mean it in all the worst senses of the word. It didn't quite smell of Ralgex, but not far off. It is huge and echoey and full of hard surfaces, shiny wood floors and blocky pillars laminated in something plastic and red. The designers doubtless offered up a computer-generated impression of what the finished place would look like. It still feels like that computer-generated image.
The food does, too. Oh sure, the menu is fluent in modern British restaurant. It knows lots of grown-up words, does the supplier name-check thing, and the French kitchen-word thing. But what it delivers needs a defibrillator to bring it to life. And boy is it expensive, with all bar one main well over £20.
Every plate looks like it's had its rims polished furiously with a tea towel by a bloke who finds order in his world by positioning overworked, underflavoured ingredients just so. Don't offer me a ballottine of chorizo with my quail breast that tastes not at all of chorizo (and while we're at it, don't misspell fancy words like ballottine on the menu). Likewise don't call a mediocre terrine of pork a roulade just because it sounds clever. Prove to me you truly love pig in all its forms, not that you can pluck culinary terms from a big book.
The best dish was a fillet of beef, served rare, with a mustardy carrot purée and a silly coffin-shaped piece of "pan-fried" dauphinoise. If it's pan fried, it ain't dauphinoise. Which this wasn't. It was a kitchen trying far too hard. Or, in the case of an underseasoned tranche of halibut with scallops and a pillow of mash, not trying hard enough. There is nothing exactly wrong with this sort of cooking, but there is also very little right with it. I'd describe every dish as unmemorable were it not that my job is to remember exactly why it was unmemorable. It was food cooked in the service of presentation, not appetite.
The dessert list was a bunch of things that had randomly been forced into each other's company. The soft white chocolate biscotti (being soft, not a biscotti at all) could have turned up with the iced lemon parfait or the dark chocolate mousse, but hung out with the caramel crème brûlée – which was fine but not an improvement on the crème brûlée. The poached blackberries could just as easily have sat with the dark chocolate mousse, but turned up with the perfectly pleasant lemon parfait.
As with everything at Opus it seemed to have no guiding passion or principle. The waiters are personable. They are men in suits. The food arrives. It comes on plates. The ingredients haven't been massacred. Jazz plays. The floor has been swept. And in the corner, snoring quietly, the restaurant critic is asleep, face stuck to the table. And what, you ask, does this have to do with the gender of those involved? The answer: absolutely bloody nothing. In its favour I will say this. Opus was both gender-blind and completely underwhelming.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
