Glynn Purnell and Phil Innes are regional leaders of their respective fields – the former a renowned chef, the latter an acclaimed wine merchant. They have joined forces to open Trillium, a restaurant which they promise is bringing something new for the city’s hospitality scene. HENRY CARPENTER catches up with them a month before launch.
We are sitting in the lounge area upstairs at Loki Wines and Glynn Purnell and Phil Innes could barely be more relaxed.
Nothing strange about that, you might think, given that Innes has created a hugely comfortable haven above the shop in Great Western Arcade, with its deep armchairs, dimmed lighting and gentle music.
No, their cheerful demeanour is striking for two reasons.
The first is that Trillium, the restaurant they are opening as a joint partnership about 100 yards from where we are seated, is at the time of this interview a building site; it is due to open a month hence on December 10.
Then there’s the fact that their venture is in possibly the most notoriously embattled of all sectors. Barely a day goes past without the gloomy news of a restaurant, pub or café closing, with a galaxy of reasons usually to blame, including rising operating costs, labour and staffing issues, consumer behaviour, and taxes and rates.
But these two prominent figures in Birmingham’s burgeoning food and wine spheres really don’t seem particularly bothered about any of these concerns, even though this is a £700,000 investment.
Maybe it’s because they’re old hands at this sort of thing, particularly Purnell. He is the West Midlands’ most celebrated chef and restaurateur of the last 20 years or so, responsible for and involved in several top-level restaurants in the city. There are bound to be ups and downs along the way, the most significant being the closure of his eponymous Michelin-starred restaurant in Birmingham’s city centre not much more than 12 months ago.
Perhaps more importantly, they also have an unshakeable belief in both the industry and also what Trillium will bring to the market.
“There is a hunger for a new restaurant and a new concept,” says Purnell. “People want to try something different and there is still a high percentage of people that want to eat out. You can only tolerate your partner’s badly cooked meals for so many days of the week!”
They make for an interesting pair, Purnell and Innes – one the charismatic and enormously talented Brummie chef (he is the self-styled ‘yummy Brummie’), and the other the nattily dressed, highly regarded wine merchant whose three outlets – in the city centre, Edgbaston and Knowle – have won legions of wine-discerning fans.
What they hold in common, apart from a wry sense of humour, is a shared belief in what makes a good experience in a restaurant.
“I think people do want to experience dining in a different and modern way and Trillium is fundamentally very different to what’s on offer in Birmingham at the moment,” says Innes. “It is something that I think will appeal to people.”
So what exactly is Trillium, and what is the point of difference which has got these two prominent hospitality figures so excited?
The simplest description is that Trillium – so named after a flower which is sometimes used as a floral descriptor for wine – is a restaurant with approximately 50 covers on the ground floor of the One Snowhill office block.
But beyond that it is hard to pigeon-hole – and that’s rather the point, because the two friends and now business partners are adamant that if there’s a buzzword here it’s ‘choice’, a quality not available to prescriptive tasting menu experiences where both prices and selections are pretty much non-negotiable.
Nor it is targeted to a particular market, despite it being in the heart of the city’s central business district.
“If you’re walking past at 12.30pm with a newspaper under your arm and fancy a really nice glass of wine and a small plate then you’ll be very welcome,” says Purnell.
“But if you want to take your wife or a bunch of mates, and spend the entire afternoon drinking, exploring the menu, having snacks, sharing plates, having wines by the bottle or champagne by the glass, then that is also absolutely fine.
“People nowadays – especially the middle market upwards – want choice. They want to dictate how much they want to spend. Nobody likes being over directed these days – being told what to eat and what wine to drink.
“We’re also keen that it will be a cool, relaxed environment, and remove all pretension from both the surroundings and what we’re serving.
“I’ve been in the industry for 36 years and worked in places ranging from a café in a hotel to a restaurant with three Michelin stars. I think that food and wine should be available to everybody, and customers can spend as much or as little as they want.”
Innes adds: “It doesn’t need to be a ‘treaty’ type of place. Of course we want people to want and be able to dine regularly, but if you want to splurge out on options on the menu then you can spend more, but we want people to be able to come just for a lunch, maybe have a few small plates and eat delicious food for a reasonable price.”
Let’s cut to the chase. Perhaps they can give us an idea what punters can expect to eat.
“There might be gougeres filled with hot Montgomery cheddar sauce or palmiers of seaweed and Parmesan,” says Purnell.
“You could have carpaccio of beef with mushrooms and truffle, which is shared between two. There will be smaller fish plates – maybe two to share – and for a main course you might be looking at very slow-cooked lamb on the bone, which is all between the two of you, or a really nice double entrecote, roasted on our state-of-the-art grill with smoked bone marrow.
“So you can always build if you want to a three-course meal, a five-course meal or just one large sharing and have sides with it. The choice is that wide open.”
Innes adds: “We don’t want to bamboozle people with foams and smoke and stuff like that. This is proper, good, well-cooked and well-sourced food – food to enjoy.
“I’m from Chinese heritage where the emphasis is on sharing plates. That is something which we see as being very much part of the eating experience at Trillium.”
In some ways, the restaurant has been several years in the making. The spark of an idea came from Innes and despite their best efforts to discuss, both were too busy to talk it through.
It was only a few months after the closure of Purnell’s that the two sat down and went through Innes’s concept.
As Innes says: “The stars were aligned in a way. A lot of the time, chefs are food experts and are very good at drinking the wine, but it’s not their field of expertise.
“We want to put both the food and the wine on a pedestal together but we want to get away from the idea of wine flights. We want to simplify the wine menu, with around 30 on the back of the food menu all available by the glass, as well as a wider wine list and its continually changing bottles.
“Much like the food, the wine will keep on changing. We’ll keep it fresh.
“Because of Loki we have the ability to source wines from all over the world. We’re not wedded to one supplier and there will be some really beautiful wines from places people might not be too familiar with as wine producers, like Armenia, Crete and Tenerife.
“I almost want it to be like a specials food board. When the wine’s gone, it’s gone, and we’ll move on to something else. I want that kind of jeopardy.
“Yes, we do have a sommelier, the restaurant managers have a lot of experience and wine knowledge, and all are perfectly capable of making suggestions, but just like at Loki I want people to experiment and try different things.”
For some time now Innes has been working with the winemaker Katie Jones (who’s originally from the Midlands) in France to blend Trillium’s signature wine.
He makes the distinction here between a signature wine and the traditional house wine.
“I’m not bad-mouthing other restaurants but it’s usually the cheapest stuff they can find,” continues Innes. “We want to really make a statement by having our own wine blended by Katie Jones.
“Yes, it’s at a lower price point but it’s delicious and it’s a wine I’m really proud about.
“It is something that we want to hang our hat on, in much the same way that a top bistro in Paris, say, is proud of their house wine, where it’s not a dirty word.
“Some restaurants I know in France are judged on how good their house wine is, but in the UK we have got used to selling the cheapest of the cheap stuff just to lure people in.”
You couldn’t get two more effusive enthusiasts for their trade than these two popular hospitality heavyweights, but there is another word which sums up much of what Trillium is about, and which many might find refreshing, and that is honesty.
Yes, they have secured Rob Palmer, who held a Michelin star at Hampton Manor, as head chef, but Purnell is the chef patron and insists he’ll be on the pass 99.9 per cent of the time.
“If you’ve got serious people around the table, we should be serious about what we are doing, so I absolutely should be in the kitchen,” he says.
And also, with the food, everything will be in plain sight – there will be no hiding place and certainly no pre-cooked food popped into a microwave at the last minute (a not uncommon practice). There are no barriers at Trillium, and in removing the traditional kitchen-and-diner divide, a relaxed informality is created.
Purnell also makes the point that honesty is a virtue which, perhaps more than ever before given the tough trading conditions, the industry has to embrace.
“It’s up to the industry to be attractive, receptive, to listen to customers on costings, time on the table, how they like to be served and so on,” he says.
“It’s then up to us as restaurateurs to juggle costs so they are not passed on to the customer too heavily but enough for the industry to survive. It’s good old-fashioned economic sense.
“But I think to entice people, you have to have that honesty so everything’s as clear as day when you order – people have to know that they are absolutely going to get what they pay for.”
There is as well that extra facet which encourages people to return to a restaurant time and time aga – that hard-to-define soul, romance or call it what you will.
As Purnell says: “Food and wine for me is very romantic. I’m not talking about romance as gazing into somebody’s eyes. It’s the romance of knowing where a particular wine has come from, and the skill and passion of chefs cooking what you ordered in front of you. Again, we come back to everything being open at Trillium.
“We just want the place to ooze hospitality, ooze great food, and ooze good wine.”
Between them Purnell and Innes have a contacts book the size of a brick to go with an acknowledged pedigree in what they do.
They are at the top of their game and up for the Trillium challenge, and if there’s a downward trend in the restaurant industry these two stand as good a chance as anyone of bucking it.
Bon appetit.
