Award: One Michelin star and three AA rosettes
Visit: 16 August 2025, lunch for five
Price: **
Website: www.simpsonsrestaurant.co.uk
Review
The Simpsons story began in 1993 when Andreas Antona opened his restaurant in the centre of Kenilworth. Just two years later, the restaurant received a Michelin Bib Gourmand and, within four years, had been awarded a Michelin star. Led by chef director, Luke Tipping, Simpsons has retained its Michelin star since 1999. In 2004 Andreas moved Simpsons to Birmingham, taking over a Georgian Grade II listed building in Edgbaston with a modern, spacious dining room, and a lovely garden where you can sit and enjoy your pre-dinner drinks when it is warm enough.
Please see my previous reviews here:
Today we chose the prestige menu that is priced at £140 pp. There are also options of a three-course lunch menu at £49.50 pp, and a three-course a la carte menu at £85.00 pp.
We started with an amuse bouche of warm cheese and truffle gougère with grated Pecorino on top, which were served with our pre-lunch drinks. These had a great cheese flavour, and I could have eaten a lot more of them. These were the only canapes served to us today.
The bread was a very good white sourdough as well as the superbly laminated black olive tapenade rolls that were sensational. These were served with butter topped with crispy chicken skin, and a taramasalata with extra virgin olive oil on top.
The first course was a savoury seaweed custard with lobster, bone marrow, caviar and salmon roe, and chives. The lobster was naturally sweet and had great flavour. Next was mackerel, served with Evesham tomatoes, black garlic puree, and a tomato macha (a consommé), finished with some colourful nasturtiums. The tomato, mackerel and garlic combination was excellent.
The next course were hand-dived Orkney scallops covered with melted Bordier seaweed butter, an oyster emulsion, and an oyster leaf wilted on top. Bordier is an artisan butter maker in France that still knead their churned butter with wooden teak paddles. The milk is sourced from Brittany and South Normandy, with Bretton salt. This was a very tasty course, with the scallops in this superb butter sauce working extremely well together.
Next we were served a visually stunning dish focused on beetroot. It consisted of roasted golden beetroot topped with circles of pickled rainbow beetroot, a beetroot slaw topped with butterfly sorrel, a beetroot sorbet with a beetroot tuille on top, some wasabi peas hidden underneath, wasabi emulsion dusted with beetroot powder, and a buttermilk sauce cut with dill oil. Not only did this course look good, but it had excellent flavours, with the warm wasabi complimenting the earthy, sweetness of the beetroots.
The main course was a perfectly rare lamb rump. It was served with a selection of summer beans (including Coco de Paimpol and green beans) and radish all cooked in a feta cheese sauce and then wrapped in a wilted Romaine lettuce envelope, with a lamb jus, smoked aubergine, and a green olive tapenade. The lettuce envelope was a very clever idea I haven’t seen before, and it worked very well here. This was a very enjoyable course.
The optional cheese selection was served with quince jelly, pumpkin and cranberry bread, and seeded sourdough crackers at a £15 supplement. Today’s selection included a Chabichou du Poitou goat’s milk cheese, Cornish Brie, Highmoor cheese from Oxfordshire with a deep orangey-red rind, Wildeblumenkase cow’s milk cheese from Switzerland covered with dried wild meadow flowers, and a rich and creamy Sparkenhoe Shropshire Blue cheese. All the cheeses were in good condition and had great flavour,.
Simpsons always has a souffle option for dessert, which is very pleasing. Today it was a raspberry souffle, with Chantilly cream and a raspberry sauce. A perfect ending to a very good meal.
Service throughout was excellent, friendly and informative. This was another very enjoyable meal at Simpsons and I hope this Birmingham institution continues to go from strength to strength.
The Menu:
The Food:
The People:
Chef-patron Andreas Antona was classically trained spending six years working in hotels in Germany and Switzerland, before working under Anton Mosimann at The Dorchester and at the Ritz Hotel. From 1987 he spent three years as Head Chef at Birmingham’s Plough and Harrow Hotel, at a time when it was among the finest in the Midlands.
In 1993, he opened his first restaurant Simpsons in Kenilworth and was among the first restaurants in the area to win a Michelin star. In 2013 he opened The Cross at Kenilworth, which itself now holds a Michelin star since 2014. He is also part of the team that launched Pure Craft Bar & Kitchen in Birmingham. Antona was a mentor to several other successful Birmingham chefs early in their careers, including Glynn Purnell, Luke Tipping, and Andy Waters. Andreas has played a central role in the UK’s participation and success in the international cookery competition the Bocuse d’Or. Andreas has recently announced his retirement and has put Simpsons restaurant on the market.
Andrea’s right-hand man at Simpsons, Luke Tipping, entered the chef profession when his father found him a job at the Plough and Harrow, Birmingham. He met Andreas and, after five years at the Plough, Luke moved on to set up Simpsons in Kenilworth. Ten years later, the team moved to the larger premises in Edgbaston. Luke was awarded the first ever Midlands Chef of the Year Award and received a Professorship of Culinary Arts by University College Birmingham in October 2010 in recognition of his efforts in promoting the next generation of kitchen stars.
Inside the Restaurant:
The Wine:
Instead of selecting the wine flight, we chose the wines course-by-course with the aid of our very knowledgeable sommelier Jack Wharton.
To start we chose the off-dry Sylvaner Reserve Millesime 2020, Rolly Gassman, from Alsace to accompany the savoury custard and lobster dish. This was pale yellow in colour, with delicate white flower and nutty aromas. On the palate there were rich grapey flavours, and the residual sugar was balanced by acidity and a saline character that worked very well with the sweetness of the lobster(£22 per bottle in the shops and £78 in the restaurant).
For the next few courses we drank an excellent Shaw and Smith M3 Chardonnay, Adelaide Hills, Australia, 2023. This dry white wine had aromas and flavours of white peach, zesty citrus, and just a hint of oak, with a creamy texture and a fresh, lively finish (£37 per bottle in the shops and £74 in the restaurant).
With the lamb we chose a red Pinot Noir, the Sophie & Vincent Morey Santenay Les Hates Rouge 2020. This Premier Cru Pinot Noir is from Cote de Beaune, France and it’s an elegant, light red wine with red fruit, black fruit and some integrated tertiary and oak flavours (£37 per bottle in the shops and £100 in the restaurant), perfect with lamb.
With the raspberry souffle we chose the Contero, Brachetto D’Acqui which is an Italian sparkling wine from Piemonte, that is slightly sweet but with some bittersweet notes, and a delicate ruby red colour, with aromas of roses and raspberries (£15 per half bottle in the shops and £30 in the restaurant). Its low alcohol (only 5% alcohol), but packed with flavours that matched the raspberry souffle perfectly.
To accompany the cheese selection we chose a very nice Sandeman Vintage Port, Quinta Do Seixo, 2013. This is a Single Quinta Vintage Port with a deep purple colour that is almost opaque, and intense aromas of cherry, raspberry, plum and blueberries, with some spicy notes of pepper and nutmeg (£14 per 75ml glass in the restaurant).