Blacklock, Birmingham B3: ‘A very, very cool version of an Angus Steakhouse’ – restaurant review

Ever-open, eminently relatable, sensibly priced spots of this sort will always have an audience A London chophouse has taken up residence on St Philip’s Place, Birmingham, on the edge of Cathedral Square, or “Pigeon Park”, as the locals call it. This particular nook of Brum city centre is a magnet to those feathered blighters, although Blacklock’s smoulderingly macho menu is ironically pigeon-meat free, revolving instead around heaps of chops and steaks cooked over charcoal. There’s porterhouse, bone-in sirloin, lamb rump and pig’s head on toast. Launched in London in 2015, Blacklock was the elegant, edgy, no-nonsense dining experience for groovy young things who quite literally wanted meat and two veg, so long as said veg was dripping-fat chips; it now has five sites in the capital and another in Manchester. “We just ended up at Blacklock,” people used to tell me half a dozen times a week, then go on to rave about the bread, the gravy and the ash-baked sweet potatoes, and revel in the glorious simplicity of it all. Modern life was complex, Blacklock was not, but neither was it cheap enough to feel like a jaunt down the Toby Carvery. And now its big flavours and broad appeal have hit the UK’s second city. Continue reading...