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Wine List Confidential: Albatross Death Cult

Douglas Blyde visits Birmingham’s Albatross Death Cult, delving into how the unusually-named restaurant and its wine list are “both a map and a riddle”.

“Billed as an ‘experimental’ venture from Alex Claridge and the team behind The Wilderness, the neutral-toned space follows current fashion: no distinction between the fully open kitchen and dining room,” remarked Good Food Guide. The observation hints at a restrained, Scandi-inspired elegance, where décor whispers serenity while the name screams lunacy.

Albatross Death Cult – a moniker daring you to take it seriously – hasn’t gone unnoticed. Grace Dent crowned it “No. 1 in the Most Absurd Restaurant Name of 2024”, suggesting it sounded less like a fine seafood purveyor and more like “a patchouli oil-scented support band for My Bloody Valentine or a sinister doomsday sect.”

The name hangs in the air, much like its titular bird – oversized, improbable, faintly ridiculous. But the reality is less apocalyptic, more poetic. Michelin’s inspectors, charmed by its “pared-back selection of top-notch seafood,” noted its inspiration: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the albatross is both blessing and burden. It’s a literary flourish adding gravitas to a name courting ridicule.

Then there’s Karen from TripAdvisor, refreshingly unburdened by metaphor: “Loved how the restaurant was hidden off the street… lending it an air of mystery.” For Karen, mystery beats patchouli oil, especially when paired with perfect oysters.

Design

“The planning for Albatross took over a year,” says Alex Claridge, “but everything you experience here came together in intense, feverish days. Think slow, act fast.” The result is a visceral collision of raw industrialism and gastronomic precision. Housed in a Grade II-listed warehouse in Birmingham’s historic Jewellery Quarter, it overlooks a frozen pool pierced by the forlorn head of a submerged traffic cone. Luxury here is stripped to its barest essence, a meditation on stark necessity.

The space is brutally honest. Exposed beams and naked surfaces define a room isolating chefs, forcing service staff on longer, winding routes, and wearing its utilitarian heart unapologetically. At its centre lies a gleaming monolith of stainless steel: part stage, part altar, where Claridge’s twelve-dish omakase is performed with mesmerising, unnerving theatricality. Seating just fourteen, it demands intimacy. “You’re forced to get to know one another,” Claridge says with a glint of mischief and challenge.

Paying homage to the building’s silverworking past, the counter gleams with hard-edged brilliance, offset by warm brick walls softening the room’s austerity. A projector casts shadowy visuals – more intention than execution, as the technology falters in its avant-garde ambition.

Albatross isn’t meant to be comfortable. Great dining, Claridge insists, is not about pampered pleasure – it’s about provocation, a theatre of unease leaving you changed. It is a narrative woven from space, flavour, and collision.

The soundtrack is curated chaos: The Style Is Death (Forever Grey) and Pyromania (Vandal Moon) play loudly – the antithesis of soft jazz clichés. It’s a playlist designed to rattle, underscoring that Albatross is not just a meal but an ordeal: luxury stripped, rebuilt, and weaponised into something unforgettable.

Drinks

Formerly of Vinoteca Birmingham (RIP), Dishoom, and Upstairs by Tom Shepherd, drinks director, Camilla Bonnannini arrives at Albatross trailing a comet’s tail of credentials. A Roman by birth, a wannabe perfumier by aspiration, and a mixologist by trial and error, Bonnannini has shape-shifted into a certified sake sommelier and sparkling wine savant. Most recently, she clinched victory at the Gosset Matchmakers competition with a pairing so audacious it bordered on genius: smoked eel caramelised in butter alongside Gosset Grand Blanc de Blancs.

Her wine list, nautically inspired and inked on such available surfaces as kitchen shelves, begins with a literary nod: “Instead of the Cross, the Albatross about my neck was hung.” It’s an appropriate opening gambit for a collection promising “wild, unruly & unexplored depths.” And true to form, this is no Champagne-drenched indulgence; Bonnannini gives the bubbles their moment with Blanc de Noirs and Rosé from Huguenot-Tassin, but devotes the real estate to England’s fizzing revolution in Davenport Limney 2018 (£15 per glass), while bottle-seekers can unearth the ancestral Montonega pét-nat, Can Sumoi 2022 from Spain (£65).

Bonnannini

The still wines are equally democratic. Glasses start at £8 with Loire Sauvignon from Cédric Allion – Touraine Les Grandes Vignes 2022 – under the indeed breezy title, “Sea Breeze”, peaking at a mere £11 for Markovitis Winery Alkemì Xinomavro 2022. Reds are an exercise in restraint, with only eight on the list, including Xabi Sanz’s Sea of Dreams 2020 (£9), a name so fitting given the working title of the restaurant was “Waves”.

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Bottles are where intrigue deepens. There are two orange offerings: Koshu Gris de Gris 2021 from Château Mercian in Japan’s Yamanashi (£75) and Rob Corbett’s Fifth Season 2023, a Devonian amalgam of Bacchus, Reichensteiner, and Pinot Noir (£68). Meanwhile, adorned with a playful word-search label, the Symington family’s Pequeno Dilema 2021 (£78) dares diners to puzzle over its enigmatic charm.

And because Bonnannini cannot resist a nod to her mixologist past, the cocktail list is where her creativity froths over. A Kombu Old Fashioned, and the Sea Truffle Negroni are invitations to drink adventurously – cocktails which taste as if they’ve been dredged from some submerged apothecary of the imagination.

Bonnannini’s list, like Albatross itself, is both a map and a riddle, leaving diners just slightly adrift, searching for the next port of call.

Dishes

In the lexicon of culinary extremes, Alex Claridge’s Albatross defies taxonomy. As he puts it, the project exists “without pre-conception, expectation, or regard for convention”.

True to his word, the kitchen is an explosive paradox: a frenzied barrage of ideas executed with precision. Heading up this culinary insurgency is Piotr Szpak, a Wilderness veteran tempered by a sortie at Aktar Islam’s Opheem, alongside Oliver Grieve, formerly of the triple Michelin-starred L’Enclume. Together, they lead an assault on dining orthodoxy.

We embarked on the “five-strong flight”, a liquid pas de deux with dishes which veered between the revelatory and the near-impossible. The opening salvo of snacks set the tone. A Porthilly oyster, stripped of its divisive texture through spherification, was as much a marvel of technique as it was a taste of the sea. This was followed by potato cannelloni, almost too fragile to handle, filled with smoky pike roe and wasabi pesto which tingled with clean, green clarity. A bluefin tuna nigiri – an ingenious trompe-l’œil made from a rice doughnut rolled in tuna oil – delivered a knockout punch of umami under glistening, three-year-aged soy.

Not all hit their mark. A three-day-cured mackerel with bronze fennel carried a hint of overconfidence, its flavour tipping over into pungency. The accompanying Limney fizz, however, proved its worth, lifting even the mackerel’s clammier moments.

The meal’s highlight – a single Argentinian scarlet prawn – arrived in a broth of its own head juices, miso, and pickled butternut squash. It was poetry in umami, paired with Shozo Moonlight Minama Nigorizake, a hazy sake which transcended its kitsch label. Alas, the barely filtered sensory immersion of the sake was dulled by the cups it was served in, which brought to mind Lilliputian chamber pots, muting the bouquet. Less harmonious was a fruity Konishi Shuzo Hiyabashi Gold sake with Devonshire cock crab, apple, sorrel, and oxalis – a pairing too lush, too sweet.

Culinary power roared, too, with mussels in a tempestuous, heavily smoked stock imbued by nine black peppers and “Iberico nduja”. This sauce demanded a fierce, gutsy wine – perhaps even an Amarone – but instead met Sebastien David’s carbonically-macerated L’Hurluberlu. The result? The meek, summery wine vanished under the mussels’ brooding intensity. A reshuffle of courses might have eased the strain.

Dessert eschewed the conventional prelude of palate-cleanser, leaping straight into “Sushi Rice Cream”. This was a beguiling balancing act, pairing sushi rice ice cream with candied fronds of nori. Genroku Redux, a barely polished sake with Ovaltine notes, fought valiantly, but it was the botrytised Greywacke Pinot Gris from Marlborough which edged ahead, harmonising, albeit imperfectly, with the final petit fours – a Szechuan/rose riff on a dib-dab.

Last word

Confined to a kitchen equipped with little more than a dehydrator, water bath, a small fryer “out the back,” and a blowtorch, Albatross achieves feats of improbable alchemy. Yet, for all its culinary daring, the wine and sake pairings too often pulled their punches, lacking the audacity which defines the plates. If Albatross is to embody its titular bird – lofty, rebellious, unbound – it must summon a fearless sense of provocation in every pour, every glass. For now, it ascends with ambition, though the wings need sharper edges to truly cut through the sky.

Best for

  • Seafood
  • Sake
  • Soundtrack

Value: 95, Size: 80, Range: 90, Originality: 91, Experience: 95; Total: 90.2

Albatross Death Cult – Newhall Square, Birmingham. B3 1RU; joinus@albatrossdeathcult.co.uk; albatrossdeathcult.co.uk

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