Anyone who has lived in the Birmingham area for any time at all will know the Italian restaurant San Carlo - it's kind of an institution in Birmingham, winning national & regional awards all the time and providing authentic traditional Italian food from the Temple Street location.
What you may not know though is that they have now opened a restaurant called
Fumo, just around the corner on Waterloo Street. Fumo is a stylish modern restaurant that specialises in Cicchetti (pronounced chi-KET-tee) which are Venetian "tapas" ie small plates.
The range of dishes is great and we went there on Sunday for Mother's Day (lucky Mum! that's
me incidentally!!!)
Like tapas you choose lots of different dishes to share and we included this halibut with samphire and baby vine tomatoes - which although the halibut was a little more cooked than I would have liked was still really nice.
The baby chicken with tempura zucchini and peppers was deliciously tender
We also had a giant prawn with walnuts and rocket - excellent! And melt in the mouth scallops. Plus a seafood salad. The pizzas were apparently very good too, I didn't have any but I did think it was a great idea to have small pizzas included in the selection.
The fillet of beef with mushroom sauce was gorgeous - a creamy sauce full of flavour and plenty of wild mushrooms - stylishly served on a platter. The fillet was melt in the mouth perfect and didn't really need the steak knife provided!
All in all we had about 12 dishes between 5 of us...we could have eaten it all over again because it was so good!
Instead we had a whole selection of deserts...
Well, it was Mother's Day!
And yes, the deserts were just as good - we polished off tiramisu, affogato, Sicilian lemon tart, chocolate & almond cake and panacotta...
what can I say! I'm NOT a huge fan of deserts - give me starter and main rather than main and desert any day BUT...these were good! I expected the lemon tart to be stronger flavoured knowing what Sicilian lemons are like but it was still really delicious.
So, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending
Fumo. The atmosphere, the team, the food and the presentation were all excellent. We'll definitely return, and hopefully before next March!
