This new restaurant in Birmingham is tiny, but its ambition and bursts of flavour are extra large
Cuubo, 47 High Street, Harborne, Birmingham B17 9NT (cuubo.co.uk). Three-course lunch £30; three-course dinner £50; tasting menus £75; wines from £25
Until 6pm that day, chef Dan Sweet, an intense sliver of a man, was moonlighting as a builder. His site: the restaurant we had just eaten in. There were walls that needed an extra lick of paint. There was some grouting that needed doing. The few narrow, slatted wooden panels, which are practically the room’s only design feature, needed a little attention. Then he put on his whites and set about training the restaurant’s new waiter, the tall elegantly dressed man with the tied-back dreads, who is actually a neighbour and was just doing him a favour. He had to be got up to speed because this was the first time he had worked in a restaurant in two decades. Back then the tills didn’t have touch screens.
