Cuubo, Birmingham: ‘A storming talent’ – restaurant review

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 £25Until 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…

Fluted bottles are back – but now they contain decent wine

Forget past associations, the elegant bottle is now a statement of intent for the fresh, floral, racy wines insideJim Barry The Lodge Dry Riesling, Australia 2022 (£15.99, or £11.99 in a mixed case, Majestic) For a large part of the wine-drinking population, the sight of a tall, slim fluted wine bottle is still enough to bring a shudder of horror at the prospect of the acidic sugar water they assume is contained within these undeniably elegant vessels. The flute, after all, is the bottle of Blue Nun, Liebfraumilch and other throwbacks to the bad old days of mass-market German wine – to the…