Blacklock Birmingham: Gorgeous Simplicity in a Gothic Vicarage

A London chophouse exports its charcoal-and-chops formula to Birmingham and immediately feels more at home than it ever did in the capital. Warm, loud, and unapologetically carnivorous.

Blacklock launched in London in 2015 as the antidote to small-plates anxiety — a place where the menu was short, the meat was charcoal-cooked, and the whole point was that you didn't have to think very hard. It now has five London sites and one in Manchester, and its Birmingham outpost has taken over the ground floor of St Philip's House, a former Victorian vicarage on the edge of Cathedral Square — locally and affectionately known as Pigeon Park. The building is extraordinary: dark wood panelling stripped back to bare original, reportedly a disused tunnel beneath, and an atmosphere that sits somewhere between Tudor feasting hall and gothic steakhouse. If you are going to open a restaurant about fire and meat, this is exactly the building you want. The food is exactly what you expect from Blacklock if you've been to any of the London sites, which is both its selling point and its ceiling. Lamb cutlets and lamb T-bones arrive in a stainless-steel tureen at £8 a chop — theatrical and generous — alongside beef dripping chips drizzled with garlic bone marrow that are, without exaggeration, one of the better versions of a chip you will eat in a British restaurant this year. The broccoli and walnut salad is crunchy and well-dressed. The ash-roasted sweet potatoes are crisp, sweet, and mushy simultaneously, which sounds wrong and tastes right. The snacks that open the meal — potted meat with kimchi, egg-and-anchovy bites — are functional rather than exciting, and the reviewer noted they were slightly dry, leaving some regret about not ordering the crayfish cocktail or mushrooms on toast. The dessert list on this visit extended to exactly two options: white chocolate cheesecake with seasonal berries, or ice cream. The cheesecake arrives in a large communal bowl to suggest abundance, then gets plonked into individual bowls with the promise of more — a trick old enough to have a Latin name, but it still works. It is, the reviewer notes with admirable honesty, a passable cheesecake that wouldn't trouble the in-house bakers at Costco. What makes the Birmingham site feel genuinely better than its London equivalents is the people, specifically the staff and the room's energy north of Watford. The server described as a 'naughty, rollicking bundle of joy' is doing more for the experience than the potted meat is. This is a real thing: hospitality that is warm rather than performative changes the texture of a meal in ways that an extra course cannot fix. By 9pm on a Monday, the room is completely full — helped by 'butcher price Monday', where every big chop is £8 per 100g. The all-in sharing menu runs at £28 a head, and à la carte comes in at around £40 before drinks and service. The honest read on Blacklock is this: it delivers exactly the experience it promises, which is a very specific and genuinely valuable thing. The reviewer's framing — 'a very, very cool version of an Angus Steakhouse' — is not a dismissal. It is a precise description of what Blacklock correctly identified the market was missing. Restaurants spent twenty years making dining more complicated, more conceptual, more demanding of the diner's attention. Blacklock made it simpler and found that people wanted to go, and kept going back. The Birmingham site has the best building of the lot, warmer service than London, and the same excellent chips. For anyone who wanted exactly this — and plenty of people do — it is quietly excellent at the thing it set out to do.