The £60 Gold Grill and the 32-Hour Lasagne: Inside Birmingham’s Most Unapologetic New Italian

On a Saturday afternoon, I bought vintage clip-on earrings from a man in a bullet-proof kiosk. Around the corner, a sandwich board offered gold grills for your teeth — £60, free moulding and postage included. This is the Jewellery Quarter. Not the polished, PR-sanitised version that property developers sell in glossy brochures. The real one. And tucked at its edge, beside a tiny train station that most people miss, is a restaurant that has no velvet rope, no private dining room, and no tasting menu with a wine pairing that costs more than a used car. Yet it is, in its own scrappy, Sicilian way, the most exclusive thing I have encountered in months.

Vieni is the creation of chef Angelina Adamo, whose Instagram bio reads: “Bite off more than you can chew and learn how to fucking chew.” That is not a marketing slogan. It is a manifesto. Adamo came here from running the kitchen at The Circle Lounge inside Birmingham Hippodrome, where she fed weary theatre-goers and parents escaping pantomimes. Now she works a tiny nook on the edge of the Goodsyard development, a space so small you could miss it while blinking. Here, she does everything: arancini with one hand, payroll with the other, ordering loo paper between services. This is the opposite of the vast, impersonal pleasure machines that have colonised Birmingham city centre — the Albert’s Schlosses, the Big Mamma clones, the giant chains serving pad thai under plastic purple flower ceilings. Those places make people happy. But Vieni makes people feel something rarer: a happy hubbub. You cannot pipe that in. You cannot orchestrate it. It happens when a room full of strangers decides, collectively, that they are in the right place at the right time.

The menu reads like a diary, not a spreadsheet. Pyefleet oysters with British strawberry and champagne vinegar. Seabass crudo with peaches, basil and green chilli. Ruffled ribbons of mafaldine in vodka tomato sauce. And then there is the 32-hour ox cheek crispy lasagne — a starter served in slices, with so much depth and softness that it becomes, as one diner put it, “the ultimate cuddle on a plate.” The arancini are not the piddly quail’s-egg-sized things so popular in Britain. They are magnificent objects, perched in puddles of tomato sauce and heaped with pecorino. The dolce of the day changes constantly, and is worth the train fare alone. We arrived at half past four for a quick drink — a Sicilian Slapper, a draught Poretti, a glass of Luscombe’s rhubarb pop — and within minutes we were begging them to serve us dinner. That is the kind of place Vieni is.

What does this signal about wealth and taste in 2025? Everything. The ultra-wealthy have spent the last decade being sold the same story: that luxury is a seamless, frictionless, branded experience. A private jet. A watch with a waiting list. A restaurant where the lighting is designed by a Milanese architect and the menu is a QR code. But the real connoisseurs know better. Real luxury is not the absence of effort. It is the presence of soul. It is a chef who signs the payroll with the same hands that roll your arancini. It is a room where the noise is not piped-in music but the sound of people actually enjoying themselves. It is the knowledge that what you are eating — a 32-hour lasagne, a fennel sausage coil with cacio e pepe butter beans — cannot be replicated by a corporate kitchen in a hundred cities. Vieni is not scalable. That is its power.

Look ahead. Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter is changing. The Goodsyard development is bringing new money, new buildings, new footfall. But places like Vieni are the canary in the coal mine for what a city can become if it remembers that size is not the same as significance. Adamo is proof that the most valuable real estate in hospitality is not square footage — it is conviction. For the traveller who has eaten at every three-star in Europe, who has tired of the tasting-menu circus, who wants to sit at a window table at half past four and feel the hum of a room that is genuinely alive, this is the address. No reservation app required. Just show up. And bite off more than you can chew.