In the last 12 months, I’ve had a largely underwhelming (and at times, worse than even that ) time dining at the Bullring. I have really loved the influx of new shops, all the new brands you can visit and fun things to do in our iconic shopping centre, but the food has been falling flat for me.
I don’t consider myself a snobby food critic. I’ve had as much of a good time in greasy spoons where the staff are known for effing and jeffing as I have in Birmingham’s elite fine dining spot.
But something I dislike more than anything is a restaurant pretending to be something that, at its heart, it isn’t. Worse, restaurants with no heart at all.
Read more: Incredible food you can eat in Birmingham for a fiver or less
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In our glittering shopping centre, in the centre of England’s second city, heart feels hard to come by in comparison to our spectacular suburbs. Rent prices must have a lot to do with that, I’d imagine. We are all poorer for it.
I was contemplating that as I walked through the Bullring to try out its latest restaurant. Pop Street is a four-in-one spot where Burger King used to be, brightly coloured and extremely well lit beside the trifecta of old timers in the mall corner: Nando’s, Pizza Hut and Greggs.
I had made a few early judgements based on daft reasons: The way their website is filled with paragraphs that look like Chat GPT just spewed them out, spelling ‘flavour’ without the U and trying to convince us that it specialises in four different cuisines that will ‘revolutionise’ fast food. How can you be excellent at katsu AND fried chicken AND burgers AND burritos?!
Enquiring minds, like mine and my friend Faye’s, had to know. We popped in at tea time on a Tuesday when almost every table sat empty.
We were greeted at the door and set about wrangling the self serve screens. Navigating it was a bit like a digital maze, with different dishes in different nooks and crannies. Stop this madness at once, bring me a human.
There were no burritos (“we don’t know when we will be doing them” a member of staff told me) and so I just started clicking with wild abandon. In the ‘Bulls Street Burgers’ section I ordered the ‘Bullseye’ burger for Faye (£7) and six ‘Rival Wings’ from ‘Dirty Wild Wings’ for a fiver. I got ‘Dirty Wild Fries’ from there too, because I heard you are what you eat, and they were £5 as well.
I ordered the yasai katsu curry, £11, from ‘King Katsu’ because curiosity dictated I should and I wanted to sample the‘flavor’. With a couple of pops coming in at £3 each for a Coke and a pink lemonade and a portion of churros (£7) that felt out of context now they’re not doing burritos, I paid the £41 and chose a people watching window seat when the staff member promised to bring our food over.
The music is pretty loud and on a loop (get lost, Maroon 5) but the space is pleasant, bright white and powder blue but for the pop art designs on the wall that look cheap. Let me reaffirm to you at this stage that I’m not a snob, because I appreciate that I sure do sound like one.
Food came over fast, as fast food ought to do, a stack of cardboard boxes with wooden cutlery. There were two lollipops too, which were cute little additions. I felt like a good girl at the doctors, and then immediately guilty because I’d been such a snark slagging off their wallpaper. I shut my mouth.
Everything tasted way better than I’d anticipated once I opened it again. And I mean everything.
The patties of Faye’s burger were really smashed thin, allowing for crisp edges but with little gushes of juice from slightly pink meat inside. English mustard instead of American style was a controversial addition (remove if you can’t handle the nose tingle) with the onions and salad, but she ate it happily and I admired the way the restaurant lighting gleamed off the shiny, seeded bun and the white bones left after she tore the fried chicken (“as good as KFC”) from them.
Faye’s smash burger
(Image: Kirsty Bosley)
The loaded fries were both dirty AND wild, a generous portion with a kick of buffalo spice and lashings of American style cheese sauce with a bedazzling of sliced spring onion. It’s not the kind of incredible, home made cheese sauce like you get at Burger Me Up in Stirchley, but until they open their first Bullring haunt (we can but dream) I’ll make do.
A beautiful dome of sticky white rice, beautifully cooked, sat like an igloo in the wooden katsu box, topped with a swimming in a tidal wave of thick curry sauce. It was a sauce as good as any I’ve ever made from scratch at home, and I think I make a banging sweet potato Japanese katsu.
There could have been more crisp, sweet and silky pumpkin and sweet potato korokke for my liking (I got two of each). But that’s only because I really enjoyed them and I’m greedy.
The katsu dish
(Image: Kirsty Bosley)
The churros were warm and they had not scrimped on the cinnamon sugar. A pot of dulce de leche was so thick and sweet and caramelly, the churro stuck upright in it when I wasn’t holding it. So much nicer than standard chocolate sauce, a great decision by them.
We didn’t need to order all of that food and we didn’t need to spend all that cash to be full, but I’m glad I gave it all a shot. If you’ve got a family arguing because you can’t agree on one particular cuisine, Pop Street is for you.
There is one thing this snobby writer is sticking by, and that’s my belief that one place can’t be EXCELLENT at four different cuisines. But Pop Street has proved that you can, at least, be good at it.
If you’re not going to have much heart, at least have really good katsu, eh?