The Sportsman Club, West Bromwich: 'You won at lunch' - restaurant review

The Sportsman Club, 13 High Street, West Bromwich B70 6PP (0121 553 1353). Starters £3-10.50, mains £4.50-10.50, desserts £2, beers from £3.80

Some people have too much free time. One of them is a reader I'll call Ian, because that's his fucking name. In early 2022, he sent me a disturbing email explaining that he would be keeping a close eye on my review numbers outside of London over the coming year. On the second working day of 2023, he delivered on that delicious promise. He sent me an Excel spreadsheet of all my 2022 reviews. Imagine Ian, every Sunday morning, tongue clenched between his teeth, making another entry, perhaps smiling justifiably over that Shoreditch review, or slightly disappointed whether I've been to Swansea or Preston. Fortunately, for Ian, everything went well. Apparently only 52% of my reviews were outside of London. Just to say, Ian was very, almost performatively, disappointed in me.

My wife was outraged. "Does this man [she used another word] know how long you spend on trains?" No, I suspect Ian doesn't and, I imagine, he doesn't care either. In a perfect world, reviews would be distributed geographically based on population. It's not a perfect world. While things have improved greatly, the spread of restaurants worth writing about isn't evenly spread out either. Once you subtract the nice but boring pubs serving menus of rib eye steaks and lemon pie, the garden center cafes offering "light bites" and the intense bearded men preparing nine-course tasting menus in refurbished barns, celebrating nature's bounty - please don't give me that - there are still swaths of the UK with little to tell, figuratively and, given my work, literally. spacefinder-role="inline" data-spacefinder-type="model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class="dcr-173mewl">

Add to the fact that these days many only open Thursday nights, that I have an unpredictable thing what we call a "family life" and recently, this other thing called the rail strikes, which are just as much, it can be complicated. I could point out that a magazine in, say, Aberdeen, all by being entertaining for Aberdonians, may be less useful for a reader in, say, Stoke, than one in London because he is less likely to go to Aberdeen than to London. Ian with so much force, you could hear the balls scraping against the casings from here. As the great Groucho Marx never said, my apologies. If you don't like them, I have others.

Anyway, I continue to travel, always in the hope of finding interesting and good. That's why I trusted this Avanti service from the west coast to Birmingham New Street and this noisy black cab that skims the outskirts of the city to West Bromwich. I'm here for the Sportsman Club, which is a Desi pub. The word Desi refers to the South Asian origins of these drinkers. They first started appearing in the likes of West L...