670 Grams

Digbeth's Most Confrontational Dining Room

Gibb Street in Deritend is not the address most diners associate with a Michelin-recognised tasting menu. The Custard Factory — a creative quarter occupying the former Bird's Custard plant — has spent two decades accumulating independent studios, small galleries, and the kind of businesses that require cheap rent and tolerance for noise. 670 Grams arrived into that context and chose to amplify it rather than soften it. The music is loud and the walls are dense with graffiti. The monochrome palette gives the two-floor shop unit a coherence that stops short of refinement. A tiny kitchen-bar sits on the mezzanine, operating at a scale that concentrates the cooking process into something almost theatrical by proximity. You are not being asked to forget where you are.

That friction between setting and ambition is, by design, the point. Birmingham's higher-end restaurant tier , which includes addresses like Adam's, Simpsons, and Opheem , operates largely within formats that reinforce the ceremony of fine dining. 670 Grams refuses that contract. The Michelin Plates it received in both 2024 and 2025 are a recognition that the food justifies serious attention, regardless of how aggressively the room pushes back against the conventions of the category.

What the Food Is Actually Doing

The daily tasting menu runs to around 17 bites and servings, a format common to creative-led kitchens where the brevity of each course allows the kitchen to pursue combinations that would be exhausting at full portion scale. The influence of Michael O'Hare's The Man Behind the Curtain in Leeds , a similarly punk-coded, Michelin-starred operation , is part of the public record here. But the kitchen at 670 Grams has developed its own set of preoccupations, and they are worth reading carefully.

The ingredient sourcing sits at the intersection of luxury and local vernacular. Lobster arrives inside a doughnut dusted with black sesame, served on a ceramic tongue with a point of wasabi. Langoustine tartare pairs with blowtorched scallop, caviar, and a soy-honey consommé cut with coriander oil. Pineapple is grilled and lacquered with kecap manis, the Indonesian sweet soy sauce that has no particular Birmingham tradition but fits a kitchen comfortable drawing from wherever the flavour logic leads. Cured salmon tartare arrives over a rice bhaji , a form pulled from the city's South Asian food culture , with smoked tomato consommé. That last combination is the most locally inflected thing on the menu and also the most quietly confident: it doesn't announce itself as a Birmingham dish, it just is one.

'half-time balti pie' is the kitchen's most discussed piece of signature work. One bite, tart pastry, the format of a football-ground snack , filled with truffle and foie gras and finished with warming chilli. The joke, if it is one, is also the technique: taking a thing with zero culinary prestige and requiring luxury ingredients to land inside it without irony. Whether it works depends entirely on execution, and the evidence from multiple visitor accounts suggests it does.

Dessert follows the same logic of controlled contrast. A chocolate crémeux with candied orange, olive-oil sponge, and whipped white chocolate and honey cream closes the menu with a finesse that the earlier courses sometimes play against. Some choices , pork scratching as a dessert garnish , read as idiosyncratic rather than essential, which is perhaps the kitchen's prerogative given the format. The kitchen is now operating under head chef Sacha Townsend, promoted from sous-chef, with Kray Treadwell moving into an executive role. That internal transition is worth noting for repeat visitors: the menu's DNA and direction remain consistent, but the creative voice at the pass is evolving.

The Wine List and What It Signals

Three whites, three reds, and a rosé , all priced at £45 a bottle or £12.50 a glass. The fruit-first, easy-drinking selection is a deliberate curatorial position: it asks nothing of the diner in terms of wine knowledge and imposes no ceremony on the beverage side of the evening. Whether that represents a philosophical choice or a resource constraint is debatable. What it means in practice is that the wine list does not keep pace with the ambition of the food. Diners who track the kitchen's precision through the tasting menu and then look for equivalent depth in the glass will find the list functional rather than matched. That gap is the most substantive editorial criticism of 670 Grams. For comparison, creative kitchens operating at a similar technical register in the UK , from The Fat Duck in Bray to L'Enclume in Cartmel , invest heavily in beverage programming as a parallel track to the food. The wine selection at 670 Grams is the concession to format that the room and the music are not.

Birmingham's Creative Dining Tier in Context

Birmingham has a structured fine dining sector that has earned sustained Michelin recognition, but the city's more interesting recent development is a lower-infrastructure creative tier operating outside the white-tablecloth frame. Alongside 670 Grams, venues like Bayonet and Albatross Death Cult are building reputations in Digbeth and surrounding areas on format, technique, and specificity of vision rather than room investment. That pattern is not unique to Birmingham , London, Manchester, and Leeds have all produced versions of it , but the Digbeth cluster has developed a coherence that makes it worth tracking as a scene rather than a collection of individual venues.

For international context, the creative-format tasting menu operating outside luxury hospitality infrastructure has parallels in kitchens like Enrico Bartolini in Milan and, at the more institutional end, Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen. 670 Grams operates at a different price point and scale, but the underlying interest in recontextualising premium ingredients through unexpected forms connects to the same broader creative current. For further reading on the UK's tasting menu tier, Moor Hall in Aughton, Gidleigh Park in Chagford, and Hand and Flowers in Marlow offer instructive comparisons in how different kitchens negotiate the relationship between setting, format, and critical recognition.

Planning a Visit

670 Grams is at 4 Gibb Street, Deritend, Birmingham B9 4AA, inside the Custard Factory complex in Digbeth. The price range sits at £££, placing it below the ££££ tier occupied by Adam's, Simpsons, and Opheem, which makes the Michelin Plate recognition particularly notable as a value signal within the city's tasting menu category. The Google rating of 4.6 across 156 reviews is consistent with a venue that generates strong partisan loyalty alongside the occasional negative reaction from diners who arrived without understanding the format. The room, the volume, and the tightness of the space are not incidental , they are the experience. Confirming what the evening will involve before booking is direct and will save both parties the disappointment. For broader planning across the city, our full Birmingham restaurants guide, Birmingham hotels guide, Birmingham bars guide, Birmingham wineries guide, and Birmingham experiences guide cover the full picture.

FAQs

What's the leading thing to order at 670 Grams?

The tasting menu is the only format, so there is no à la carte selection to navigate. Within the approximately 17 courses, the courses that consistently draw attention across visitor accounts are the lobster doughnut with black sesame and wasabi, and the 'half-time balti pie' , a one-bite tart drawing on Birmingham football-ground culture but filled with truffle, foie gras, and chilli. The rice bhaji with cured salmon tartare and smoked tomato consommé is the dish that most directly connects the menu to the city's South Asian culinary culture. Both the Michelin Plate awards (2024 and 2025) recognise the kitchen's creative range rather than any single dish, so the honest answer is that the menu is designed to be experienced in sequence rather than cherry-picked.

How far ahead should I plan for 670 Grams?

The venue operates from a compact two-floor unit with a small kitchen, which limits covers significantly. Small-capacity creative tasting menu restaurants at the Michelin Plate level , across Birmingham and the UK more broadly , typically book out several weeks in advance, with popular weekend slots going further ahead. Given the recent internal change (Sacha Townsend now heading the kitchen in an executive restructure), renewed media attention may have tightened availability further in the near term. At the £££ price point, 670 Grams sits below the full ££££ tier of Birmingham's most-booked fine dining rooms, but the limited seat count rather than price is the constraining factor. Checking availability well in advance and having flexible mid-week dates in mind is the practical approach.