“It’s great to win it, and keeping it for the year means you’ve done what you needed to do to maintain the same standard you hit achieving the first one,” says Aktar Islam. “If you let things slip, it’s gone.” It’s a chilly January afternoon in Birmingham and I’m inside Islam’s progressive Indian restaurant Opheem, having just congratulated him on the fifth anniversary of winning its first Michelin star back in 2019.
Less than two weeks after our conversation, Opheem would become Birmingham’s first restaurant to receive two Michelin stars . Islam is too driven to let any standard slip, and this latest accolade is more confirmation of why he’s now perhaps the city’s most highly-regarded chef (no small feat in a field that includes Glynn Purnell and Brad Carter). It’s been a long journey to the top.
From working at his father’s restaurant in Solihull as a teenager and then later for many years operating as chef director of Birmingham’s Lasan restaurant group, Islam eventually stepped down in 2017 to open Opheem the following year. He’s also made various appearances on TV shows including Gordon Ramsey’s F Word and the BBC’s Great British Menu , but it’s at Opheem where his personality and vision has been freed. Flanked by the rising glass towers of the city centre’s seemingly never-ending Paradise developments and the Jewellery Quarter’s Victorian factories and foundries, the restaurant occupies a space and time all of its own on Summe.