Highly rated Birmingham chef Alex Claridge is to open an extravagantly named chef’s table restaurant in the city’s Jewellery Quarter – where he plans to charge guests less than half what he should to be profitable.

Albatross Death Cult – a name inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the the Ancient Mariner – will offer a 12-course, mostly seafood set menu to just 14 guests at a sitting. The meal will cost £88 a head – not the £210 Alex says he should charge.

“Anyone can do something for money, I’m doing something just because I want it to exist. I don’t think it will make any money, plausibly it will cost us a lot of money,” he said. “The cost of visiting Albatross is the cost of its continued existence, not the pursuit of anything as commonplace as profit. The world has too many accountants and not enough romantics – let’s roll the dice.”

Alex has earned consistent high ratings in the Harden’s guide for the “cutting edge modern British cuisine” at his “unmissable” restaurant The Wilderness, also in the Jewellery Quarter.

The closure last year of Atelier, the cocktail bar he ran with Robert Wood in a restored factory in Newhall Street, left his with an “albatross around my neck” – hence the name. “I have spent more hours than I care to recall sat alone in this beautiful shell contemplating, well, what’s the point of this?

“It’s an earnest wish that, through the creation of something tremendous enough, bold enough, ambitious enough, and pure enough, I may be able to exorcise the tremendous weight – emotional, creative, financial, and practical – I have carried for far longer than I ever felt able. I believe in the radical power of reinvention in both the individual and in business.”

Alex hosted a series of preview dinners in December to roadtest dishes he describes as “extracting maximum flavour from a pantry that is rooted at sea“.

Albatross is expected to launch in June, with chefs serving guests directly at a kitchen counter.