I've never eaten in a Jamie Oliver restaurant until yesterday. (I know! Where have I been?). He has five types of restaurant and one of those has been franchised, so that there are 42 Jamie's Italians over the country. I'm sure it won't be long before there are franchises for the diner and the British food restaurant as well; the man appears to be going for world domination.
Can I be honest?
I've never really liked Jamie. Maybe because I am so much older and grumpier than him. His energy and chirpiness always got me down. Whenever he is on TV showing recipes I think they are unnessisarily complicated; I mean, who stuffs their Sunday Pork roast with higher welfare chicken livers and oysters? Stuffing is easy to make with onions, bread and herbs but for a Jamie recipe it always has to be sourdough bread, organic onions grown on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and ethically sourced sage that really, really wants to be picked.
His television programmes put me off eating anything he cooked, as he seemed to be sniffing. No. Not just sniffing, hawking back great chunks of mucus and wiping his nose on his sleeve. He may not have done any of that but that was my impression.
Obviously, you have to admire the concept behind Fifteen and the work he is doing around children's nutrition and he is always such a happy chappy.
So, why was my experience of his restaurant, Barbacoa, such a difficult one?
We went there to celebrate meat-loving son's 18th birthday. We could because vegetarian daughter was at work. He loved it but the Grumpy Old Woman in me wasn't too happy. This is what she had to say:
1. Dead animal carcasses hanging in the window? Really? That's just tacky. I know it's a meat restaurant but, well, it's not the restaurant at the end of the Universe, we don't need to have a conversation with our cow before deciding to eat it.
2. How many stairs to get into the restaurant? Bouncers with headsets stopping people who haven't booked or who are early from going upstairs, even to the bar, is a bit pretentious.
3. Ooh. It's pretty. What a view. I like London.
4. Actually, this seat arrangement is only good if you don't like the people you are with. I could have a great conversation with St Paul's Cathedral. *looks at LSH, decides it's not so bad after all.
5. It's very dark in here. I can't see the menu. Oh well, I'll just have the smallest steak they've got.
6. Oh, here we go. Up selling waitresses. The special today is a kilogram of meat between two people. Only £60 per person.
7. My steak looks like a joint of beef that we would share between three for a Sunday roast. It's a square of meat, burnt on the outside and still alive on the inside. It's quite tough and I can't see it.
8. My chips are in a bucket. Why? Why does everyone think we like buckets? Luckily, my steak is on a decent sized plate. I had a scone on a small piece of slate the other day and I still haven't recovered.
9. Conversation is difficult, with our seating positions, the dark and the clattering noise environment.
10. The waitress comes to ask me something. I can't hear her, so I ask if she has a torch. She brings me a sharper knife; it's terribly difficult to hear. It does help with the chunk of cow, though.
11. The LSH and boy have ribs but are surprised. Can you have ribs off the bone?
12. I hit upon a genius plan and used the torch on my phone.
13. Ordering pudding is so much easier.
14. Bacon in my son's Sundae seems to be taking the meat theme a little far. Luckily, there is no meat in my brownie. There's not much brownie in it though with just a small layer of brownie with a chocolate mousse on top. Yes, it's nice but I feel cheated.
15. I've started a trend. It's much lighter. Everyone has their phone torch on.
16. The bill has a donation to Jamie's charity to tackle childhood obesity included. That seems reasonable if not a little hypocritical, as I wonder how many calories I have just consumed.
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