We’ve had a chance to pop into Jamie Oliver’s new venture Recipease a couple of times and sample the food, so I thought it was time I jotted down our thoughts on the set-up:
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First up, no doubt, the food we’ve had has been great. Really tasty, hearty and generous portions of comfort foods with big flavours; just what you’d expect from a Jamie Oliver experience. We shared a couple of portions of the Baked Salmon In a Bag, which worked really well with the included olives, but needed some extra veg to make it a proper FatBanker meal size. We also bought and froze (no problems there), the weighty Fantastic Fish Pie, which we ate a couple of days later. This was very good. Huge chunks of fish and prawns, with the interesting addition of spinach in the pie (is this traditional??)…didn’t need much added to make this a generous meal for two.
Ok, that’s the view on the food we’ve tried, how about the shop and concept itself?
- Inside, the shop is nicely decked out, modern yet homely, the open cooking-space at the back looks welcoming and spanking clean. As you’d probably expect, there are plenty of JO products placed around inviting purchase.
- Some of the prices made us baulk: a tub of olives for 12 quid is an eye-watering example. Also, given the prevalence of big-red-letter discount and offers on show at other retailers at the moment, it was odd to walk into a store and see none on display at all.
- The closing time has been brought forward to 7pm on weekdays. This seems a little odd given the demographic in the area is heavy on young city workers who will only just be passing on their way home about this time. Unless, of course…
- …the intended demographic is the day-time ‘at-home-mums’, in which case they seriously need to make the shop more baby-buggy friendly as the current layout means a lot of the shop is inaccessible to the little darlings.
- You can’t book a cooking course in the shop itself, you have to do it online instead. This is odd, right? Overheard a funny conversation, where a customer, having been talked through the concept by one of the friendly staff was impressed enough to ask to book a course, only to be told she couldn’t do it in-store. Daft.
- No nutritional values on the boxes of prepared foods. My gorgeous date ensures me that every girl (and possibly guy) worth her salt will want to know just exactly how much olive oil has gone into the preparation of these lovely meals before they commit to buying them.
- Is anyone going to return to the store for further purchases after having been show how cook the dishes once? Fresh organic ingredients are available next door in Waitrose too. And you can get loo roll there at the same time.