Restaurant Review: Jamie's Italian, at the Bullring, Birmingham
JAMIE’S ITALIAN, Bullring shopping centre, Birmingham. Tel: 0121 270 3610
Reality can be a fickle companion for a global food star.
You do all these TV shows with delicious looking, flavour-packed dishes, cooking effortlessly on the back of a Vespa up a mountain pass. You produce glossy cook books which look so good you could eat them.
And then you set up a mass catering operation, in the middle of Birmingham, and leave it entirely to other people to run. That’s a big risk, foolhardy perhaps. But if anyone can do it, a cultural demi god and all-round decent bloke like Jamie Oliver can do it surely.
He can’t.
Lunch at Jamie’s Italian in the Bullring – the 15th and newest in an expanding chain offering “fantastic, rustic” Italian dishes – proved to be a dismal affair. Poor meals are two a euro but this one galled particularly because I happen to like Jamie Oliver.
I have interviewed him a couple of times, mostly recently just before the opening of his gargantuan Birmingham outpost, and he has always proved engaging company and engagingly honest.
He has said he doesn’t want to come across as a “f***ing know-it-all” and he doesn’t. You can’t fault his passion and the zeal with which he continues to tackle important social concerns relating to food, including poor diets, the paucity of basic cooking skills and apathetic politicians.
He doesn’t have to crusade like this, with campaigns such as School Dinners and his Ministry of Food, and one senses it comes at a considerable cost, both financially and emotionally. The last time we spoke, Jamie was out on his feet, deprived of sleep following the arrival of his latest baby, Buddy.
So what does he do? He opens a 270-cover restaurant in Brum. I fear the Naked Chef may end up going nuts. After waiting two hours for two courses, I know I did.
The first thing you need to know, if you haven’t been to a Jamie’s Italian, is that you can’t book unless your group is between eight and 16.
According to the PR blurb, this is because “we want you to visit us when it suits you.” Isn’t that considerate? Except I usually have a fairly good idea what day and what time I would like to eat, otherwise I’d never pin anyone down for a meal, and I make reservations. I don’t find this at all constraining. Clearly, I am unconventional.
Happily, when we arrived there were several empty tables, so I assumed we would be seated quickly. Oh, no. Like everyone else, we had to go through the rigmarole of waiting.
The greeter asked for my name. I got as far as “Richard” before he stopped typing into his computer and handed me a pager. “There you are, Richard,” he said. Why is he calling me Richard? I don’t know him. I hate that. Charlie Nameless said the pager would go off when our table was ready. It went off straight away. I told Nameless: “It’s gone off. Is our table ready?”
He looked at me scornfully. “It’s a test,” he said dismissively.
“Oh, I thought we’d got lucky,” I replied, attempting to lighten the mood.
“You wish. I wish. We all wish,” said Nameless.
And that’s part of the smarmy, self-satisfied problem here. Everyone’s bought in to the cult of Jamie Oliver. We, the cash-paying customer, should be grateful to be here, to be living part of the dream. Giving you a pager to wait to be called for lunch/dinner is a way of saying: “You’re lucky we let you in. We’ll call you when we’re ready.”
