Planet Jamie arrives in Clapham Junction with Recipease

So famous he needs no surname, Jamie Inc is one of the few good news stories on the High Street. His latest addition on my home territory has an enticing, if misleading bright pink interior and is a kind of luxe, rustic kitchen prep concept already apparently popular in the States and maybe a credit-crunching midway between dining out and cooking at home, with the shopping for ingredients, more time-consuming prep – from tomato sauce to meatballs and mash done for you – and bliss no washing up .

The interior is gorgeous, lots of oak fittings, abundant gorgeous ingredients, plenty of tempting tableware and Jamie food lines from chutneys, spiced nuts and jams to wines. It’s also impressive that almost all the staff have been recruited locally and the whole vibe is adamantly about appealing to the needs of the immediate community.

For a confident cook like myself, it felt slightly ridiculous to be layering up a fish pie. However, I was greatly impressed by the impeccably sourced ingredients that went into it and thought it typically Jamie in the best possible sense to add a cheeky layer of spinach, tomato passata and garlic mushrooms to sneak in some extra veg. Personally, as a purist I might have simply added tomato as the pre-cooked spinach tasted mildly metallic. The hard-boiled eggs were an ingredient too far – fine in kedgeree, but superfluous to fish pie. The results were good on flavour but its texture was disappointingly sloppy and floppy.

I also assembled a South Indian prawn curry. Again fab ingredients including tamarind paste, coconut, ready chopped chilli, pots of fresh coriander to plunder and it merely needed finishing in a pan at home. This was the most impressive dish, full-on piquant flavour with plenty of depth and a combination, I wouldn’t so readily be able to pull together at home.

Theo, my 13 year old son, enjoyed assembling his pizza. Again full marks for proper buffalo mozzarella and it was handy to have on greaseproof paper ready to slide into the oven at home. However, as pizza enthusiasts, who do summon the effort to make pizza from scratch sometimes, we found the pizza rather under-whelming and a bit too biscuity on the crust. Still Theo would definitely return for a laugh and good meeting place with his friends. I’m intrigued too to try the tiramisu, will find it hard to resist the outrageously good Chelsea Buns from Jamie’s bakers and think the more in-depth knife skills and classes with local businesses such as Dove’s the butchers sound great.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipease/index.html