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Comments
(Gets coat)
The breakfast choices alone in a Cantonese Dim Sum breakfast has more variation in ingredients, cooking technique/methods and difficulty than most of Italian cuisine. That's before you expand it into other breakfast options.
And that is limiting to 1 region, 1 time of day and 1 particular style of food.
The restaurant business seems quite prone to whims of fashion - one week everyone who's anyone is desperate to be seen there, next week they're all going somewhere else, and you can't pay the rent.
The one booming part of the dining sector appears to be Deliveroo - restaurant food that you eat at home at takeaway prices. Not that I fancy a carbonara that's been sweating in a cyclist's backpack for half an hour, but clearly lots do.
Reading some of the staff interviews since administration sounds very familiar to an experienced chef. The biggest problem is that they operated on the assumption of large numbers of covers. The venue I knew well had to do 400 covers in order to break even so about 5k per day.
Imagine a 12 to 10 food service day. You're going to need to give chefs three hours prep time before service minimum. At least an hour or two clean down time afterwards. That means you're paying for back of house labour from 9am to 12pm. Because you're offering food of this nature, you can't rely on one or two people adept with a microwave or able to dump frozen bags in a bain marie. You need a big kitchen crew. Accordingly, a big kitchen crew is generally mirrored by a big front of house crew.
When you try to cut labour costs and keep the same opening hours, you're asking one chef to do 1.5 chef's work and asking one floor staff member to wait on 10-12 tables at once. Service and food suffers.
When your labour costs are high, you try to reduce food costs. Ooops, that's not happening with the menu you have and where you source your ingredients. As JI restaurants followed a spec menu, you then look to reduce costs by changing the menu: smaller portion sizes, perhaps change a cut of meat for something different, all the usual tricks.
Since I moved to London late 2017 after cheffing around Bath and Bristol for the best part of 7 years, the biggest trend within London food for me wasn't food itself: it was downsizing of property. Chain places moving from one place to a smaller cheaper place, independents doing likewise. JI didn't really do this and it's notable that the ones still open now are the Gatwick franchises with a totally captive audience.
Just lash a bit of chilli in........
Bish Bash Bosh...run out of Dosh
They should have had Turkey Twizzlers on the menu
but I do feel for the staff, redundancy is horrible.
The puns on this forum really have gone pasta joke.
... "Jamie's Italian" is simply not true. Jamie's not Italian... but I guess the punters wouldn't have gone for "Jamie's English"
He put his name on something which he seems to have little control over and as a result harmed his own brand worthiness.
My feedback thread is here.
And everything on the menu had truffle oil lol
I'd disagree in part. There is more to Italian food than wheat cheese an tomato. You are missing out most secondi here. Meat, fish, they do a lot more than pasta and pizza. Like most established civilisations, their food has creativity and diversity in spades. But yes, there is a simplicity at the core, fresh sparse combinations that work fantastically. But, you can say that of many country's cuisines. Traditional French food is simple, as is Asian food. Asian food can be very simple indeed.
cheese - well surely that's down to personal taste isn't it? I'd have a quality Lancashire over any manchego/rocquefort, insert whatever. IMO, a proper quality Cheddar takes a lot of beating. I think we do better cheese than any country.
We’re fortunate enough to have loads of decent eateries in Cheltenham nowadays
(Obviously, there are some idiots that think they're going to get food of the same standard as *The* Ivy, but I'm not talking about them)