Jimmy's

The recent BBC detective series 'Ashes to Ashes', set in the early 1980s, has led to an outbreak of permed hair, blue eye shadow and white blouson jackets among those too young to remember those fashions of the day the first time around. Old enough to know better, the owners of Jimmy's also appear to have replicated the 1980s, in this case a provincial cocktail bar-brasserie, complete with mirrored walls, dodgy art and retro menu. The chef, Liam Cooper, is only 25 so for him dishes such as prawn cocktail, beef Wellington and knickerbocker glory may seem wonderfully ironic and retro, rather than passé, as they might seem to an older generation.

To be fair, Jimmy's crab-and-crayfish cocktail isn't really a prawn cocktail, but merely evocative of the dish, with its guacamole-like base and chilled shellfish topping. Macaroni cheese, in contrast, is timeless; this version is buried in a white sauce that, to some tastes, would have benefited from a lot more cheese and seasoning.

'Is this what British food used to be like? No wonder you all turned to eating curries,' said my dining companion, who was raised on Indian food. She had a point; bland and blander seemed to be the style of home cooking practised in many British households until the last two decades. Even a good rendition of beef Wellington, not overcooked but pleasingly tender inside its puff pastry case, tasted of little other than the tenderloin itself; no browning or complexity of the Maillard reaction, just the sort of dish the British used to like with two veg. Technically we couldn't fault the dish, it's just that plain food doesn't have the same allure for us that it once did.

However, there was nothing plain about the knickerbocker glory (left), currently undergoing a revival. A sundae glass is filled with ice-cream, red jelly, and raspberries. It brings back memories of childhood, from the days before people knew what cholesterol was.

Jimmy's does, of course, also serve more contemporary dishes - baked sea bass, a lemongrass crème brûlée, that sort of thing. But around us, no one was ordering them; groups of cheery fortysomethings were instead making light work of the cooking like their mums used to make. Time for us space-travelling folk to head back to 2008, where our menus are seasoned with sous-vide and sustainability.
Guy Dimond. Photography Michael Franke

Time Out Issue 1963: April 3-9

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