I'd seen a few things around Qype and an advert in man's favourite man-gazine Shortlist about The Jam Tree. There's two branches, one in Kensington and the other on the King's Road in Chelsea. The Kensington one has had good reviews and as the food was the same across both, we decided to take a trip to the Chelsea one which was closer! Both are in the Taste Card range and the Chelsea one had 50% off the food price if you booked through Qype as well so I did that and got a confirmation email straight away. All set.
We rocked up to a nice greeting from the lady inside. I was impressed with the decor, particularly words like 'push' and 'pull' on the front door spelled out using scrabble tiles. An amusing touch. We got handed the menus and ordered some drinks. They had an impressive double sided A4 wine menu packed with wines from around the world, but we settled for something non-alcoholic and ordered our starters and mains.
To start I had their duck and ham terrine with red onion marmalade, pickles and toast. It looked pretty good when it came to the table, there was a sizeable portion of terrine and a big chunk of bread. Unfortunately when I went to pick up the toast, it felt stale and on inspection with my teeth and tastebuds, they confirmed the theory. The terrine was overcooked and dry and the only redeeming feature on the plate was the red onion marmalade which served as a moistener for the duck making it a bit more edible.
We then faced nearly a half hour wait for our mains which, with music playing and the laughter of the men on the table next to us the same number of decibels as aeroplanes taking off, meant a very noisy 30 minutes, without food or drink. When it finally came, it was probably the only meal of the night worth waiting for. I had Caribbean Goat Curry and rice with mango salsa. The goat meat was wonderful, cooked perfectly and very tender. The curry was spicy and, when combined with the small amount of salsa, was tasty. However, although the food was half price, normally this would have cost £13.50. For that cost, I'd have expected either a fantastic curry, or something else to go with it. The curried goat was exactly that, just sauce and goat, and there was only a small spoonful of the salsa. If there was something else on the plate, or vegetables in the curry, it would have been a lot better, and worth the cost.
We'd got used to little or no attention by now but nothing had prepared us for the 30 minute wait between being handed dessert menus, and finally being asked what we wanted from the menu. That was awful, and I don't think I've ever had to wait even more than 5 minutes in such an instance, let alone half an hour. As it turned out, we did want a dessert, but it was getting to the point where if we weren't paying half price, it wouldn't have mattered if their dessert was the best in the whole world, we'd have decided to walk out (if we could have gotten the bill that is...).
Even when it came, the sticky toffee pudding wasn't worth the wait, and you couldn't taste the rum in the sauce. We quickly finished it off, got the bill (which surprisingly and thankfully came a little quicker), paid it (minus the service charge) and headed out.
So overall, the place looked good enough (we peeked out at the back garden as well at the end and wished we'd been out there). However the food, while we only paid half price, was nowhere near worth its full cost on the menu. The service was slower than a postal strike and there was more ice than drink in the drink. The only vaguely redeeming factor for me was the goat curry which was the tastiest part of the meal, but that's not saying an awful lot. read more