Recipease.

I have heard a lot about Recipease, the new Jamie Oliver ‘food and kitchen shop’ in Clapham. I am a self-confessed armchair foodie, I enjoy food immensely but enjoy nothing more than watching food television, flicking through a (dare I say) glossy celebrity-chef endorsed recipe book or magazine. Jamie Oliver fits into the ‘celebrity chef’ bracket more than most and ‘Recipease’ helps to back this notion presenting Oliver as a global brand with shelf upon shelf of Oliver-face-endorsed merchandising.

We enter the ‘shop’ in a huddle and we are immediately greeted by the cheery chirpings of the staff, who incidentally are lovely in every sense of the word but I am not entirely convinced that they didn’t go through some rigorous ‘pucka’ lingo training programme in order to fill employment briefs. No grey hairs in sight the staff are bouncy and ‘street’ and only just on the correct side of being, to use a food pun, cheesy. We are here to make Risotto, in our case of the wild mushroom variety.

We are told to gather around the central station and we are taken through the basic elements of what makes the dish but just before we even touch a pan we are given an Orwellian message from on high in the form of a DVD introduction from the great man himself. Jamie (it seems more than appropriate to refer to him by his first name) wishes us luck and tells us that we are in the capable hands of the ‘kitchen champions’ which is Recipease lexicon for ‘chef.’ Our kitchen champion makes it known that Jamie and herself are good mates and should you have any burning questions as regarding him as a person to please let her know.

First we are told to turn our hobs to ‘5’ an order that I find disturbingly succinct, in-fact all margins of potential error are removed and all ingredients are ready chopped, measured and arranged as if they are ready for a screening as part of a television recipe. Is it any wonder we are about to create ‘the perfect Risotto?’ In-fact the only stage in the creation that allowed a refreshing foray into dangerous inaccuracy was when our ‘kitchen champion’ splashed wine into our pans with seemingly unforeseen gay-abandon and we were then allowed to season creations to our own palettes.

After some stirring and pouring, but only when told to do so and a few variations in hob temperature anywhere between 1-5 we are told to dish and present the finished product and not unsurprisingly it tasted wonderful.

We ate with cutlery forged with the J-Me branding, cooked with utensils and drank out of coffee cups all bearing the proprietors name with a few Jamie magazines nonchalantly strewn about the table. Although I admire Jamie Oliver it is seemingly and increasingly more for his canny business sense these days than anything else. The only Jamie Oliver products I own are in the medium of printed word but then again that is the nice thing about recipe books, you can do your own measuring, add extra ingredients if you are feeling so inclined and to any amateur, young and not even necessarily enthusiastic cook the writings of Oliver are as good a place as any to start.

At £35 per person it is a nice gift for anyone who wishes to pass an hour or so with guaranteed results although if you are the adventurous sort and doesn’t like to be bound to portioned ingredients and cooking on ‘5’ I would suggest buying Oliver’s book ‘Jamie’s Kitchen’ instead where you can find an identikit version of the recipe and of course so much more besides. As a closing point I feel I should also let you know that if you are indeed going to visit the shop you can even walk away with an authentic Jamie ready-meal, plant-pot or hand-cream. Need you shop anywhere else? With a growing online shopping empire, maybe not.

(Image: http://earthfirst.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/jamie-oliver.jpg)