Jamie's Other Kitchen

(Kitchen)



Review Requested by Laura the Dance School Sandwich Girl

JAMES says:

There’s recently been a second series of Jamie’s Kitchen following wideboy mockney naked chef Jamie Oliver as he sets up a restaurant and fills it with people hired to make himself look intelligent. Well, Jamie had another kitchen. This one doesn’t get its own TV series, isn’t staffed by YTS gimps, and isn’t in London’s fashionable West End. Though Jamie has long since deserted it, I’m still proud to call this my kitchen. James’s Kitchen, if you will.

Yes, it’s true, I live in Jamie Oliver’s old flat. From when he was on a pittance for chopping onions and this was all he could afford. Though he has long since gone, his presence still lingers; Here, in the shelves he put up, there in the prank phone calls asking for pizza. And in the kitchen that he left when he got a whiff of the big time. It’s not the biggest kitchen in the world, being about as wide as a roast chicken, but it makes up for it in length. This can be quite irritating as the microwave is at one end and the oven at the other. If using both this can involve several mad dashes from one end to the other before something explodes, narrowly avoiding the wok that sticks out very inconveniently. If there are two people using the kitchen at the same time then they had best be very intimate, but seeing as it could only possibly be me and my girlfriend this isn’t really a problem.

I think the kitchen has shaped Naked’s distinctive cooking style. Forced to work in such enclosed spaces resulted in his maverick quick-fire method. And you might notice that his recipes never call for the use of both a grill and an oven at the same time, being used to having a combined oven/grill which made such notions impossible.

Even though Jamie dumped the kitchen as he thought it might embarrass him in front of his new media friends, I still respect it. It has seen some fine culinary efforts by both me and Deborah, and apart from the pre-mentioned oven/grill restriction, and a slightly leaky pipe under the sink, it meets all other requirements you could possibly want from a kitchen. Alternatively the people who had the flat before us might’ve been bullshitting and Jamie Oliver might never have lived there. That would make me sleep a lot safer at night.

6.3/10