Restaurants / Jamaica Street Stores
Jamaica Street Stores – restaurant review
The plates come out when they are ready at Jamaica Street Stores. Chunky pieces of chicken thigh fresh out of the fryer, served with kimchi rather than ketchup. Delicately caramelised cauliflower with ‘black’ garlic that has also been caramelised
There’s more fermentation at work in one of the dishes cataegorised as ‘raw’ on the menu: brown butter fermented slaw, capers, herb emulsion and breadcrumbs.
The glazed Saddleback sausage with potato mousse is a simpler affair, and with only small slithers of sausage not one to order as your only main dish, but this isn’t the point here where the most expensive plate is £10, and diners are soon reaching across the table to sample each others’s dishes.
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Glazed Saddleback sausages (left, £7) and caramelised cauliflowers (right, £5.50)
The Asian influences are clear but this new restaurant is also so very Bristol.
The cola is made by the team at The Cube cinema around the corner, with the bottle containing the ingredients if you want to make your own version at home; and every single bottle of beer is from a Bristol brewery: either Bristol Beer Factory from Ashton, Good Chemistry from St Phillip’s or Lost & Grounded from Brislington.
A builder’s tea pannacotta served with burnt butter granola and raspberries doesn’t quite hit the spot like the pannacottas at Box-E, but the other two desserts currently on the menu: warm and rich chocolate mousse hiding gooey pieces of rum fudge, and banana and honeycomb pudding with rum cream, are much better.
Banana and honeycomb pudding (left, £5) and builder’s tea pannacotta (right, £5.50)
Just a few yards down the road from here, Meat Liquor crashlanded into the middle of Stokes Croft like an alien spaceship.
Jamaica Street Stores have done things much more subtly and not just because they now occupy a listed building, which by law means they cannot do much to change its outward appearance.
But why would you when it looks like this? Huge windows flood the restaurant that used to be a screenprinting studio with natural light.
Artists studios remain on the upstairs floors while visitors to this new ground level arrival were treating it as both a bar and a restaurant on Thursday evening, drinkers sitting on comfortable leather sofas while eaters tucked in elsewhere in the spacious dining room.
There is no sign outside, but look inside and you can see ‘Jamaica St Stores’ spelled out in neon letters on one whitewashed stone wall.
Greenery spills out of plants on another wall, and there is even a tree that has been planted in a circular concrete block that is now used as a table.
The team behind Jamaica Street Stores – for the time being open from 5pm from Monday to Saturday – have got previous in River Cottage Cafe, Bagel Boy, The Ethicurean and CUPP Bubble Tea.
Their divergent backgrounds have created something very special.
Jamaica Street Stores, 37-39 Jamaica Street, Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS2 8JP
Read more: Could Jamaica Street Stores be this year’s most exciting new restaurant?
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