Clubby vibes: the palm frond-filled dining room
(Picture: Adrian Lourie)If you are acquainted with big, clubby, Caribbean-influenced restaurants, then on first glance at least the scene at Islington’s Jam Delish will be comfortingly familiar. Cranked R&B slow jams ring out across a vast, darkened space of azure blue light and fake palm fronds; tempting plumes of fried plantain scent the air; servers bearing flaming rum cocktails in novelty tiki bar mugs make their careful way to guffawing, dressed-to-the-nines hordes. And once you get to ordering, you may even find that the menu is mysteriously missing two or three of the things you’d most fancied — a reliable, absurdist quirk of jerk spots and roti shops that, in its own way, is as redolent of island dining as the fragrant burn of scotch bonnet.
Still, look a little closer, and you’ll realise that there is something quietly revolutionary happening here. Not just because every dish — from the soy “beef” patties and the jerk jackfruit birria tacos to the “chicken” wings that are actually a proprietary seitan blend compacted around a sugar cane “bone”— just happens to be entirely plant-based. But also, perhaps more importantly, because many of them are uncommonly delicious; vivid moments of mind-scrambling culinary brilliance that subtly and memorably reframe your perception of what can be achieved with vegetables and meat substitutes.
I will cop to having approached it with a decent amount of scepticism. Initially launched amid 2020 lockdowns as a Wimbledon delivery operation, the business sprang from founder Jordan Johnson’s desire to reconcile a plant-based lifestyle with the Caribbean flavours of his youth. There is established precedent for this, of course (Rastafarianism’s meat-free Ital movement is proof that veganism was not, in fact, invented by a white ashtanga instructor in 2009). Yet a glance at the inverted comma-laden menu — executed by head chef and Fifteen alum Nathan Collymore — caused me to brace for the gimmicky and ultra-processed. And I barely need to say how deeply wrong I was, or how quickly that became apparent, do I? Mini festivals were like a roomful of synchronised alarm clocks for the palate: pointy-ended nubbins of fried dumpling in a ringing, complex pineapple, mango and scotch bonnet sauce.
Ragged tostones of crisp, starchy plantain, piled with jackfruit (here standing in for saltfish), samphire, and a thin mortarboard of crisp nori, unleashed an exhilarating burst of layered, Indo-Caribbean spicing. And then came those faux wings.
The notion of smooshing mock meat around a dummy bone might feel ridiculous. In practice, it’s astonishing
In the abstract, the notion of smooshing mock meat around a dummy bone feels too ridiculous to even momentarily engage with. In practice, however — and particularly in the case of the southern-fried variety that are all thickly cragged, profoundly spiced crust shielding a suspiciously chickeny middle — they are astonishing; a bravura conjuror’s trick that will have you grinning at the ingenuity of it. In truth, the mains represented a slight drop-off in quality. Those methodically built, back-a-yard flavours that you only really get from domestic Caribbean cooking, were still present — especially in the warming, subtle depths of a seitan-spiked curry “goat”. It was just that the indeterminate hunks of meat substitute, including unnerving shards of facon in a claggy mac and cheese, began to feel a little repetitive, unnecessary and to the detriment of each dish’s sense of definition and pizazz.
But, look, I feel like this might be my inner omnivore showing. If you have a vegan in your life, then Jam Delish, with its irresistible, enveloping party atmosphere and daft, forbidding drinks, is nothing less than a gift from the plant-based gods. We jointly polished off a diverting mango cheesecake, as Usher’s U Remind Me dropped on the stereo, and another flaming tipple made its way to a delighted, shrieking table.
January marches interminably on; your plans to stay vegan or dry may have already foundered on the rocks of regretful hangovers and inevitable bacon cravings. But at Jam Delish, virtue, if we can call it that, has never felt so full of colour, fun and joyful, energising creativity.
