Evening Menu At Jamie's Italian | Covent Garden

Evening Menu At Jamie's Italian | Covent Garden

• March 04, 2017

Jamie's Italian restaurants* are all over London and last week, I met up with one of my favourite girlfriends and my sister to try out their bargain evening menu. The Covent Garden branch is tucked inside the peaceful St Martin's Courtyard and offers a lovely respite from the shoppers on Long Acre. 

The evening menu is available Sunday to Thursday from 6pm; 2 courses for £15.95 or 3 courses for £18.95. The price is a bargain for central London and the menu doesn't skip on the more expensive ingredients like crab and truffle either.

We decided to order a selection of starters to share and then chose our own mains, though we happily had a taste of each others too. 

My sister who is a gold club member at Jamie's scores us free nibbles. Olive tapenade with sundried tomatoes, garlic and lemon are absolutely delicious and we only wished there was bread to mop it all up. 

So, we ordered some bread too, which came with more tapenade haha. The bread was so good and I had to refrain from eating it all by myself. 

Truffle tagliatelle is perfectly executed. It's buttery, the truffle is delicious without being over powering and the parmesan gave it a good salty hit.

Fritto misto, a plate of fried fish and squid with a a fennel spiced flour and garlic lemon aioli wasn't crispy enough and is a little mild on flavours. But it's a huge serve for a seafood starter and it went down well.

The cured meat plank was another very substantial and enjoyable starter. It included fennel salami, schiacciata piccante, pistachio mortadella (similar to ham) and prosciutto for the meaty part. There was also a delicious purple slaw, olives, caper berry and two types of cheese.

We already feel pretty full before our mains are even served.

Oxtail tagliatelle is definitely a great choice from the evening menu. The oxtail ragu was meaty and melty and cooked in a delicious rich and full bodied tomato sauce, then topped with parmesan and rosemary. All the flavours worked excellently with each other and the fresh pasta was perfectly al dente and flavourful. However, it was a little on the salty side, so I ended up guzzling glasses of water with it. 

The British crab spaghetti sounded delicious but was so salty we had to send it back to the kitchen. The staff were great though and very apologetic and assured us no salt was added to the new one. However, the capers still made it quite salty and overpowered the other elements of the dish which was a real shame because the crab was fresh and tasted pretty good with the fresh dill, sauce and al dente spaghetti.

I'd been to Jamie's Italian in Canary Wharf when it first opened many years ago, and I had the same problem with everything being too salty, so I'd never been inclined to visit again until this evening.

Overall, the food is fresh and full of flavour, and most definitely value for money so I'd come back again despite the heavy handed seasoning. It would make sense to ask them to go easy on the salt next time though. Service was wonderful, our server was friendly, informative and didn't intrude at inappropriate times.

We arrived for an early dinner at 6pm and the restaurant was packed by 7pm. It sure is popular!

Have you tried Jamie's evening menu yet?

*I was a guest at Jamie's Italian, but all opinions are my own and unbiased