Juici Jerk have been serving up Caribbean food in South West London since 2017 and have seized upon the opportunity presented by this pandemic to offer nationwide delivery on their products, neatly grouping them into well presented boxes of food that include everything you need for an indulgent evening of eating. There’s a real sense of attention to detail and breadth of experience with the boxes, some of which feature access to spotify playlists along with rose petals to scatter for the more romantic occasions. We took delivery of a “Juici Jerk box” that retails for £30 (delivery is another £5) and proposes to feed two, also including drinks and sauces!

My run of astonishing good luck with delivery drivers remained unbroken with this one as it arrived exactly as promised, deposited happily on the now semi-permanent porch table for deliveries. Opening the box revealed sensibly compiled instructions and a large number of vacuum packed treats to look forward to along with bottles of fruit punch, sauces and some fresh produce with which to embellish your dishes.

The logical instructions require thankfully little common sense to be applied beginning with getting the pre-marinated chicken in to the oven, which is later finished using the Jerk BBQ sauce as a glaze. The only other element to require the oven is Mac Cheese so it’s easy enough to leave both of those to their own devices while preparing the other dishes. Rice & peas needs little more than a blast in the microwave at a convenient moment while plantain demands a frying pan be introduced to proceedings before the same utensil is used to fry off “Festivals”, a sweet fried dumpling. With the included fruit punch poured we were tucking in quickly, trying not to be over faced by the quantity. While this is notionally for two people, there was significantly more food here than our appetites could tackle; you certainly wouldn’t need to add anything else.

Most of the meal kits I’ve worked through so far have focused on presenting meals composed of a sequence of courses, which if you’re not in the mood can interrupt the flow of an evening. It was a nice change to see everything presented at once to pick from at leisure as we put together an attractive (and substantial) spread. The cooking instructions for the chicken left it perfectly tender and succulent with a decent tingle of heat from the marinade, and the Jerk glaze I’d administered before finishing and Mac’ Cheese delivered all the comfort that it should along with a refreshing coleslaw that added bite to the plate.

Plantain has never been one of my favourite things to eat but after being hit with a good amount of heat and caramelisation they were perfectly satisfying, and the fried Festival dough that had been through the same pan was a very happy surprise. Festivals are new to me and represent another happy expansion of my culinary horizons: sweetened fried dumplings sound like such an obviously wonderful and wonderfully obvious thing in retrospect. A mountain of rice & peas finished things off.

With a few sauces and some fruit punch thrown in with the food, this was a superb way to spend an evening enjoying a cuisine that’s not widely available in York. This was undoubtedly one of the best value at home offerings I’ve enjoyed so far, producing a genuine sense of indulgence and occasion. I’ve made the point before that the necessity for restaurants to find a way to enter the home is one of the few silver linings we’ve got in our current circumstances, I’d strongly encourage inviting Juici Jerk in for a try.

Disclaimer: No charge was made for this PR product.

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That was earlier in the spring though and since then we’ve had news of an apparent scandal based around tipping policies in mainstream chain restaurants around the country. My reaction to this was of course distaste, but what I wonder is how this compares to local independents’ policies. It’s so easy to denounce chains on the basis of their size, but I’ve heard stories about local restaurants that are rather worse in some cases, so I’m going to leave comments to speak for themselves.

I was asked to visit Turtle Bay York a couple of times, initially refusing with a chord of indignation chiming as I couldn’t elicit forensic detail of that tipping policy despite a few requests, but I subsequently agreed to head along and judge the experience on its own merits while discussing things openly with the staff.

The night we arrived, there were buy-one-get-one-free cocktails on offer for Bethan to get stuck into, Marley Mojito breaking the tape of her internal race to decision, while I opted for a Carib beer. As the drinks arrived we noted neat details such as linen cloths and decent cutlery before choosing starters of Jamaican fried whitebait and chilli fried squid. Both arrived quickly, benefiting from well-judged spice and crisp finishing. My biggest complaint was the quantity of whitebait; if I’d not been allowed my main until finishing them, the evening may have taken on a trickier tone! Luckily, we kept them on the table until the end of the meal for periodic picking.

With Marley mojitos dispatched and that slightly generic Carib replaced with a decent chenin blanc (six pounds a glass), it was time for mains.

We went for the Curry Goat and, making sure ‘jerk’ made the cut, jerk salmon. The salmon came with sweet potato mash and a good dousing of jerk sauce that packed a punch just beyond my slightly lame tolerance. The sweet potato was a disappointment, interspersed with full-sized solid chunks of carrot that presumed to fly below the radar while softening the unit cost of the dish, and there were some dollops of seasoning and creaminess, but not what I was hoping for. The salmon was well-prepared, skin crisped but flesh soft, but the jerk sauce was a bit overpowering. I need to stick my hand up (yet) again to admit my poor spice tolerance, but this felt like a blunt hammer on a well-cooked slice of fish.

Goat curry is something that’s cropped up in a few Keralan restaurants around this neck of the woods and has, in every case so far, been a highlight of the meal. This version of the dish had undertones of coffee and liquorice. Slow-cooked and moist, everything hit the spot. The slightly dry pitta served with it may have been better replaced with a pot of rice, but it was still a well-rounded dish that I’d happily order again.

At this point Beth decided to pit herself against the hot sauce left on the table for those with a greater tolerance to heat than myself. She should thank me for not including the more embarrassing photos!

Last up was poached mango for Beth, taking up the sweet food baton for me. Reportedly reminiscent of mulled wine, the frozen yoghurt split into the hot sauce in fairly short order without doing much positive.

Finishing the meal we were struck by the red shirts that the servers were all wearing. While not a prescribed uniform, the colour put me in mind of Star Treks famously dispensable red shirts as I came back to thinking of the staff’s status here and that tipping policy.

The manager was good enough to come and have a chat about the meal so we went back to that question of tips, to which I still don’t know the answer. I’m assured that 100% of the tips end up with the staff, but when I asked the manager, he point blank refused to elaborate on the basis that anything he said would be biased personal opinion. Being issued with a professional rebuff when I suggested that a factual explanation wouldn’t breach personal liability doesn’t suggest a surfeit of confidence from the management to let its staff speak their minds. However, nobody has said anything explicitly negative to me, so I’m not going to assume the worst in the absence of having researched the competitors’ policies.

Turtle Bay York is a nice place to sit: well-presented and with a palpable buzz that’ll benefit weekend nights no end without overstepping toward the binge drinking-centred culture that parts of York can tip into.

Good value, decent food and a buzzing atmosphere. If I was a 20 year old with a sense of optimism rather than a slightly misanthropic 36 year old looking to make ostentatiously positive decisions on where my inconsequentially small tips go, I’d probably be hooked.

Disclaimer: Turtle Bay invited us to review the restaurant on a complimentary basis.

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