Jimmy's Restaurants

As an American expat, I was looking for a complimentary birthday buffet meal in London. They exist! (Surprisingly...) My choices were down to JRC Global (have been to) and Jimmy's (have not been to). I decided to try the place that I haven't been to - and that was Jimmy's in Wimbledon.

The restaurant website is colorful, showing off many different cuisines they specialize in. However, the actual restaurant, is catered mainly towards Indian cuisine (I'm not complainin', I have a spot for Indian food). About 70% was Indian dishes while the other non-fried options were Chinese. They had a small taco bar that I didn't get a chance to try (no one was there to service it) and also a dessert section. The Indian food quality was good, as validated by a large number of Indian families coming in around 5:30 to partake in the buffet options. Some dishes were cold, even though they are in a fancy silver close-able vessel - maybe they just need to adjust the temperatures?

If you are there, definitely try the stir fry chef - gather your veggies, choice of noodles and hand it over to the stir fry chef who will ask what meat you would like in your stir fry. Skip the yellow egg noodles - they are a bit mushy, go for the white flat vermicelli noodles.

There is a chocolate fountain for marshmallows in the dessert bar, but the rest of the desserts are pretty sad. In conclusion, the overall food quality is average at best.

With JRC Global, you have to come with at least another paying adult to qualify for a complimentary birthday meal. At Jimmy's, it was a complicated situation because my husband made dinner reservations for us and asked if the birthday person gets the complimentary meal, to which the man on the phone said yes. However, when it came to paying, they said we need to be in a party of six or more to get the birthday deal. We pointed out that the man on the phone did not specify this and he knew it was a party of two, with one birthday. The manager came out and made things right at the end, but there needs to be more clarification on this.

Jimmy Spice's, the multi-cultural buffet restaurant chain which started in the Midlands, continues its spread into the southeast by opening its latest restaurant in Wimbledon last week.

It follows the pattern of their other restaurants, serving up Indian, oriental and Italian food, mainly buffet style but supplemented by a few live cooking stations such as the noodle stir fry, where the chefs will fry your chosen combination of meat, veg and noodles with a sauce of your choice.

The restaurant itself is very bright and airy with high ceilings and big windows. It does tick many boxes but I would still only recommend it for big parties - the buffet makes sure everyone is well-fed, the split of the bill is easy to calculate at the end of the evening and there will be no fighting over what style of food to go for.

However, for me, the food is average and I can only give it 3 stars

Curry, Pizza, Salad.....


...Marshmallos, lasagne, ice cream, noodles.

A huge restaurant opposite Wimbledon Theatre priding itself on the exploration of around the world cuisine.

It's a sure bet for large groups with bits and bobs to please everyone and a good selection for vegetarians.

The set up is quite impressive, large hot plates, desert bar and chefs in white hats wandering around asking if you need any advice about what to try.

Now, I can imagine what it's like when the restaurant is full on a weekend, and I can see why the place gets a bad rep here. But, I went of a Tuesday with a friend for a nice catch up meal. We were starving and needed a hole filling... and boy did Jimmy's do that.

Cheesy Music, lots of families... but if you know what you're going in to... good clean fun all around.

Top tip: Tip you waiter... they deserve a pay rise for the uniforms they have to wear.

This place has a mish mash of different cuisines and usually that can be quite risky but the food is actually pretty good but make sure you're a fan of indian food because the majority of the chefs are asian so everything but the italian section has a bit of an asian infusion.

It was ridiculously packed when I went and apparently thats the norm, You are herded around the assembly line like buffet and there isn't nearly enough space towards the desert section. Certain foods I just couldn't wait for as the line was so long but they looked amazing from the 25 strong queue :-)

I say if you are impatient and don't like to sit in cramped quarters then fine one of the many other places around in wimbledon.

Myself & my siblings came here for lunch & we were not disappointed! We all had bottomless soft drinks which includes squash or fizzy drinks (apple tango, coke, Pepsi etc) for £2.99. The food is a mix of Indian, Chinese, American etc. The food can be either hit or miss because I experienced some cold Indian dishes today which needed to be hot!! A good place for groups or if you are on a budget!!

We went to Jimmys Buffet for their £10.99 Happy Hour Special (Mon-Fri 5-7 p.m.), not including beverages, and it was decidedly average.

They do have a plethora of options, even for vegetarians, but almost everything I tried was either surprisingly spicy (like roasted potatoes), or decidedly lukewarm (like pakora). I actually like spicy food, but not in unexpected places, and I was surprised by it being lukewarm since we were there only 15 minutes after it opened for dinner. In addition to these, other things, like the vegetable lasagna, had an odd, incredibly mushy-like texture (perhaps due to being 1/3 mushrooms), which was not appealing.

The two upsides were the servers were actually quite nice, and the desserts (especially chocolate cake, and waffle with ice cream and Nutella) were tasty.

I wish they offered Coca Cola products instead of Pepsi, since then the £2.99 unlimited refills option may have been beneficial. But alas.

HUGE Restaurant, HUGE potential but let down by poor customer service and a poor range of food.

The size of the restaurant is impressive.

The quality of food was not great but what it was what I expected from a buffet operation of this nature.

What wasnt good was the range of food wasnt anything like the web site made out. For example, there was no Sushi - the thing my son was looking forward to, despite the website boasting Sushi. This is not only bad customer service but it's also illegal to advertise what you are not offering.

Customer service was very poor with staff not offering to help and having to be asked to serve us. They also told us things would be ready in 5 mins when it was longer than 20 mins to prepare. Staff really didn't seem to care and were absent from a lot of counters where you needed staff service. Language was also a barrier with many of the staff seemingly not able to converse normally in English.

seriously underwhelming... i was so excited for this place, and so let down :[

maybe it's because i'm american, and used to buffets being amazing, but i found this place pretty disappointing. they definitely have a lot of different types of food, but none of them are very good. there's indian, chinese, and italian food, as well as a dessert and ice cream bar. the ice cream bar was probably the highlight of all the stations, because everything else was sort of grim..

** they have little notes next to each food telling you it's country of origin, but some of them are so stupid it's hilarious. like "lettuce - italy" or "rice - world." that rivals the ice cream bar for the highlight... or possibly the man in a giant pepper suit standing outside. all three were pretty memorable, everything else sucked

The restaurant itself is huge and reminds me of a restaurant back in America. However, when I went for dinner in the middle of the week it was so crowded and waiters often came to our table with wrong drink orders and they all appeared to be quite lost.

There was a large variety of food, but the quality was only very average. Also, the presentation of the food was quite sloppy.

The concept behind Jimmy Spice is a sound one. Do I like Chinese food? Tick. How about Indian? Tick. A spot of Italian maybe? Tick. All in one place? Hmmmm......

There's a lot to be said for specialists. People and businesses that shirk the 'One size fits all' mentality and the 'one device that does everything' idea that pervades our quick-fix society (oooh deep) and simply prefer to do one thing right. As the opening gambit of this review suggests, Jimmy Spice is not one of them.

It manages to do lots of things averagely. The food is ok, with no particular dish standing out as a favourite. It is in most part, a buffet style, serve yourself from a series of troughs affair, with a couple of cooked to order dishes thrown in.

I'd recommend Jimmy Spice if you're planning a night out with lots of friends as it is very spacious and the buffet style negates long waiting times that can be a pan in large groups. Aside from this very specific situation, I'd suggest picking whichever cuisine you prefer and sticking with one of those forward thinking specialists, of which Wimbledon has many.