Jade Pavilion - a Racing Success (Jade Pavilion (Northampton))

Member Name: koshkha

Product:	Jade Pavilion (Northampton)
Date:	03/11/08 (354 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great food, good value for money

Disadvantages: Not a great area to park a good car, but other than that, nothing bad

** A Short History of Racing in Northampton **

It's easy when you live near Northampton to see the town as a bit of a dive and to forget that it's a place that was once rather grand. As I learned recently, Northampton once had the third largest castle in the country and if they hadn't backed Oliver Cromwell and fallen out with the royal family, who knows what the town might be by now. It probably wouldn't have the distinction of being the biggest town in the country to not be awarded city status. Anyway, enough of local politics.

Until around 100 years ago, there was a racecourse in Northampton on a patch of land that now stands as a park - referred to as 'Racecourse Park' despite there being not so much as a sniff of a gee-gee these days. Not only was this a horse-racing venue but they also used to do public hangings there until the police statistics showed that more crime happened during a hanging than was ever cleared up by it. Hence, hanging went private and moved to the local courthouse and eventually to Bedford Prison. Racecourse Park is now the centre of things each summer when the Northampton Balloon Festival comes to town - other than that, it's just a big open park.

The racecourse attracted the local folks as well as the great and the good, and a pavilion was built to keep royalty and gentry away from the hoi polloi. Today, this pavilion is the home of an oriental restaurant called Jade Pavilion. After more than 4 years of saying 'We really ought to eat there' we finally got round to doing so a few weeks back. I phoned ahead on Saturday and despite understanding barely a word from the man on the phone, I was pretty sure I'd succeeded in getting a booking for the next evening at 7 pm.

As I mentioned the Racecourse area was once very grand - indeed the houses that line the side of the park are absolutely enormous places. We looked at one when we were house hunting but couldn't imagine what two people could do with a five storey building other than work like dogs to pay for the heating. But these days the area has gone downhill. The Wellingborough Road (or Welly Road) is better known these days for cheap Indian restaurants than for the up-market refinement of the past. So when I parked my car at the Jade Pavilion, I not only took my TomTom with me, but took the bracket off the windscreen too after briefly glancing at the boarded up windows on the ground floor of the pavilion.

** Saddle up and Head up stairs **

Entering the Pavilion though, things picked up enormously. We were just a few days away from going to India on holiday and I felt as if I was in a swanky colonial building as we headed up the stairs. Entering the restaurant there's a large bar area complete with a Thai-style sloped roof above the bar. Oddly, this roof and the gilded Buddhist statues somehow managed to combine with the ornate Victorian ceiling rose and chandelier without looking all that odd. We were asked if we'd like to wait in the bar or head directly into the restaurant and chose to go to our table straight away.

At 6.45pm the restaurant was completely empty and we did start to wonder if we might be on our own all evening. We had a table next to the window and could look out over the park as the sky got darker and the trees started to disappear. The dining room is beautiful - combining oriental and Victorian in a way that works much better than it ought to. The ceiling is high, and there are windows all along one side of the room looking out over the old racecourse. Curtains reach from floor to ceiling. The windows are so big that rather than being a double sash system, there are three sashes, something I've never seen before. The floors are dark stripped wood, there are two fabulous old chandeliers and the end wall is painted with an oriental fresco. There's even a fountain in the middle of the room. All in all, we really liked the ambiance of the place.

** Assessing the Runners and Riders **

The tiny waitress brought us a menu and a bowl of prawn crackers - the brownish coloured ones with lots of hot spices and took our orders for drinks. I'd already checked out the menu on line before I booked so I had worked out that the set menus weren't likely to suit and so manipulated hubby (who's always pretty lazy about choosing) into agreeing to the dishes that I wanted. He doesn't really have a clue about Chinese, Indian or Thai food so I can generally persuade him that he really likes what I've decided we should have. Of course we started with Tom Yum soup - mine with seafood, his with chicken - and then ordered Thai fish cakes to share, followed by a red curry tofu and prawns with ginger and spring onions and a portion of rice.

** And they're off **

Our drinks arrived and still we had the restaurant to ourselves - in fact I think we were half way through the soup before anyone else showed up. The Tom Yum was good - very sharp, very spicy and aromatic. In retrospect I think the seafood was the wrong choice and I should have stuck to prawn. A good Tom Yum means you'll spend at least half your eating time fishing bits of twig, stick and leaf out of the broth and adding in hunting down mussel shells means it's more like a lucky dip than a soup. The fish cakes came with the soup and were juicy and succulent with just the right amount of fire in the seasoning. I was also pleased that there were four fish cakes as I've noticed a lot of places always seem to give you three - thus making them more of a challenge to share.

The arrival of the main courses was paced well - long enough to let the soup settle but not so long as to get your stomach rumbling again. The dishes were a good size - the prawn dish in particular was absolutely crammed full of big juicy king prawns although the amount of the tofu in the red curry (a much cheaper ingredient than king prawns) was a bit disappointing. The amount of ginger in the prawn dish was astonishing - big juicy tender lumps of the stuff. Ginger was used more as a vegetable than as a spice and the spring onions were also in very large pieces. Refreshingly, our single portion of rice was more than enough for the two of us - I've noticed that a lot of places seem to be a bit mean on rice which again seems a bit odd when even with recent price increases it's still the cheapest part of the meal.

** Approaching the Finishing Line **

When we'd polished off the last of our meal, we ran shy of the dessert menu and asked for the bill. With two pints for hubby, two diet cokes for me, two soups, fish cakes, two main courses and rice and a healthy tip on top, we paid £40 for the two of us which I felt was a very good deal - especially as the same amount at our other favourite Thai would probably have cost £20 more and the portions would have been smaller and the service much more rushed. I can safely say that our visit to the Jade Pavilion has converted us to fans and we'll be sure to go back.

** Race Report **

I picked up a take-away menu on the way out and was surprised to see that the take-away prices are a lot cheaper than eat in - probably around 30% lower. The Thai Garden in Rothwell which is our usual choice for Thai, only knocks 10% off their eat-in prices if you want to take away so the Jade Pavillion scores even better on value for money if you want to eat at home.

Details:
Jade Pavilion
Racecourse Pavilion
Kettering Road
Northampton
Northamptonshire NN1 4LG

Tel - 01604 621292

Summary: Dinner at the Jade Pavilion is a tip worth backing