Jolly Posh Foods Brings The Jolly With Lots Of Anglo Oddments
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Jan 17, 2014 7:20PM
Last week, we slipped on a patch of ice and fell into a sludge puddle just outside Spencer’s Jolly Posh Foods’ door. Our left ankle felt damaged and our wool gloves were doused like puppy ears after a bath. Fortunately Jolly Posh is heavy on the jolly if low on the posh. The storefront has been in business for a few years now, but we didn’t stumble in until recently, after a trek in the snow made us hungry enough to eat the full monty and a scone with clotted cream.
Eating lunch or dinner—or afternoon tea—here feels playfully off-balance because the space, intimate as it is, conflates café with candy store. The tables are hemmed in on all sides by tempting tins of merchandise. So we sat and ordered the full monty sandwich ($9.95), sausages topped with two rashers of bacon and white pudding. And while we waited, we shopped—and soon littered our table with a pot of marmalade, a can of Heinz spotted dick pudding we’re keeping for display in our kitchen forever and ever, a box of Scottish fudge and Irish cookies. Then we ordered a cup of earl grey and bought a bag of toffee tea treats and decided we’d need that warm scone to round out all the meat we had yet to devour.
We embarked on a feeding frenzy, in other words, well before our food arrived. This is the danger of being a hungry Anglophile among cairns of colorful tea caddies even if you are nursing a sore ankle. Add in a jaunty wait staff who invariably chirp “okie dokies!” when you ask for another napkin or spot of hot water and you’re hooked—and just spent $40—before you so much as take a bite.
Fortunately when the food did arrive, it was good enough to justify the extracurricular shopping we’d done in the interim. Good in the way that hearty pub food is in the confines of a candy store: solid, simple and filling. Served with a side of crisps looking like foreshortened cheese puffs, the sandwich tasted better than it looked, enough for us to wonder why we didn’t fix ourselves sausage-bacon sandwiches minus the oatmeal pudding on top regularly for ourselves at home.
Technically, we could have purchased more of either the selfsame bangers or bacon—not that we really needed both—from the freezer section only a few feet away for the morrow, but then the best part of the sandwich may have been the baguette and that they don’t sell. And if we made it on our own kitchen counter, we might not be so jolly eating it either. We would miss the funny little cheese puffs we didn’t actually finish, the warm raisin scone that supplemented the sandwich we ate every morsel of and the “okie dokies” that came with the clotted cream too. We would miss the chance of leaving hundreds of times more cheerful than when we walked in, knowing we’d be back soon before the weather clears.
Jolly Posh Foods is located at 1405 W. Irving Park Rd.