Jumpin' Jay's Fish Café — Restaurant in Portsmouth

Jumping Jays fish café - Portsmouth New Hampshire – 2/3/2016

Portsmouth is well known for its fine restaurants and this place is no exception. With a public parking lot across the street you couldn't ask for a more ideal location. KJ, my server, welcomes you with an inviting smile and a very personable demeanor,. You couldn’t ask for a better server. Kind of an electric flavour with an almost immediate feeling that this is going to be an absolutely spectacular dinner!

I started with the sourdough bread served with whole garlic, butter and olives. Nicely plated and quite flavorful...

For starters the New England clam chowder with Applewood smoked bacon and bliss potatoes... Fresh clams and chunks of potatoes in a creamy base… Phenomenal! I’ve only been here about 10 minutes and I’m already contemplating my next return… if I was alone at home I swear I’d lick the plate!

Next course the winter salad featuring baby spinach leaves, chunks of roasted beets, crumbles of goat cheese, grapefruit, pickled fennel and dressed in an orange thyme vinaigrette… So beautifully plated I almost felt bad eating it... The blending of flavors will send your pallet into a state of euphoria!

At KJ’s suggestion, this evening for the first time I will be trying local Portsmouth Monk fish served with a Lobstah Veloute, pronounced: (veh-loo-TAY). Tender cuts of white fish, mashed potatoes, chunked carrots and green beans cooked to perfection…The Veloute sauce is absolutely to die for!

And for dessert my signature cappuccino… Everything on the dessert menu looks really really good!

Absolutely amazing dining experience… I would say it is a five-star casual restaurant. Between the service and the quality of the food, this is a must stop on the gastronomic...

This was a very good experience with really only one significant downside, which I'll get to. But first the good stuff. Now, I'm from Portsmouth, but I've been living in other places for decades before recently returning to the area, and this is my first time eating at this place. I probably felt a little weird prejudice along the lines of "how can a place in my hometown be actually very good?" But it was great. Not that the recipes were that crazily inventive or even necessarily effective - the Vietnamese inflected herbs didn't quite match perfectly with my wife's scallops, for example. But the execution was nearly perfect. I ate the black pepper fettuccine, which came with mussels, shrimp, and scallops, all things that are easy to overcook, but everything was done exactly perfectly. Seared scallops, nice consistency, a bit rare in the center: perfect. Shrimp was similarly awesome. We shared a caramel pudding for dessert, and my wife said "why did we bother with dinner, this is what we should have been eating," also pretty much true. So really, the food was truly great. Service was fine, friendly, knowledgeable, maybe a little rushed but not terribly so.

To be honest the only real complaint I have has to do with the physical layout of the place. There's a bar area kind of raised above the middle of the dining room. This kind of seems out of place in a restaurant like this, and it made dinner a little less enjoyable to have to overhear loud, drunk, occasionally profanity laden conversations the whole time we were sitting there. Not that this offends me, particularly, but it's definitely not what I would prefer during an otherwise nice dinner like this, and it's maybe enough to make me avoid eating here in the future if it's...

Its with extreme displeasure with to even have to write this review. This is the second time in, and I honesty don’t know which experience was worse. First time was clearly a busy night and chalked up the service to just being in the weeds. Second time was probably worse and half the tables where either cleared or being cleaned. It took over 25 minutes to get the first drink (first time, our first round was comped because it took longer) but to receive an app before your beverage. Both experiences the food wasn’t even close to what should be expected from the JG GROUP. Have been to all with nothing but good things to say. Almost inedibly dry fish, having “fish” as the selling point in your bends name. Service, I honestly don’t even know where to start. We had at east 5 servers come to our table over the course of the night, which almost makes it even more sad how bad it was. For coming to the table that many times, but still not receiving what was ordered. Embarrassing or your part. Almost more embarrassing to see the server who took second drink order doing side work and chatting with other employees rather than getting our order. And before this gets an “owners” response, the fact that we saw multiple disgruntled patrons being apologized to, there is no need to say that you wish you knew we had a bad experience. If it isn’t clear how your patrons feel about their visit, maybe there is something that needs to be reevaluated. I’m sorry but we will...