Jamie’s journey
As the Jamie Oliver brand continues to grow in its 20th year, Janice Butler travels to his headquarters in London to experience the appeal of the chef first hand, where he talks to her about staying relevant and following his gut feelings in business
When you arrive at Jamie Oliver HQ in London, it’s like knocking on the door of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. is is where it all happens: the recipe creation, the books, the magazines, the TV shows, the youtube channel; it’s Jamie overload and it’s fantastic. is is the hub of an organisation that employs almost 8,000 people, while Jamie’s TV shows are broadcast to all corners of the globe and he’s sold 41 million books. at makes him the UK’S secondmost successful author, a er JK Rowling.
Like Willy Wonka himself, Jamie is at times a mysterious media gure. Despite being everywhere on food shows and in press reports about the food industry, he doesn’t actually do much media. at may be because he has reached a level of fame where he doesn’t have to. “I don’t do things like
this that often, so it’s always quite exciting to get a sense of what people like or don’t like from my new books.” The new book in question is his passion project, Jamie Cooks Italy, which he co-wrote a er a tour of the country with his mentor and long-time friend Gennaro Contaldo, who is also here at Jamie HQ today. e pair dive into a cooking demo and their interaction is both entertaining and endearing to watch, more like a father-son duo than friends.
The style of cooking they are so expertly showing us is exactly what you’d expect from Jamie: a perfected chaos with olive oil splashed about, lemons
st-squeezed dry, pasta swung from one end of the kitchen to the other. It’s a feast for all the senses and I must report that the nished product tasted divine. Jamie enjoys the performance, soaking up the attention from his impressed audience. It seems his passion for cooking is as strong as when the boy from Essex rst burst onto the scene with Naked Chef. Since then, his food passions have grown to encompass high-pro le public campaigns about school dinners and sugar. “When we started 20 years ago I never thought I’d get on TV in the UK or publish a book and now we’re broadcasting to 120 countries on 200-plus channels so it’s just a very strange job really. Your existence in di erent countries always varies as well, because they can be showing you at a completely di erent stage in your career to what you’re at now.”
We rst saw Jamie and Gennaro in Italy back in 2005 with Jamie’s Great Italian Escape. Now they have returned for his latest show, Jamie Cooks Italy, a loving tribute to the food of Italy and the people who make it. e two men clearly adore each other, both on and o screen, but their reason for doing the show – and Jamie’s accompanying book – goes beyond it being a jolly for the two of them. In the show, they travel the length of the boot, cooking alongside elderly nonnas and learning traditional recipes, many of which are no longer being made by the younger generation. How did this journey compare to Jamie’s youthful jaunt around Italy years ago?
“e rst time all those years ago was more of a boys’ travel vlog. I was in my VW Camper on my own and it was a bit more of a rough guide, whereas this is a much more thought-out and planned project, focused on nding old cooks with amazing recipes,” he says.
“I banned Google searches: we just did good old-fashioned Bbc-style knocking on doors documentary-making. Frankly, we knocked on hundreds and hundreds of doors. ere was really good content, colour and food everywhere, but I had to work out what hadn’t been seen before and we did nd lots of those, thankfully.”
e result of this perseverance is a book and a show with some seriously delectable fare, something Oliver says he was determined to achieve. e series took nearly two years to lm, o and on: by Oliver’s own admission, it went over budget because it took so long. “TV nowadays is really f***ing lazy. You watch some shows on telly and you know they’ve been researched in an o ce on a computer without ever going near the place. Good research is expensive but you know the di erence.”
Jamie is a perfectionist, one of the key reasons he’s still relevant in the food world a er 20 years. While he’s never without a multitude of things on his plate, he keeps a watchful eye on everything that comes under the Jamie Oliver umbrella. In September, his previously successful Jamie’s Italian restaurants veered on the edge of bankruptcy, with the chef forced to inject £13 million of his own money into the business to stop it going bust. He still o ers his gut instinct as one of the reasons for his continued success when it comes to his books and TV appeal. “I’ve succeeded and failed in equal parts. It’s all about following my gut and listening to the public.”
I’m doing this for 20 years and that’s quite rare. Touch wood, I’ve had an incredible publishing career and that is really hard, especially a er all this time and the increase in competition. Nowadays, it’s not about just being good; OK, your book is good, so what? It has beautiful paper, so what? – people expect that. For me, it’s about timing and with all my books, it’s been me either following my heart like Jamie Cooks Italy or solving a problem, like 15 Minute Meals or super foods.”
When it comes to life at home, his proudest creation is still the Oliver family. Jools, his wife of 18 years, was his childhood sweetheart and the couple now have ve children. He believes that even a er all these years, the greatest expression of love is a fabulous dish of food. “e nicest way to love someone is to cook for them. In some respects it’s dying out, which is a shame,” he remarks. “I was talking to my wife about it recently and she said she doesn’t remember the speci c meals I cooked for her a er she had our babies but she remembers the act of it and the fact I was looking a er her. It’s not always about how fancy a dish is, it’s about the right food in the right place at the right time.”
I’ve succeeded and failed in equal parts. It’s all about following my gut and listening to the public”