By Alison Boshoff
HiS goose is cooked and his souffle has collapsed. Or, as he might more bluntly put it, someone has stuffed his poussin.
Jamie Oliver has sold 40million books, never seems to be off our TV screens and is surely the most famous chef in the UK.
But that was not enough to persuade diners to pay £4.50 for a garlic flatbread or £15.30 for a prawn linguine at his Jamie’s italian chain.
more than 1,000 staff are to lose their jobs, and dozens of suppliers will find themselves out of pocket – some to a possibly disastrous extent.
Banks and creditors, including HSBC – which as recently as September last year agreed to lend the business more money, taking its loan to a reported £37million – will be left reeling.
Oliver himself put in £7.5million of his own cash in September 2017 as an emergency loan to stop Jamie’s italian from going under, then topped it up with another £5.2million. He was convinced his ‘turn-around plan’ would work.
Yet his naturally chirpy character never translated into that much-needed feelgood factor for his restaurants.
as the end came, he blamed a perfect storm of rising rents and wage bills, expensive imports and tough times in the trade. Oh yes, and Brexit. To be fair, other restaurants such as GBK, Prezzo, Strada and Carluccio’s have also been suffering.
OLIVER closed 12 restauants in February last year and put his firm into a company voluntary arrangement, which is one step from insolvency. Court documents show that the group owed £71.5million.
By this spring, he was looking for an investment partner to take the business off his hands. ever bullish, he said the casual dining market was heading for a renaissance and Jamie’s italian could survive. He was wrong, and administrators were appointed yesterday.
it’s a huge blow for Oliver, who will be 44 next week. He had gone into the business fired with enthusiasm by the happiest memories growing up at The Cricketers, the pub owned by his father, Trevor, in the village of Clavering, essex. He wanted to recreate that ‘perfect cocktail’ for diners of great food and good value.
‘i remember being fascinated by what went on in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘it just seemed such a cool place, everyone working together to make this lovely stuff and having a laugh doing it.’
it was thanks to the money he earned as a broadcaster that he found a means of setting up his own chain.
His big break came when a visiting TV crew spotted him working in his first job as a chef at the swanky river Cafe in Hammersmith in 1997.
The immediate success of The Naked Chef, the TV show he was given, gave rise in time to his sprawling business empire, a platform from which he campaigned on issues such as school dinners and energy drinks, and for charitable ventures such as the Fifteen cookery schools that helped the poor and underpriveleged become chefs. His fortune is now said to be around £150million.
He lives with wife Jools and their five children in a £ 10million house in Hampstead and is a workaholic, often putting in 15- hour days at his HQ in north London.
He has also recently bought an enormous 16th century stately home with 70 acres in essex. The trouble is he’s never, of course,
been a businessman. Dyslexic and having left school at 16, his talent for cooking and communication made him rich. But his hubristic approach to the restaurant business only appears to have diminished his wealth.
In a moment of candour he once said he had ‘f****d up’ 40 per cent of his business ventures. He added: ‘There is often a disadvantage to getting in first. In the future, I might spend a bit more time getting in second and getting it right.’
Certainly, it seems everything aside from his TV shows and books has been a disaster.
In a painful twist, the spotlight now falls upon his brotherinlaw Paul Hunt, a flashy former City trader.
He has been chief executive of the Jamie Oliver Group since 2014, and the chef deferred all the day-to-day running of the business to him. ‘Don’t forget that my day job’s doing “jazz hands” and making content for television and books,’ explained Oliver. ‘I can’t do everything.’
There is a widespread belief that Hunt will end up carrying the can for the disaster. One Oliver ally told me Hunt will have to go, even though it may mean hard times for Oliver’s beloved sister Anna-Marie.
Hunt, who has been married to Anna-Marie for more than 20 years, has a manor house in Clavering, with a swimming pool and tennis court.
Oliver’s and Hunt’s families spend much of their time together and Anna-Marie told me last year: ‘We are so close to Jamie.’ Was Oliver right to appoint his brother-inlaw to run the business empire? The chef declared him ‘sharp’ and ‘ shrewd’ and said he regarded him as an ‘inspirational businessman.’
Hunt was nevertheless considered a surprise choice to replace the respected John Jackson, Sir Richard Branson’s former business mastermind, who stepped down as CEO at Jamie Oliver in 2014.
After all, Hunt had run into trouble for insider trading in 1999, the year after he married Oliver’s sister.
At the time he was working for Refco Overseas, the London arm of an American futures broker.
He and four others were found guilty of ‘front-running’, a practice in which traders take an order for shares that is big enough to move the market price, but – before placing the deal – buy the shares themselves and pocket a profit.
He was fined £60,000 and banned from trading for a year. Hunt claims he was treated unfairly. ‘We broke an exchange rule,’ he said.
‘ We didn’t think we were breaking that rule. Our advisers told us we weren’t.’
Once in position, Hunt took an axe to the loss-making parts of Jamie’s empire.
He shut down the JME Group, which made kitchenware, and also the Recipease cookery schools whose final set of accounts showed it had net liabilites of more than £8.7million.
Wood Fired Ovens by Jamie Oliver was also closed, followed by the Union Jacks restaurants, a personal disappointment to Oliver because they were started in 2011 with Chris Bianco, a friend who’s known as the Arizona Pizza King.
The chain had liabilities of around £6.4million.
DURING an interview, Hunt said these were ‘desperate times’ but that the Jamie Oliver brand had expanded so far and so fast that corrective action was essential. He added: ‘ We had in the region of... I think it was 38 different businesses we were involved in. Everything from talent agencies to graphic design studios, to restaurants. We needed to make the business about Jamie again.
‘It was enormously stressful. We were all working till two, three in the morning, sleeping on the office floor. We had to make some extraordinarily tough decisions.’
Initially, this had a positive effect on the bottom line, and accounts for Jamie Oliver Holdings in 2015 showed a pretax profit of £10.2million, up from £200,000 in 2014.
But then, in the autumn of 2017 came what can now be read as a clear signal of impending disaster. Three of Oliver’s trusted senior executives – a managing director of ten years, the head of his restaurant business and his finance director – all left within weeks.
Oliver’s publicists said Hunt was ‘restructuring’. But an insider later anonymously described Hunt as an incompetent bully who had a problem with high-flying women, forcing Oliver to insist the claims were ‘nasty’, and ‘nonsense’.
A senior figure said: ‘ Paul Hunt is an arrogant, incompetent failure. He knows virtually nothing about restaurants and less about publishing.
‘He’s running the business into the ground and the day he resigns the staff should have a big party... morale is at rock bottom.’ Hunt called the claims ‘vindictive’ and ‘baseless’.
Meanwhile, Jamie’s Italian was losing money. The chain had grown from one outlet in Oxford in 2008 to 43 by 2016 and was haemorrhaging so much it endangered the profitability of the entire group.
Diners kept away, complaining the restaurant was expensive, perhaps because of the use of high-welfare ingredients, and the menu was tired. Oliver’s advisers couldn’t understand why customers would buy his books and watch his shows but eat at rival restaurants.
Former M&S executive Jon Knight was brought in as CEO for the Italian division. He candidly highlighted earlier errors, saying: ‘ We were opening too many restaurants, too quickly, in the wrong places.’
He was optimistic that by 2021, Jamie’s Italian would be back in profit and free of debt. It was a forlorn hope.
Inspired by those memories of his dad’s pub, Oliver pursued his romantic dream of providing ‘decent, high-welfare ingredients at mid- market prices’ for as long as he could, adding: ‘I really care about it.’
But, inevitably, hard business reality took over and the dream is now shattered.
Or, as he put it: ‘ We kind of got half-way there, and then it all ran away.’