Awful.” It would be easy to see a touch of Icarus in Oliver, or to view his saga as some sort of life lesson from an overachiever. “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he said of the closing. A smart producer saw how much the camera loved him. Jamie Oliver was a sous-chef at the River Cafe in London when a BBC crew showed up to shoot a documentary. He had opened it in 2002 to train unemployed young people, many from difficult backgrounds, how to prepare tasting menus, make fresh pasta and run a proper dining room. In all, he shuttered or sold 25 restaurants, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.Ĭlosing his first restaurant, the fashionable Fifteen in London, hurt the most. But after closing some restaurants, injecting the equivalent of more than €13.5 million of his own money into the company and searching for a new investor, he gave up. Oliver said he tried his hardest to keep the business alive. The company, according to some accounts, owed creditors nearly €91 million. In May, the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group went into administration. "I have probably been pushed to the edge of my capacity over the last four years," he said. It wasn't just a bad night's sleep, a new house and a packed day that weighed on him. Not so pukka: the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group went into administration in May 2019, leading to the closing or sale of 25 restaurants. Still, moving is moving, especially with five children, including a feverish 3-year-old who spent the night “jumping around me like a rattlesnake,” Oliver said. Granted, that kind of move is a little different from asking your friends to help you muscle a mattress into a studio flat. (They're keeping the eight-bedroom North London town house.) It didn't help that he and his wife, Jools, had exhausted themselves over the weekend moving into a €6.5 million 16th century Tudor mansion not far from his parents' pub in Essex. After feeding a reporter lunch, he had to meet top officials from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London who were coming by the office to hammer out a plan to halve childhood obesity rates by 2030. He dropped his children at school, then made his way to the refurbished North London warehouse that serves as his headquarters. “I’m a bit tired.” The day started before 6 a.m. At 44, Oliver comes off more like a pleasant, world-weary secondary school teacher than the arrogant jokey bloke everyone wanted to hang around with back when he blew up food TV.Īnd are those bags under his blue eyes? “Sorry, darling,” he said as he seasoned a fillet of Dover sole. That adorable mop of hair he had 20 years ago when he slid down a banister and splashed into popular food culture as the Naked Chef is cropped now. Just before lunch on a recent Monday, Jamie Oliver wrapped an apron around his dad bod and started mashing mint and broad beans with a mortar and pestle, which has long been his favourite kitchen tool.
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