Jamie’s Italian
24-26 George Street, Oxford  OX1 2AE
Contact: 01865 838383
Visit jamieoliver.com/italian/oxford

 

The last time we met, Jamie Oliver was hungover like a dog, having celebrated his birthday in his restaurant on George Street the night before it opened, and was therefore fairly monosyllabic.

But today he’s on top form, happy to celebrate Jamie’s Italian’s fifth year in business, and sit back and chew the fat. So much has changed since then, from one restaurant to 32, from two children to four. So is he done? “Yes I’m done,” he grins, having another sip of beer, “but the missus, she keeps talking about having another one. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it and wouldn’t change it for the world but I’ve got four children and I don’t want to push my luck.”

Pushing his luck is, of course, what Jamie Oliver has made a career of, first with the Naked Chef, commissioned “by the skin of my teeth”. The book was also “cobbled together” after the presenters mentioned it was a shame there wasn’t an accompanying cookbook and Jamie rushed home to find his beloved recipe collection, which he had written on the back of menus and scraps of paper, only to discover that his wife Jools had thrown it away. “She’s like a cleaning Ninja and quite OCD about tidying up, so we thought she’d chucked it, but then we found them in the back of my wardrobe.”

Jamie Oliver literally burst into our lives, showing us how to cook realistically while entertaining us in the process with his Essex boy-isms, ‘pukka’ now being in the English dictionary.

And while the 38-year-old still looks like a teenager, as he sits on his hands or swings his arms about as if he’s got too much energy, to pigeon-hole him would be to vastly underestimate the Jamie Oliver machine which has made him the most famous chef in this country and arguably the world.

Forget for a moment the countless books and TV shows by which he made his name and fortune. That aside, he’s now got 32 restaurants under his belt, a quota that may even have increased by the time you read this.

What makes his success even more remarkable is that his extreme dyslexia hasn’t held him back, even though he’s only ever read one book. He dictates everything into a dictaphone, which might explain his winning, chatty style and his innate ability to communicate so readily. “The media always takes the piss and says I’m lazy, but reading or writing takes up every ounce of concentration I have, and while I can read to my under-fours, after that I leave it to Jools.”

Yet it all comes at a price. In the early days we watched Jamie’s fame rocket, but such instant notoriety meant he had to make a conscious decision about whether he actually wanted to live in a goldfish bowl for the rest of his life.

“It was like being in One Direction back then,” he remembers. “Honestly, it was mental. and I knew that even though this was what I had always dreamt of, it would be my life from now on and did I want that?”

He did as it turns out, but says he’s got much better at managing it over the years, surrounding himself with people he knows and trusts and making sure he looks after them. “I am very lucky,” he acknowledges, “but I’m also quite an unusual chef and I’m aware of that. So while it’s hard to explain how the machine works, it’s mainly about collecting wonderful people over the past 11 years. They are my best friends and brilliant at what they do, although I can still hold my own,” he grins again.

Tucked away out of sight, chatting away as if he hasn’t a care in the world, it’s easy to forget how famous this man is. Having witnessed the Jamie effect last time around, when tourists were physically throwing themselves at the restaurant windows and crowding outside like rabid wolves, I wonder what it’s like to live like that and where Jamie Oliver the commercial machine begins and ends? “It doesn’t. It’s always there,” he confirms.

But that’s the thing about passionate people. It’s not a coincidence that Jamie Oliver is famous. Whether one BBC exec or another had spotted his potential, you couldn’t have ignored his enthusiasm or gift for communication for long. He was a ticking foodbomb waiting to happen.

Having said that, he could have stuck with the nice TV shows and the books. He didn’t need to stick his neck out and take it upon himself to change our children’s eating habits, tackle the schools, the government, the parents. He didn’t need to open restaurants to give deprived teenagers a chance to train and cook as he has with Fifteen. He didn’t need to sign up the first three Jamie’s Italians, having been warned off George Street by a friend who called it ‘puke alley’, using his own house as collateral.

He never takes the easy path. There have been hiccups and backlashes. There was a point in Jamie’s School Dinners when mums were pushing chips through the school railings so their children didn’t have to eat his food, and he looked like he’d bitten off more than he could chew. Starting Jamie’s Italian on the cusp of the recession was another brave move.

“What was the alternative?” he asks me. “Folding into a smug world or turning it around and having a right go. Yes, the recession was announced that day, and I lived through two with dad in the pub when it was all about keeping your head down, so there was fear going through my body when I signed those first leases. But I had to remain positive. Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts.

“So while it’s a massive responsibility [there are now 3,000 staff on the Jamie Oliver payroll] and I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m deeply proud of what we’ve achieved. It’s hard and great and uncompromising and I’m totally indebted to the people who work for me. And having grown up in the restaurant business I am very protective of the industry and any bullying is totally unacceptable,” he says.

“If you are a good chef you shouldn’t need to treat people like sh** and if I found out that was happening in my restaurants it would be ‘bye bye’.

Would Jamie’s Italian have been such a success though without his name? “Being a known face helps for about two weeks, but it’s not about the first customers who walk through the door; it’s about getting them back,” he insists.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Jamie has a lot of new projects on the boil at the moment: The Big Feastival (on August 31 and September 1) which he shares with Alex James in Kingham, new restaurant concepts Jamie’s Diner, steak house Barbecoa and Union Jack’s, as well as a Ch4 TV series commissioned in Italy with his old pal Gennaro Contaldo. Plus he’s rearing his own sheep. “I’m so geeky aren’t I?” he grins. “My wife thinks I’m completely bonkers because on her phone she’s got pictures of the kids and on mine I’ve got sheep-breeding programmes.”

The Jamie Oliver machine even extends into his own home life, although the other, less publicised reason that Jamie has succeeded is that behind the scenes his childhood sweetheart and wife Jools, mother of his four children Poppy, Daisy, Petal and Buddy, runs the family home like an empire and takes it all in her stride.

Even so, having such a famous husband and father is a lot for them to cope with. “It’s harder for the girls at school, and while I don’t want them to get preferential treatment, they are beginning to ask why the other pupils say things like ‘do you eat fishfingers at home’,” he sighs.

“But I made a decision 15 years ago and I can’t change it. I’ve just learned to stay out of trouble and am teaching them to do the same.

“And we’ve got a place in Essex where we can get away.

“I grew up there and they all know me in the village and keep an eye out for me, so if anyone turns up trying to find me, they get redirected elsewhere.

“But balancing home, kids and a business, how do you do that?” he asks before answering the question himself: “I don’t know but I’m giving it a bloody good go.”