Naked Chef
I've always liked Jamie Oliver and have been a big fan ever since his first show, The Naked Chef, hit our TV screens many years ago.
Jamie was a bit of a geek to be sure, but he was blessed an engaging personality and his joy of cooking and good food made an impression on my two children as well as me; his programmes were always lively and entertaining, peppered as they were with tales about his girlfriend (now wife), mum and dad and dear old gran.
How could you not be won over by someone with such a youthful zest for life?
And he has kept the show on the road ever since, evolving into a chef with a real social conscience as well as a talented business person, which comes across in this interview by AA Gill for The Sunday Times.
Please, Jamie, can I have some more?
AA Gill first encountered Jamie Oliver when he was a humble sous-chef (Jamie, that is). Seventeen years later, as Jamie joins The Sunday Times Magazine, they meet again
By AA Gill - The Sunday Times
AA Gill and Jamie Oliver
“Oh, is that still there, then?” asks the taxi driver when I tell him to take me to Fifteen by the City. I must say it pretty much echoed my response when I was told I was meeting Jamie Oliver there at the unnecessarily keen time of 8.45am. Breakfast interviews are a bit too Financial Times for me. I reviewed the first Fifteen restaurant Jamie set up in 2002, as the subject for a TV show to get discarded, awkward, defensive, unappetising kids into work.
The warmth of the project overwhelmed the deficiencies of the food. It tasted good because it was made with lashings, smears, drizzles and nests of goodness. I’d assumed it had faded away when the cameras and lights were being packed up, but here it is, 12 years later, with the latest class of Jamie-trained chefs about to graduate into the world of catering. At the moment it’s empty of customers but busy with baristas and waiters setting up the mise en place, and a coterie of PRs, minders, facilitators and assistants trying to set me up. “Jamie will be here in a moment. He’s in a pre-breakfast breakfast meeting. Can I get you anything? Breakfast?”
“Just a cup of coffee, thanks. Oh, and a bun.”
“A bun?”
“Yes, you know, something bunnish. Bunnly. From the bun ballpark.”
“Fine.”
She comes back with a flat white and a bowl of muesli, with some Greek yoghurt. Ten minutes later Jamie bustles in.
“Hi. You got some breakfast?”
“Yes, thanks. Coffee. And granola that thinks it’s a bun.”
“How is the granola?”
“A bit salty.”
He tries a smidgen. “It is a bit salty, isn’t it? The chef here is really fantastic. You should come back and eat here.” Jamie looks just like Jamie Oliver, but a little tireder, a touch worn around the edges. He’s still wearing the kidult kit of checked shirts and trainers that first slid down the bannister for The Naked Chef. It’s not exactly hipster or Ralph Lauren but it looks like his mum’s still buying his stuff from H&M.
He’s come with a couple of spare shirts for the benefit of the photographer, including one in a particularly vile shade of eggy yellow. This non-look look is part of his unconsidered charm and he still has that radiant can-do Boy Scout smile, a face that says: “Life gave me lemons and I made a fortune out of them.” He is approaching his 40th birthday, an age when most men take stock, or in the case of old chefs, stop making it. Few want to be sweating over a stove into their forties. “I suppose I ought to start dressing like a grown-up,” he says, running his hand through his young tearaway haircut, making it stand on end.
He’s going to take to middle age by continuing to run on the high-octane optimism of his twenties. Oliver is a cook without a second course. He doesn’t have plans to slow down, retire to the country, buy an island. “I can’t afford an island.” He found what he was good at early and he wants to go on doing it. He is, as it turns out, peerlessly good at being Jamie Oliver. I ask if he remembers the last time I interviewed him. “That was 17 years ago,” he says without having to count on his fingers.
I was briefly an exceedingly bad interlocutor on a business TV channel’s business TV consumer-interest show that no one watched and no one wanted to appear on.
A publicist suggested a cook called Jamie Oliver who was going to be the absolute NBT — next big thing. I can’t remember anything about it except he was one of the few people I ever met who had absolutely no fear of the camera. He was exactly the same on as he was off. There was zero performance anxiety. It wasn’t arrogance or vaunting confidence, he was just unusually comfortable behind his own character.
Talking to Jamie Oliver is a bit like interviewing water. He’s cool, clear, unimpeachably good and honestly uncomplicated. We should all have more of him, but he slips through your fingers and runs away down the plug hole of your ear leaving only a damp memory. He may well have hidden depths or be as shallow as a puddle. “A lot’s happened since then.” “Yeah,” he says. “You seem to be getting on all right.” “Actually, I meant you. How many books is it now? How many series? How many restaurants?” “Yeah, I like being busy. I’ve got a good team. It’s not all me.” (Actually, it’s 15 books — 12 with “Jamie” in the title; the other three using the word “naked”.) He trails off, unconvincingly. Except, an awful lot is all him. He’s had a series on television almost every year this century. He works in the test kitchen most weeks on recipes for books and menus, he does endless public appearances, motivational talks and then there’s the advertising. One of the PRs has filled me in on his Jamie’s Italian chain, which has 40-odd outlets and is being franchised around the world in places as random as St Petersburg and Dubai. “Are you planning on opening any in Italy?” I ask. She gives me the “Are you winding me up or being ironic?” look. “I think we’ll wait a bit before dipping into Italy,” she says. Like when you’ve got Ulan Bator covered. Sort of coals to Newcastle or pizza to Pisa.
“What I’m really interested in, at the moment is our internet channel FoodTube. That’s going really well. It’s fantastic access to a younger audience. People can interact with it. I can bring in cooks who are just starting and don’t have the hits we get. Because the cooking faces on TV have been much the same for a decade. There isn’t a lot of new talent on food shows. It’s opening the whole thing up.” And he bangs on with those amorphous, chewy, faintly non-specific words that enthused people say when eulogising the internet that, in real, 3D, face-to-face life, sound like information pebbledash. I look at it later on YouTube. It’s huge. Here’s Jamie and Alex James making cheesy pasta, Jamie and Antonio Carluccio making carbonara pasta, Jamie and Gennaro Contaldo making pasta shapes. Jamie and Russell Brand making booby pasta. It’s free, but they’d like you to register so they can be your virtual friends for life.
Practical advice and recipes is one thing you’d imagine the internet would be really good at. But most of it’s terrible: misleading, misinformed, pushed by propriety fast food. Jamie adds: “You know, most internet searches for recipes are for the same couple dozen dishes. Millions of people looking for lasagne. But we make it more interesting and appetising.”
Astonishingly, one of the things people ask most often about Oliver is: “Is he really stupid? Did they call him Special Needs at school?” That beggars anybody’s definition of stupid. He left school with two O-levels, Art and Geology, and then went to Westminster Catering College (now Westminster Kingsway), where he got a City & Guilds diploma, which may sound sniggerable but Westminster is one of the very best catering courses in the country. He worked for Carluccio and the River Cafe, and he has made more money than all the TV cooks put together, by a deep pocket. And he’s done it without appreciably changing his bright demeanour. He’s pretty much the same on as he is off. He sports precious few of the trimmings of stardom, except for having lumbered his kids with Hello!tastic junior celebrity monikers: Daisy Boo, Buddy Bear, Poppy Honey and Petal Blossom Rainbow. “I grew up in this industry,” he says. His parents ran a pub that served good food. “I used to be… not exactly upset but a bit hurt when other chefs I really admired as a kid slagged me off.”
Gordon Ramsay’s name comes up in conversation, like a passing cloud. They have had a very public feud, but then almost everyone in the business has had a run-in with Gordon; it’s what Gordon does. Cheffing, by tradition, is an aggressive, judgemental, competitive business. The school of hard knocks: scrapes, burns, split shifts and bullying. Oliver cuts against the ancient law that if you can’t stand the heat, you have no business in the kitchen. He is generous, companionable, forgiving, friendly. He believes that to make a great broth, you really can’t have too many cooks. And that’s what others mistake for stupidity.
Of all the TV chefs, he is the one who has campaigned, not about better ingredients or happier chickens or fairer fish, but for happier, healthier eaters. He crusades on behalf of people who cook and consume rather than on the ingredients they cook, starting with the employment of kids in catering and then on the quality of what we feed our children at school. His series on school meals was one of the best evocations of food on television. Moving away from dinner party vanity or fantasy rural living (although he has been responsible for a good deal of that), it dealt with the real problems and consequences of a poor diet, not as medicine or chemistry, but as culture and hospitality.
And that didn’t stop with the credits or with the eradication of chicken nuggets. He still campaigns relentlessly for freshly cooked, healthily prepared and attractively presented food in schools and he does it with humour, compassion and understanding for the economics and hardships of feeding the nation’s kids. But he is implacable in the need to get it right, particularly about the amount of refined sugar in everything. Particularly fizzy drinks and juice. “It’s really criminal,” he says. “Mostly we drink water. Water’s good.”
He took his particular brand of boy-scout foodism to West Virginia’s schools for an American show that got canned. But Jamie says they’re still cooking proper stuff in their canteens. He is remarkably tough in the face of resistance and personal abuse. The pandemic of obesity, diabetes, shortness of breath and just plain low self-worth fat misery is something he is not turning his back on to just turn out nice picture books of fantasy food and jolly YouTube hits of comedians making pasta nipples. The latest series and book is comfort eating. It is full of fat, sugar and carbohydrates and it comes with nutritional information, but it is mostly about the importance of taking time to cook and prepare. He says none of these are 15-30 minute recipes. It is also about pausing to share and eat. This isn’t food to be eaten off a tray in front of the telly.
And now he is joining the Magazine every week. So what do you want us to cook? “I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s see what you want to eat.” He goes to pose for his photograph in the new shirt. “Do you want the hair up or down?” he asks the photographer. I ask if he has any favourite ingredients at the moment. Chefs always have something they’re obsessing about. He thinks. “I quite like bay leaves. Not just a touch, like you get in a bouquet garni, but lots, so you get a real hit of bay.” It’s a good taste: bay, the laurel wreath, the taste of victory.
“Oh, is that still there, then?” asks the taxi driver when I tell him to take me to Fifteen by the City. I must say it pretty much echoed my response when I was told I was meeting Jamie Oliver there at the unnecessarily keen time of 8.45am. Breakfast interviews are a bit too Financial Times for me. I reviewed the first Fifteen restaurant Jamie set up in 2002, as the subject for a TV show to get discarded, awkward, defensive, unappetising kids into work.
The warmth of the project overwhelmed the deficiencies of the food. It tasted good because it was made with lashings, smears, drizzles and nests of goodness. I’d assumed it had faded away when the cameras and lights were being packed up, but here it is, 12 years later, with the latest class of Jamie-trained chefs about to graduate into the world of catering. At the moment it’s empty of customers but busy with baristas and waiters setting up the mise en place, and a coterie of PRs, minders, facilitators and assistants trying to set me up. “Jamie will be here in a moment. He’s in a pre-breakfast breakfast meeting. Can I get you anything? Breakfast?”
“Just a cup of coffee, thanks. Oh, and a bun.”
“A bun?”
“Yes, you know, something bunnish. Bunnly. From the bun ballpark.”
“Fine.”
She comes back with a flat white and a bowl of muesli, with some Greek yoghurt. Ten minutes later Jamie bustles in.
“Hi. You got some breakfast?”
“Yes, thanks. Coffee. And granola that thinks it’s a bun.”
“How is the granola?”
“A bit salty.”
He tries a smidgen. “It is a bit salty, isn’t it? The chef here is really fantastic. You should come back and eat here.” Jamie looks just like Jamie Oliver, but a little tireder, a touch worn around the edges. He’s still wearing the kidult kit of checked shirts and trainers that first slid down the bannister for The Naked Chef. It’s not exactly hipster or Ralph Lauren but it looks like his mum’s still buying his stuff from H&M.
He’s come with a couple of spare shirts for the benefit of the photographer, including one in a particularly vile shade of eggy yellow. This non-look look is part of his unconsidered charm and he still has that radiant can-do Boy Scout smile, a face that says: “Life gave me lemons and I made a fortune out of them.” He is approaching his 40th birthday, an age when most men take stock, or in the case of old chefs, stop making it. Few want to be sweating over a stove into their forties. “I suppose I ought to start dressing like a grown-up,” he says, running his hand through his young tearaway haircut, making it stand on end.
He’s going to take to middle age by continuing to run on the high-octane optimism of his twenties. Oliver is a cook without a second course. He doesn’t have plans to slow down, retire to the country, buy an island. “I can’t afford an island.” He found what he was good at early and he wants to go on doing it. He is, as it turns out, peerlessly good at being Jamie Oliver. I ask if he remembers the last time I interviewed him. “That was 17 years ago,” he says without having to count on his fingers.
I was briefly an exceedingly bad interlocutor on a business TV channel’s business TV consumer-interest show that no one watched and no one wanted to appear on.
A publicist suggested a cook called Jamie Oliver who was going to be the absolute NBT — next big thing. I can’t remember anything about it except he was one of the few people I ever met who had absolutely no fear of the camera. He was exactly the same on as he was off. There was zero performance anxiety. It wasn’t arrogance or vaunting confidence, he was just unusually comfortable behind his own character.
Talking to Jamie Oliver is a bit like interviewing water. He’s cool, clear, unimpeachably good and honestly uncomplicated. We should all have more of him, but he slips through your fingers and runs away down the plug hole of your ear leaving only a damp memory. He may well have hidden depths or be as shallow as a puddle. “A lot’s happened since then.” “Yeah,” he says. “You seem to be getting on all right.” “Actually, I meant you. How many books is it now? How many series? How many restaurants?” “Yeah, I like being busy. I’ve got a good team. It’s not all me.” (Actually, it’s 15 books — 12 with “Jamie” in the title; the other three using the word “naked”.) He trails off, unconvincingly. Except, an awful lot is all him. He’s had a series on television almost every year this century. He works in the test kitchen most weeks on recipes for books and menus, he does endless public appearances, motivational talks and then there’s the advertising. One of the PRs has filled me in on his Jamie’s Italian chain, which has 40-odd outlets and is being franchised around the world in places as random as St Petersburg and Dubai. “Are you planning on opening any in Italy?” I ask. She gives me the “Are you winding me up or being ironic?” look. “I think we’ll wait a bit before dipping into Italy,” she says. Like when you’ve got Ulan Bator covered. Sort of coals to Newcastle or pizza to Pisa.
“What I’m really interested in, at the moment is our internet channel FoodTube. That’s going really well. It’s fantastic access to a younger audience. People can interact with it. I can bring in cooks who are just starting and don’t have the hits we get. Because the cooking faces on TV have been much the same for a decade. There isn’t a lot of new talent on food shows. It’s opening the whole thing up.” And he bangs on with those amorphous, chewy, faintly non-specific words that enthused people say when eulogising the internet that, in real, 3D, face-to-face life, sound like information pebbledash. I look at it later on YouTube. It’s huge. Here’s Jamie and Alex James making cheesy pasta, Jamie and Antonio Carluccio making carbonara pasta, Jamie and Gennaro Contaldo making pasta shapes. Jamie and Russell Brand making booby pasta. It’s free, but they’d like you to register so they can be your virtual friends for life.
Practical advice and recipes is one thing you’d imagine the internet would be really good at. But most of it’s terrible: misleading, misinformed, pushed by propriety fast food. Jamie adds: “You know, most internet searches for recipes are for the same couple dozen dishes. Millions of people looking for lasagne. But we make it more interesting and appetising.”
Astonishingly, one of the things people ask most often about Oliver is: “Is he really stupid? Did they call him Special Needs at school?” That beggars anybody’s definition of stupid. He left school with two O-levels, Art and Geology, and then went to Westminster Catering College (now Westminster Kingsway), where he got a City & Guilds diploma, which may sound sniggerable but Westminster is one of the very best catering courses in the country. He worked for Carluccio and the River Cafe, and he has made more money than all the TV cooks put together, by a deep pocket. And he’s done it without appreciably changing his bright demeanour. He’s pretty much the same on as he is off. He sports precious few of the trimmings of stardom, except for having lumbered his kids with Hello!tastic junior celebrity monikers: Daisy Boo, Buddy Bear, Poppy Honey and Petal Blossom Rainbow. “I grew up in this industry,” he says. His parents ran a pub that served good food. “I used to be… not exactly upset but a bit hurt when other chefs I really admired as a kid slagged me off.”
Gordon Ramsay’s name comes up in conversation, like a passing cloud. They have had a very public feud, but then almost everyone in the business has had a run-in with Gordon; it’s what Gordon does. Cheffing, by tradition, is an aggressive, judgemental, competitive business. The school of hard knocks: scrapes, burns, split shifts and bullying. Oliver cuts against the ancient law that if you can’t stand the heat, you have no business in the kitchen. He is generous, companionable, forgiving, friendly. He believes that to make a great broth, you really can’t have too many cooks. And that’s what others mistake for stupidity.
Of all the TV chefs, he is the one who has campaigned, not about better ingredients or happier chickens or fairer fish, but for happier, healthier eaters. He crusades on behalf of people who cook and consume rather than on the ingredients they cook, starting with the employment of kids in catering and then on the quality of what we feed our children at school. His series on school meals was one of the best evocations of food on television. Moving away from dinner party vanity or fantasy rural living (although he has been responsible for a good deal of that), it dealt with the real problems and consequences of a poor diet, not as medicine or chemistry, but as culture and hospitality.
And that didn’t stop with the credits or with the eradication of chicken nuggets. He still campaigns relentlessly for freshly cooked, healthily prepared and attractively presented food in schools and he does it with humour, compassion and understanding for the economics and hardships of feeding the nation’s kids. But he is implacable in the need to get it right, particularly about the amount of refined sugar in everything. Particularly fizzy drinks and juice. “It’s really criminal,” he says. “Mostly we drink water. Water’s good.”
He took his particular brand of boy-scout foodism to West Virginia’s schools for an American show that got canned. But Jamie says they’re still cooking proper stuff in their canteens. He is remarkably tough in the face of resistance and personal abuse. The pandemic of obesity, diabetes, shortness of breath and just plain low self-worth fat misery is something he is not turning his back on to just turn out nice picture books of fantasy food and jolly YouTube hits of comedians making pasta nipples. The latest series and book is comfort eating. It is full of fat, sugar and carbohydrates and it comes with nutritional information, but it is mostly about the importance of taking time to cook and prepare. He says none of these are 15-30 minute recipes. It is also about pausing to share and eat. This isn’t food to be eaten off a tray in front of the telly.
And now he is joining the Magazine every week. So what do you want us to cook? “I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s see what you want to eat.” He goes to pose for his photograph in the new shirt. “Do you want the hair up or down?” he asks the photographer. I ask if he has any favourite ingredients at the moment. Chefs always have something they’re obsessing about. He thinks. “I quite like bay leaves. Not just a touch, like you get in a bouquet garni, but lots, so you get a real hit of bay.” It’s a good taste: bay, the laurel wreath, the taste of victory.
