Jamie Oliver rekindling his “Jamie’s Italian” brand is impossible to ignore. The first UK branch in six years will open in Leicester Square next spring, marking a “triumphant return to British soil”, an announcement said.
The fallout when the celebrity chef’s restaurant chain went bust was huge. Sites had begun closing in 2017 and, despite Oliver’s best efforts, the business failed in 2019, resulting in 1,000 job losses and numerous unpaid debts.
Oliver has talked a lot about what happened since. As successful as he is on-screen and with cookbooks — more than 50 million sold worldwide — he’s always wanted restaurants too. Though his own chain has been growing internationally, the loss in Britain has plagued him. He opened a new flagship restaurant in Covent Garden last year, a higher-end standalone, but that was relatively low-key and panned by some critics. The Jamie’s Italian comeback feels much bigger.
For round two, Oliver has got backing from Brava Hospitality Group, which owns the high street staple Prezzo, another Italian-inspired chain. The relaunch promises “revitalised restaurants and a menu curated by Jamie himself” and so his once famous cured meat planks will return, as well as dishes such as prawn linguine and Gennaro’s bolognese, the latter named after his mentor Gennaro Contaldo.
I remember having my first meat plank in the Oxford restaurant — the first to open — in 2008. It was next door to the pub I was working at, so we went in almost immediately and were treated wonderfully because there’s always an understanding among hospitality workers. The cured Italian meats, folded on top of a slab of rustic wood, this sitting on two cans of chopped tomatoes, were worth £6.50. And the menu was littered with Oliverisms: the “world’s best olives”, Jamie’s “music bread”, a “Catherine wheel sausage” that arrived on top of a parmesan and mushroom polenta.
It’s easy to take snacks like arancini for granted now. These days they’re everywhere but in 2008 they were novel to almost everyone. It might be difficult to remember — or impossible to understand for younger readers — but Jamie’s Italian was excellent when it launched.
And wait until you hear the prices. My starter, a fennel sausage pappardelle, was £5.50. My pal Jade ordered a penne arrabbiata for a fiver and we shared Oliver’s much celebrated prawn linguine for the same price. This was 17 years ago, so of course the prices were lower, but even then it was affordable, the produce sound and the cooking fair (most of his first workforce came from the then hugely respected Oxford Brookes hospitality school).
Do we need Oliver’s Italian food now? It might be welcome in India and Dubai, places with less of an Italian food scene, but Britain’s has been blooming for decades. People know what arancini are and they roast sea bream at home. Oliver taught half of them. To that end, he might have orchestrated his own demise.
London especially is full of superb Italian restaurants. Some are old and others are new. Among the finest places to find pasta is Padella, which was launched by the Oliver-trained Tim Siadatan. So I think Jamie’s Italian will have to be very good to succeed this time around, much better than it was in 2008, which will take some doing. It started well but became average fairly quickly thanks to short-sighted overexpansion. As soon as a restaurant is run from a boardroom rather than a kitchen, it’s always going to falter. It’s one or the other: a restaurant or a business. In the end, for Jamie’s Italian, it was neither. By the latter years the restaurants were a certifiable shitshow.
It’s difficult to predict what happens next. I guess Oliver is not without his fans and in Leicester Square, he's going for the tourist trade, not London “foodies”. I’ll tell you this: if the sausage pappardelle is under £15, I’ll go in.
