Jamie Oliver seems to be copping an enormous amount of schadenfreude, as he closes restaurants, including branches of Jamie’s Italian, and restructures his company to keep it afloat. Some people just don’t rate his restaurants, which is fair enough, though on the few times I went to Jamie’s Italian, while I wasn’t moved to burst into a rendition of Some Enchanted Evening, I thought it was perfectly nice.
The problems seem to lie mainly in the company’s disastrous over-expansion and restaurant chains being hit generally. With Oliver in particular, there’s also a shadow narrative about his supposed self-importance, hubris and self-interest. Which seems unfair – he wasn’t the first to stick his name on kitchen utensils or publish a paper tsunami of recipe books and he won’t be the last.
Oliver has also consistently stuck his neck out about healthy eating. Not that he has always got it right – who could forget his ill-advised moan about people with poor diets finding the money for wide-screen televisions? As if not having a television would magically transform people on benefits, or the low-waged, into organic-minded bon vivants, finding evening amusement in a candlelit game of Mrs Beeton-themed charades.
At this point, and others, it was a case of: “Oh shut up, Jamie.” However, despite being bombarded with flak, Oliver has kept trying to educate people, and with a fair amount of good humour, which is all too often conveniently forgotten because it doesn’t fit with his supposed smug preachy public image.
For someone so often attacked for self-interest, Oliver seems less guilty of it than most of his ilk. He’s also dyslexic, ferociously hardworking, and self-made (unless you’re minded to depict his parents’ pub-restaurant in Essex as some kind of sinister gastro-pub dynasty). With this in mind, I, for one, wish him luck in sorting out his nightmare – one day, the breadsticks will be snapping again.
