Jamie Oliver has claimed his restaurant chains closed down because he is “conceptually thick” and struggled to understand the maths.
The celebrity chef was forced to close 22 of his restaurants - including Jamie’s Italian, Fifteen and Barbecoa - in 2019, causing 1,000 job cuts and leaving the business owing around £83 million.
The 50-year-old - who explored his dyslexia struggle in a recent documentary - talked about how he “got the basics wrong” when it came to his business empire.
“Sometimes I've failed and I got all the hard bits right and I got the basics wrong because I spent a lifetime refusing to accept any responsibility around numbers and maths... I didn't pass maths at school,” he said on Davina McCall’s Begin Again podcast.
“Conceptually within that, yeah, I'm thick. I have a negative view of myself when it comes to maths.
“So when I lost my restaurants, you know, all the hard stuff we got right - all the stuff that most people struggle getting right, we got right. We were really good at the hard stuff - and it was really the basics.”
The Naked Chef star went on: “Like, we were really good at the hard stuff. And like, it was really the basics.
“But and through my inability and it sounds like I'm being hard on myself, but I recognise it now through, you know, my inability to exercise the demons of like actually like maybe you're not s**t at that and actually you can retrain that.”
He also revealed he has learned to accept the positive aspects of “failure”.
“Maybe it's me being philosophical and trying to protect myself but I think that pain and failure is all part of really shaping your peripheral vision and your senses,” he said.
“And I think, whatever it is that you're trying to do, you might not have failed because it was all were wrong.
“Sometimes I've failed because I was too early and people weren't ready. Sometimes I've failed because I was too late.”
In May 2019, all but three of Oliver’s 25 restaurants were shut down.
The chef reportedly used his personal bank account to pay the salary of around 1,000 staff who had been made redundant.
