It’s 9 a.m. when Oliver’s welcoming face, a bit doughier than it appears on camera, greets me in the 16th-century dining room of The Cricketers, his father’s pub-restaurant. I have been granted a three-hour audience, and I am braced to receive a well-rehearsed patter honed by the hundreds of interviews he’s given over the years. But Oliver is refreshingly unselfconscious.
His dad, Trevor, is prepping for the day, setting the menu, and straightening up the dining room. “This was one of the first ‘good food’ pubs in England,” his son tells me. He’s sitting casually, one leg up on a bench, pulling at the hem of his jeans. “Seven chefs. Modern kitchen. French pastry. Seasonal menu. Everything locally grown. All good clobber.”
He tends to speak in lists.
Oliver started in the kitchen at the age of 8, “plucking birds, prepping liver, picking up dogends, sweeping up.” By 11, he was “as fresh with a knife as you want to know. I was like ka-ching, brumph, bwaump—fillet of fish, piece o’ piss. Whole deer comin’ in, bam bum boom, broken down into haunches of venison.”
Dexterity is necessary for a chef, but even as a teen, Jamie possessed something & extra. “He had the chitchat,” recalls Vicky Thompson, who as a teenager waitressed alongside him at the pub. “He was always ‘Darlin’ this, darlin’ that,’ peeling spuds. I wasn’t at all surprised to see him on TV.”
High school was a bust for Jamie—geology and art were his best subjects—so after graduating, he attended the unexceptional Westminster Catering College, trained in France for a summer, and did time with London restaurateur Antonio Carluccio. At 19, he landed a $350-a-week job as a sous-chef at the River Cafe, the trailblazing restaurant that blends gorgeous Italian ingredients with a modern cooking style à la Chez Panisse. In business for a decade at the time, its owners, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, were hoping that a 1997 BBC2 Christmas special taped at their establishment would springboard them into their own series. Instead, the wild-haired kid whipping up pasta in the background caught the eye of producer Patricia Llewellyn.
It was Llewellyn who discovered the eccentric Two Fat Ladies and sent them scooting to unlikely worldwide fame. Likewise, when young Jamie flashed across her screen, she saw an ideal host for a “Friends with Food” program aimed at the TV dinner/takeout generation. The next day, she phoned the River Cafe. Six times she called. Five times her calls went unanswered. “I thought it was me mates taking the piss,” Oliver remembers. “As if TV would be calling me.”
As if.
When they finally met, Oliver impressed Llewellyn with his confidence and his River Cafe–redux philosophy of food. They made a screen test for Channel 4, Britain’s more adventurous network, who deemed Oliver too green for his own series and turned it down. The BBC jumped on it.
More trad than rad, the pilot was taped in a studio kitchen with multiple cameras and a script. Oliver struggled for several days trying to say this line to that camera on cue; then he just pulled the plug. “I was crap,” the wonder boy recalls. “I was being polite as if I was talking to me mother-in-law. If my friends saw that, they’d laugh me off the planet.”
Footage costing $100,000 was scrapped in favor of a Hill Street Blues video style that Llewellyn developed but which Oliver has come to own. Shot with one jiggly camera in an East London apartment filled with Oliver’s posters, music, and mates, the show took off. His performance was hyperkinetic. He didn’t sprinkle herbs on a chicken. He smashed them first with a pestle (to release “all those lovely oils”), then shoved them up its bum. “People do think I’m a bit of a freak, but there is a reason for bashing the living daylights out of things,” he says. “You can chop it, but if you want it to taste fantastic, you gotta get stuck into things.”
And the food? Stripped down, unfussy & naked. “The BBC came up with the original title,” Oliver says disparagingly. “I’ve always hated it.”
To those who argue that he hasn’t the technical expertise of world-renowned chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten or Thomas Keller, Oliver wisely admits that he excels at only four things: pastas, breads, salads, and roasts. Whereas some chefs might have you devising foams or building constructivist towers, Oliver’s recipes are eminently unintimidating—he prefers “glugs” of olive oil and “handfuls” of grated cheese to precisely measured portions. They’re also mercifully short. As Oliver told one reporter, “I haven’t made a demiglace since I left catering school. Anyone who has time to make demiglace at home has got too much time on their hands.”
But don’t be fooled. While Oliver’s zeal may be infectious (“I’ve found it. The best onion recipe—it’s smashing, pukka, the absolute dog’s kahunas!”), there’s knowledge behind those exclamation points. The offhand comments he makes on TV are deeply useful. (Don’t salt the water before boiling broad beans, it makes the skin tough; lay the roast on the oven rack for 20 minutes first to crisp the outside; score the thigh of chicken so that it cooks through.)
The Naked Chef was as much lifestyle as it was food. In one episode, Oliver prepared Thai noodles for his older sister’s “hen party”; at the end, each woman, happily fed, thanked the chef with a kiss. (Message: Cooking makes you sexy.) In another, he cooked a gorgeous roast for his favorite band, Jamiroquai. (Message: You don’t have to play guitar to hang with rock stars.)
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