It’s no accident that one third of the photos in the Happy Days cookbook are of Oliver. Women took to the books immediately; men were more wary. “At first, it came across like I was giving license to the women to say to their husbands or their boyfriends, ‘If that little hyperactive Essex boy can do it, then you should have a go at least once a week.’ The women were buying books for their men, and the men didn’t like being told what to do.
“Then, a year later, it changed. Men did some simple things and wives patted them on the back. Then they started saying ‘Nice one, J. I’m really good. I hated you at first, but now I’m better than you.’”
All British heroes need to shed some tears before they are fully accepted into the pantheon. Oliver’s decline began two years ago, when he signed a two-year contract, option to renew, with Sainsbury’s, Britain’s second-largest supermarket chain. For appearing in 12 ads a year, plus consulting on a new high-end range of foods, he earned a reported $1.5 million. While few mortals, let alone cooks, could turn down a sum that handsome, the exposure turned Oliver into an unavoidable presence that wouldn’t go away. His face turned up in every other prime-time ad, and it was (and continues to be) on every package of fresh herbs in Sainsbury’s 480 stores. (The copy is unwittingly camp: “I’m absolutely doolally about herbs!” it shouts, then rabbits on about the virtues of summer savory or lemon basil.)
Jamie maintains he’s vigilant about what he will and will not promote. “I have to be very careful because they want me to push everything you can imagine. So we keep it down to me doing ads for fresh food. You won’t see me opening anything prepacked.”
He also argues that his duties as supermarket spokesmodel fit synergistically with his idea of cooking. “My pitch on it is: I couldn’t put porcini in my first book because most people (a) didn’t know what they were, or (b) couldn’t get them. But now they’re in Sainsbury’s and so are pancetta and buffalo mozzarella and Sicilian lemons and, okay, it’s not the same as getting them in Italy, but they’re damn good, and they weren’t there before me.”
While Oliver’s omnipresence got on the nation’s nerves, Sainsbury’s was thrilled. When he did an ad for vanilla pods, stores sold out of them. “We’ve gone from 9.6 million customers a week to 10.5 million,” says Sir Peter Davis, the company’s CEO. The chain’s stock has also risen 20 percent since Oliver’s been on board.
His ubiquity quickly turned Boy Wonder into Boy Blunder. One Web site launched a “Punch the Smug Chef” game, with pages of insults and a send-in-your-own-Jamie-joke section. Journalists skewered him for everything from his “lolling tongue” and his unregimented front teeth to his hanging with Puff Daddy and Minnie Driver at fashion shows. Then there was the time at Monte’s, the London club where Oliver used to consult, when he told a journalist he’d spent the morning “prepping, butchering, all that malarkey” in the kitchen. Too bad she’d just seen him walk through the front door. He also informed her that he’d “done more for British food in two years than anyone else had done in a century.”
In the wake of such gaffes, Oliver did what all overexposed celebrities ought to do: He disappeared. While lying low, he became a father (he insists that his 13-month-old daughter, Poppy Honey, was not named for a salad dressing) and wrote another cookbook, Jamie’s Kitchen. He also spent time finalizing a plan he’d told me about when we first met at his father’s pub.
The idea was to launch a nonprofit restaurant and to create a reality-TV series about it. But rather than use professional chefs, Oliver would train 15 jobless youngsters. Then he’d funnel the restaurant’s profits into a charity to enable the program to continue. He was convinced that his determination, passion, and love of food could give the kids involved a new lease on life. Luckily for him, things didn’t go as smoothly as planned.
On camera, Oliver battled with builders, budgets, and the trainees themselves. One cursed at him for his authoritarian approach to food; another accused him of using them to advance his own career. He responded on air by telling them (and the nation and his wife) that he had secretly mortgaged his house to foot the $2.5 million production and start-up costs. Later, the building department threatened to shut down the restaurant, Fifteen, before it opened because the property was missing an exhaust vent.
In short, Oliver couldn’t have scripted it better. By the third episode, Jamie’s Kitchen had attracted a record 6 million viewers. When it was bumped one week for a special edition of Celebrity Big Brother, the network switchboards were jammed with complaints.
Even more remarkable was the reception the restaurant received. Revered Evening Standard food critic Fay Maschler said her meal contained some of the “best dishes [she had] been served in a long time,” and added that Oliver had “succeeded in fashioning from seemingly lumpen dough a group of keen and competent cooks.” She also declared that he “should be knighted for effort, energy, financial risk-taking, and genuine empathy.”
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