On a warm friday night in London, 2,800 people are rushing to their seats in the massive Apollo Theatre. Grandmothers of 60 with their grandsons of 8; moms, dads; young couples of the opposite and same sexes outfitted in this season’s smart bags and Puma sneakers: They’ve all paid between $20 to $40 to see the hardest-working chef in show business. But as the lights dim, it’s the shrieks of teenage girls that rise through the balconies.
Squeals morph into a chorus of oooohs and aaaahs as a video screen flashes images of baby Jamie, his tongue, even then a tad too large for his mouth, poking through his gums. Then there’s Jamie in a mullet haircut, Jamie camping it up in cooking school, wedding videos of Jamie and “the lovely Jools,” as he calls Juliette Norton, the mother of his child and the envy of young women across England. To the escalating techno backbeat, we see Jamie today scooting through London on his gray Vespa, smashing into the back wall of the theater, and whoooosh—lights up, music peaking—through the curtain onto the stage. The audience screams. Off the bike, he places a call to Domino’s.
He orders a jalapeño, anchovy, and pineapple pie, puts down the phone, then dives into his first recipe—a homemade pizza—to show how easy it is. Grunting and sweating, he attacks the dough (“You can make bread,” he says. “But I live it. I feel it”), tops it with sun-dried tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella, and slides it onto a marble slab in the oven. Before Domino’s arrives, he’s on to his next dish: chicken and Thai noodles in a tinfoil bag. (To alleviate the humiliation of the Domino’s delivery woman, who arrives 30 minutes after his own pizza has been cooked and consumed, Oliver tips her $50.)
Then, bang! J’s into a South Indian lamb curry, chopping onions, expounding on the joys of fresh, fragrant curry leaves. Mid-dish, he launches into a reggae tune he has written and recorded (“Lamb curry/You give it to me hot/Ain’t no worries/When you cook it from your heart”). The crowd sings along until the finale, the pasta cook-off, in which four volunteers race the clock to whip up fresh tagliatelle. J hops around the stage recording them with a handheld digicam, then pounds out a tune on his drums. After two hours and 45 minutes of raw, unleashed cooking power, the audience is on its feet, chanting, whooping, hungry for more.
The cynical might have viewed this spectacle as an elaborate marketing scheme to kick off Oliver’s third cookbook, Happy Days with the Naked Chef. But with the music and sports promoters IMG behind it—not to mention eight corporate sponsors, some of whom pitched in $150,000 for the privilege of being associated with Oliver—the show took on a life of its own. After three nights in London, it traveled for 24 dates across Australia and New Zealand. (In Perth, fans camped outside the night before tickets went on sale, and all 3,000 seats sold out in a day.) On past Australian tours, word has it, girls bared their breasts, and at a food exhibition in Birmingham, one woman slipped a pair of panties around a cheese grater and tossed it onstage—inspired, presumably, by Jamie’s fresh ravioli.
It would be easy to compare Oliver to a rock star, but that’s yesterday’s metaphor. This teen idol rides a Vespa, not a Harley. There’s no busty blonde in tow—he married his high-school sweetheart, to whom he’s remained faithful for nine years. And the only herbs that interest him are legal ones. Besides, Oliver’s appeal has nothing to do with rebellion. Guys like him because he’s confident and makes cooking look effortless. And while young mothers and teenage girls consider him a sex god, most of the people who want to go home with him would rather watch him cook than cuddle up in bed.
If he warrants a comparison, Oliver is more like a Holy Roller, spreading the gospel of fresh ingredients, simply prepared. At 27, he’s already been a huge television success, with his first series, The Naked Chef, having appeared in 44 countries, on 64 channels. In England, his first two cookbooks, The Naked Chef and The Return of the Naked Chef, sold second only to the Harry Potter series, and Happy Days is nearing 2 million.
“Jamie started a mini-revolution,” says Rosie Kindersley, owner of Books for Cooks, London’s top bookshop for foodies. Kindersley has been in business for ten years and is not prone to hyperbole or to promoting television chefs who’ve never swabbed a kitchen floor. “The people screaming about him are also screaming about *NSYNC and other boy bands. At the same time, we have these beautiful old Kensington girls in twinsets and pearls saying, ‘Isn’t he frightfully wonderful?’ ”
Jamie Oliver grew up in Clavering, a tiny village in the county of Essex that’s about an hour and a half northeast of London. Essex is London’s version of New Jersey, a place relatively low on the food chain that’s renowned for fast girls who like boys with fast, souped-up cars. Coming from there is generally a liability in class-constricted Britain, but Jamie made it his strongest asset. His “mockney” English, for example, infiltrated the mother tongue. (Good food is “pukka tucka.” He doesn’t give it his all; he “gets stuck in.” He doesn’t drink; he “bevs up.”)
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.)
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.”
The inevitable question now is, When do Americans get a bigger piece of him? Until last year, the Food Network couldn’t fill the insatiable maw of cable programming with the measly eight shows that constitute a British series. They needed 26 episodes, so Oliver formed his own production company to churn out a studio version of his show. Oliver’s Twist recycled the worst clichés of his English series—the wobbly camera, rapid shots, and abrasive music—the result of which verges on self-parody. But even this hasn’t dampened his stateside appeal. E-mails come in from hundreds of viewers each week. One woman arrived home to find her husband naked at the stove, a copy of The Naked Chef in hand. “We had sex on the kitchen floor,” she wrote to Oliver. “You changed my life!”
“He could be much more huge here,” says Eileen Opatut, the Food Network’s senior vice president for programming and production. “But I think he sees America as this monster that wants to jump on him, brand him, license him, promote him. I’m not sure anyone’s ever explained it to him.”
Oliver says he’s neither that stupid nor that strategic. America’s a big country. He’d have to spend months flying across four time zones (he hates airplanes), pounding the green rooms of Leno and Letterman to stump to his public. And right now it’s a question of time. He’s got money, a family, a $2 million apartment in tony Hampstead, and plans to replicate his restaurant, which is not just a commercial and political success, but a deeply personal one as well. Besides, he’s already seen thousands of believers rise to their feet, shrieking over a plate of homemade pasta. For someone who’s passionate about food, what greater pleasure could there be?