Jamie Oliver: Part 1

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0:59Hello, everyone. hope you're well. Sorry to be familiar, I just am, because I'm here. They always look like, what the... He's quite familiar, isn't he? Oh, it's that guy. Hello, darling. I can't say how many times when arriving in the River Cafe in a taxi, the driver will turn around to me and say, is this the restaurant where Jamie Oliver cooked? The other day, one even informed me that the River Cafe was owned by Jamie, and I thought, why correct him? He is a prodigal son or the brother who knows that when he walks in the door of the restaurant, he is home. Like the old days. When was the last time you were here?

1:45I try and get here at least two or three times a year if I'm lucky. And I have to say, it's a bit like therapy, really. You see Charles, which always makes me very happy. We normally go through the same old jokes and then crack onto a bit of new news. friends and family but there's lots of nostalgia isn't there no well i think one of the things you always said is that you you love the reset of coming back to the river cafe something you and begsy always said yeah as you go out into the world and then it's quite nice to get back to your roots and taste a bit of that get that river cafe experience again it's like being home which is lovely jamie came to work with us when he was just about 20 i guess almost 30 years ago rose gray interviewed him for the job and as always said it was love at first sight thank you Ruthie wow I love that I remember the first time um Rose interviewed me tell me about it well I I had been working at the Neal Street restaurant for a year and a half and um I knew it was time for me to move on and I just read this book the first River Cafe book Blue and um it just like changed everything it was like it's like a moment because just from a design point of view and a feeling point of view and the black and white reportage photos and it was like fresh air and I knew I had to get there um so I phoned up and I came in I was quite skint and um I had my first suit that was a really cheap suit honestly it was if it had gone near a candle it had gone up in flames so quickly and I I turned up in a suit with a terrible tie because my dad always said like make an effort They were tied to an interview.

3:21And I remember Theo, who was head chef at the time, and all the chefs looking around just thinking, like, he's in a suit. What's he doing in the river? Because you don't really wear suits at the river cafe. Even our customers don't wear suits. No, I know, so I really stuck out. But we definitely bonded on, I think, Ravioli was the place that we kind of connected. And then the rest was history. Yeah. Then did you come straight away? Yeah, straight away. Yeah, straight away. Yeah, and I couldn't wait. and it was like it was an amazing time because you know obviously you always look back in in with romance but it was an amazing time in britain and the river cafe was like on fire and had come from you know such humble beginnings but was this extraordinary unconventional restaurant doing incredible things run of course by you and ruthie and the amazing team but you know cool britannia the music scene the fashion scene the photography scene the art scene And I remember cooking with you for New Labour before they got in and during they got in.

4:19And I remember the Millennium Dome as a sketch on a tablecloth. And I remember it as a model that was just a few metres away from the pastry section while making Chocolate Nemesis. And then I remember the real one. What year did you remember? I was thinking it was 96. Yeah, I was 19 years old when I came here. And I was here. That was 99, 98? 98, I think. Yeah, maybe 98. But nice memories. When did Blair win the election? Was it 97? And as you said, there was a kind of excitement, a kind of melding also of politics and food and, as you say, culture and excitement. I certainly remember Rose calling me up.

5:03I think I was away, clearly, when you came for your interview in the suit, or I would have remembered it. And she said, you know, Ruthie, this one you're going to love. this is you know this is somebody i was so keen i was so keen and it felt like a family straight away and i'd grown up obviously in a in a family restaurant i know and my last bit of advice from my dad to me was like just whoever you work for just treat their business like yours and you haven't got one job you've got every job if the phone rings picks it up if your floor needs mopping mop it and and i remember just sort of um coming to the river cafe and it actually felt like a family which is it is more rare than it's not that common even now in restaurants what you and rose were doing was so untraditional from what the kind of machine teaches so i felt like i was being liberated well your friend ed baines once said that you know when he came to work for us he said you know that song i did it my way well you should say we did it our way and we didn't know what we were doing yeah but it was but we just knew that we were doing it our way but you were right it was i don't know right and wrong no because i think what had happened is uh i mean i feel like i can look at it objectively now but like training's fine but it's it's for consistency and you have structure and it was very male dominant and which is very testosterone dominant and to go from that typical training and typical kitchens to you and rose was the most visceral emotional uh maternal um common sense logical thing that ever happened to me ever and and um and because you were you i mean i know you you know what has happened here is special but when you're an outsider coming in it was it was like someone had invented a new type of music um and i remember the sheer worry of writing a menu at say 3 30 yeah for customers coming at six because normally you're trained to do like monthly menus and here we are doing two a day every day and uh and i remember just doing the jobs list and um i remember seeing like you'd have random people bringing in like overly caesar mushrooms and um you or rose would say i'll start we'll put them on now and it's like but we just put no now and like nothing everything was now and it was all about freshness and and that energy was i remember i remember thinking about crying for about three weeks not not because of you or the team but just because of the stress of a new menu twice a day was completely outside of what I knew but then you get used to it and I learned what you created was thinkers yeah people that could adjust and react to seasons and and everything that was happening in the industry was about protocol and structures and safety whereas we I don't know it was so exciting to have two women as bosses and owners I think very male driven kitchens and I'm not saying this for any effect like a quite aggressive um often flooded with drugs and it was quite scary yeah and I knew those kitchens and I'd worked in London and abroad and things like that so it was you know even when I come in today you can see there's this lovely 50-50 balance of and that's the holy grail I think I mean I think if you skew one way or the other you can get issues but you know it's um but the thinking was so different yeah but i think it also helped us so much having chefs who worked in other kitchens because neither of us rose did a bit with mcnally's and in new york and a bit with carluccio but somehow i remember the joy of having you know young people who'd actually experienced other kitchens or contributed to us who taught us you know but the yin and yang of you and rose was was really a precious one as well because your you crossed over in the middle but you had strengths on other sides and that was quite interesting to see great great partner yeah and i and i think you know like also having the open kitchen where there was that connection with the customer i remember we used to answer the telephone and take reservations when um maybe it was before your time but i literally remember no i remember writing it down you know it's a table for four table for six you know and then going back to kind of stirring the uh polenta the telephone in my head but if we go back because you talk you you spoke about your father and you speak about you know um the way you grow up and just even in the first five minutes of conversation he's present and he's telling you you know whether it's to wear a tie or to be curious or to treat a restaurant in a certain way so why don't we maybe begin also a little bit at the beginning with the Oliver household.

9:39So how many siblings do you have? I have one sister. One sister. She's a year younger than me. Yeah. And so when you were growing up, who did the cooking? Was it your mother? Mom actually. Was it your father? She did. Yeah. I mean, dad was a trained chef and he'd started really young and also grew up in a pub that did very good food. Yeah. What, his father? Yeah. The pub. Yeah. So this is third generation. And they still have the pub. called the Plough and Sow in Pagglesham, which is in a dead end near the River Blackwater, which is where we used to get sea bass from Ben's Fish. Ben's Fish. Yeah.

10:13Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And West Mersey oysters. Yes. So that's where Dad grew up. And I was born, actually, in South Ockingdon. South what? South Ockingdon in Graves, Essex. So right in the estuary of Essex and got devastated in the war. And Dad was the youngest license holder in the country at the time. How old was he? I believe he was 17. No. No, I think in those days you could have it a bit younger. He was at least 18, but I think he was even younger. And then he had me at 20. So as soon as I was born, we got a tatty old pub that was beautiful in a little village called Clavering. And it was a 16th century pub.

10:54And I obviously grew up there. But Dad, I mean, I remember a few things that stuck out. So the chalkboards were daily. so that gave me some sort of connection with the river cafe changing daily um the game was local the fish was only on tuesdays and thursdays lots of live crabs and lobsters and whole fish whole um animals coming in to be butchered he had a brigade i only ever remember a brigade of at least six on a shift and the pastry was a proper pastry of sort of anglo french swiss style that's ambitious yeah well i thought it was normal but of course even now it's not normal No, it isn't. And, you know, typical would have been freezers full of stuff you could reheat.

11:33Was he trained, Jamie? He was trained, yeah. I mean, he didn't go to school much as a child, but he got student of the year at Southend College and went and worked in France as well. So he was kind of, he had a really good start, but he ran the pub. And I remember little things like the head chef was paid more than he paid himself. And I remember as a child going, well, that can't be right. And he's like, no, no, we've got to invest in the quality and get the brigade steady. And of course, these are all real things. But it had a bar side and then it had a restaurant side, which meant there was slightly two tones of cooking.

12:08Both with food. Yeah, and quite Anglo-French cooking. So kind of things that you would get, I guess, at the Walsley or kind of like rules, you know, classics, like simply cooked game and beautiful Dover Souls, you know, cooked how you liked it, but everything homemade. So that was, I just wanted to go to London for five years so I could learn some things, then come back and run a pub. I remember, I actually remember you kind of very, really quite late. You were always really interested in the pub. Did your mother work there as well? Yeah, she was a classic landlady in the sense of, that's not like an EastEnders landlady.

12:46It's quite a glamorous role, and Mum was very glamorous. All I remember with my mum, honestly, was she'd get ready for two hours, the smell of that hairspray from the gold canister, and rollers, always in rollers, and always in sort of like 90s, and then all of a sudden this outfit came on and the hair was out, and then she'd go down about 8.15. Perform, maybe she wanted to be in the theatre. Two hours, oh, hi Sally. and just work in the locals. And it was a busy pub. And I think, I guess in a sort of cheesy sense, we went from a working class family to a classic middle class family in about 13 years.

13:22But who did the cooking for you and your sister then? How would she do that between rolling her hair and pulling out her hair? Well, she would do all the books, all the hiring. Well, mum would do the hiring and dad would do the firing. And often mum had to run after people that dad had fired to rehire them because he hadn't dealt with the problem quite well. but um mom mainly did like classic things really like you know did you live in the pub yeah oh you lived upstairs yeah so like my bedroom was not much bigger than this room which is like two and a half by four of course it was 16th century so there's gaps all around the edges so everyone smoked such a lot so you know um god forbid i ever do get anything unhealthy with my lungs but that if it was it was because i had passive smoking as a child and um but yeah i mean so you lived over So you had a dining room and a kitchen?

14:07Not really. There was two bedrooms and a front room, but in the front room we had a little table, so Mum would cook down in the commercial kitchen in between shifts. She would cook at the dinner for you and your sister. Yeah. But they cooked well, and Mum still cooks well today, and Dad still cooks well, but they're both retired now, which they did in lockdown. Yeah. So you can imagine living upstairs from this pub, having your parents involved in the kitchen. It was a rumble, always a rumble, rumble, rumble. Was it? Customers and laughter and giggling. Yeah, yeah. But of course, I worked at the weekends for pocket money.

14:38Yeah. What did you do? I started up bottling up, which is replacing... What's that mean? Well, you go and look at the bar after a busy night and you look at all the empty shelves and if you're lucky, you can see little round marks where all the bottles had sat and you'd count them and then you'd replace them and then you'd recycle the bottles. How old were you when this was going on? Nine. Nine? Yeah. Yeah, and I was in the wash up by 10. um and the wash up involved a lot of veg prep so not dissimilar to at the river cafe when you're picking the herbs and all the stuff um and then i really wanted to get into the kitchen so i was probably fully in the kitchen by about 11 and they had sections so they had veg starters may and and they split you'd have someone putting food in the oven someone taking it out and serving it and then a pastry section um but yeah i mean i probably by the time i was 16 i'd done the rotation of the kitchen maybe three times so I remember having to develop a skill to teaching cooking as in when I say teaching like if you had a 21 year old come in from college to get a job as a commie chef I'd be 14 and I'd have to train him and obviously when you're 14 you haven't got a hair on your chin and these 21 year olds look like men so I had to sort of develop a way of teaching without getting a slap how would you do that make them feel like they were teaching themselves and and like teaching like are you left or right-handed okay work from left to right okay so this is this dish and we prep this and prep that and we put that put that on ice and you know just try and set it up for service so the service can flow and I obviously being young I was cocky as well so I often ended up in the freezer um I often ended up with like why uh because I've been I've maybe back that would be like somebody put you in the freezer in the freezer yeah and close the door and sit on it sounds like the shining minutes it was a bit like the shining if I'm honest.

16:28I'm sure it was illegal. I'm sure it was with love. But I'd finish shifts and take my jacket off and there'd be clothes pegs with like, there'd be like 100 clothes pegs and a few signs saying very unkind things. Did your father know they were doing this too? Oh yeah, I think he felt it was a kind of initiation of some description. So of course, by the time I was 18, I was well versed to stuff. Wow. I think that, do you think that might go on now? Yeah, I think wherever you have teams and institutionalized sort of training, which I think kitchens have been, that there's that going on. And it can be for best or for worst.

17:10I think it's, you posted something with your team and it was very clearly a 50-50 split of men and women. I reposted it because it's so, well, it was so powerful. The balance is so important in a really happy kitchen. And if it's 100 % men, all hell breaks loose. And, you know, if you can get to 20%, that's amazing. But 50-50 is definitely the whole thing. I also think there is a feeling that, I mean, it's something that I've always said, that when people call up and say, a journalist might say, wow, it's so hard being a chef. It's so stressful. and I go, it must be really hard being a journalist.

17:51God, it must be so stressful. Because in a way, you want to take our profession and have it not be different from other professions. The kind of myth that because we have to do service so quickly or we have difficult customers or chefs are yelling, that's so old-fashioned in a way. And now, certainly the young people who work in the River Cafe are just not going to put up with that anymore. It's just, we're over that. I think as a kid that struggled in school and as an adult now with kids sort of looking at where AI and technology and all the things are going to happen around learning and how that's going to affect learning in schools in the future.

18:31I think what I can, I can thank you for a thousand things. But one of the things that was most precious that you and Rose taught me and the institution, the family that you created was how to think yourself. so that's really interesting because learning stuff is learning stuff and that's kind of what happens in school but problem solving and resilience and reacting to weather which is therefore seasons which is therefore ingredients which is therefore the two shifts a day that you know like it was really interesting as a young chef I would watch brilliant chefs come out of michelin star kitchens and they'd go and do their own thing and they'd be doing versions of the same thing that they left and if you look at the family tree that's come from the river cafe i mean i guess sam and sam um from morrow is a really good first example like you can see river cafe through their heart and their their soul but it's they they did this incredible north african you know and they not only went into restaurants they opened pizzerias and sandwich but i mean They just did brilliant things and you created thinkers.

19:37And I think that's different. I always tell people there's sort of two ways to run a kitchen. One is sort of through fear and one is through family. Yeah. Yeah, and family's a bit slower, but you get much more back in return. And fear's very efficient, but you get so little back in the long run. And I feel quite passionately about that.

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21:41Carly you chose was really interesting time for me because it was in the Neal Street restaurant. Designed by Terence Conrad. Yeah and next door to the Neal Street I mean the Neal Street was famous for mushrooms and late night serving because of the opera house. The kitchen was hidden in the basement so you didn't see much light all day so I was pretty vitamin D deficient and you know Antonio was the the the wonderful character at the front door smoking a cigar having a little a little whiskey or something but not really in the kitchen but Gennaro was in the kitchen and he was an incredible drawer but he didn't work in the restaurant he worked in the very first Carluccio's deli driven by Priscilla Carluccio who was Antonio's wife and that was really interesting because the kitchens were shared and I did um nine until three and then I did six until one in the morning every day every day but then I did a third shift which was three until seven um with Gennaro so I did a third secret shift um and is that how many hours that was like I was doing like 20 hours yeah but I was so young I could do it I mean I couldn't do it now But I was only really there to learn from Gennaro.

22:55And, you know, I knew I just had to make bread with Gennaro, really. So I'd asked Antonio, he said no. So I thought, well, look, if I'm here till one, I can get the ovens on, I can get the temperatures on, I can weigh out all the flours, I can get all the kind of, I kind of configured everything so he could work quicker. And because I thought, poor man, he's getting up at a crack of dawn every day. so and I and one of the clever things I did with the bread was all the stale bread from that day they would finally whack um make into very fine breadcrumbs to dust the trays with to get a lovely crunch um and I'd sack about 100 trays up to make all these different breads and I'd draw little rude messages in there and sort of like say good good morning Gennaro and just I just to befriend him because I didn't know him at that stage and as soon as we became friends he said oh don't worry about Antonio, just come in.

23:44But it was an amazing, I mean, the restaurant was great. It was very traditional, slightly northern Italian stuff. But what happened at night was amazing. Like at four o 'clock, ding dong, and there'd be 30 policemen that would come in. Four in the morning? Four in the morning. Four in the morning. And I'd get up there, open them up, there's police out here, Gennaro, let the bastards in. I'm like, oh, okay. Then all these coppers would come in, but clearly it was their home. They sat down as if it was their front room. They went behind the bar, they started making espressos. and we'd reheat the stale bread from the day before give them the stale stuff reheat it and then we'd give them some like honey and some jam and they'd be very happy and and they would you think i'm making it up but yeah it was kind of that's the great british bobby or whatever yeah yeah i don't i mean i don't think it's happening anymore but um that sounds like the good old days yeah but they i mean they were very romantic and i think um janara did give me a good base to tiptoe into the river cafe and but river cafe really was where my heart was at you know one of the amazing trajectories was when we did a film called what was it called a day at christmas at the christmas at the river cafe and that was a film that you know really i remember you know you fried mushrooms didn't you yeah well we did i think porchetta and ritolo yeah and then i think um i was on hots two one night and um uh obviously i can look at it back now sort of seeing because I think, correct me if I'm wrong, you were filming for a couple of weeks, the show that you were making.

25:14And I wasn't supposed to be working that night. I don't know if I ever told you this. No, I don't know that. So the night that I was in the background of your program, I wasn't supposed to be working. I was off. And my wife, Jules, was off as well. And she worked at the River Cafe on the front of the house. We hadn't had a night off together for ages. And the phone rang about four o 'clock. And one of the team had gone sick. Like Jules, you know, we're all best in the world. Like I had to come and put the shift in. But that's when the crew was there. And actually they were kind of in the way because I was catching my tail because I was an hour and a half late for the shift to cover someone.

25:52And I was running hot too, which as you know, is one of your busier sections. I'm sure it still is now, but it was Frito Misto, Tagliatelle, if I remember with Girols and Risotto. I do remember. I do, I do remember. And the slow cooked pork, of course. Yeah, I didn't think anything of it. And the night it went out on TV, like many months later, maybe six months later possibly, I didn't know I was in it because I was working. But then the phones started to ring the next day, literally the next day. I came in, I always say that I came in that morning and said, wow, Jamie, you did a really great, great thing with those mushrooms.

26:33You were amazing on television. And then the phone rang and I can remember where it was. the phone used to hang up on a hook in the kitchen. Just when you came in, it was before we had the really open kitchen, and it was a call for you from Pat Llewellyn. He came over to me and he went, Ruthie, somebody just called me up and asked me if I want to do a screen test. What's a screen test? Yeah, yeah. Should I go? I didn't know anything. And we didn't know anything. And then he said, Ruthie, the newspapers called up and said, do I want to do a column? Can I go? We went, sure, Jamie. And then a supermarket has called up and said, could I go?

27:04And I would say that within a very short time, you had a column in a newspaper, a television show, an advertising campaign with a supermarket. And they knew, they knew that you could do all this. And you showed them that you could. And you did. I mean, when I think about it, I mean, I remember when I had my 20 years anniversary and there was loads of people together. and to think that it really genuinely does come back to that phone call at four o 'clock saying, can you cover? What was it like from being a chef in the River Cafe? Who was around you? Who was protecting you? Who was guiding you?

27:42Yeah, I didn't really have any protection for a while. Everyone was perfectly lovely, but I'd done the first book like I couldn't write or type. So I did it in dictaphone. The responsibility of delivering it is like a nightmare. It was The Naked Chef, the first book. Yeah. And so that was with the television show. Yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of like a year later, at least. Because what happened was they pitched like a little showreel to Channel 4 and it sat with them for like six months. And then they passed on it. It then went to BBC Two. And Mark Thompson commissioned it in seven days. So I think, like, you know, knowing what I do about commissioning now, I think there might have been a gap and like they probably had a BBC sort of remit for representing a wide group of people.

28:36And I was a bit younger, I guess. I'm making this up, by the way. I don't know. I have asked him since because he runs the New York Times. Yeah, he's left the New York Times. Oh, he's left. And he just said like, you know, I think he just he just said I just had a feeling and I took a call on it. But that doesn't happen that often. I mean, and TV's not as they're not. they're very risk averse and normally if you're on telly I mean had we not come up with a naked chef which is I remember writing down what I would and wouldn't do on tv and it said you know stripping down restaurant food to its bare essentials and stripping and bare turned me into the naked chef which is your was that your title yeah well I didn't come up with it but before that the working title was forking gorgeous so thank god I think I mean both both were looking quite shady but I think Naked Chef just got away with it and and probably more than anything hit a moment and a sound and a time and and again like I think timing timing's an interesting master isn't it um but it was it was interesting it was a bit of a whirlwind I think it was it felt like being in a pop band and I think because I was younger and I wasn't married at that point it was very leery yeah um and thankfully I had Jules who's obviously I've been with since I was 18 and was you know my rock and and i had good friends in the business and and i had you and rose and and um i have mum and dad so i felt like safe enough

30:17no i did the naked chef in my holiday time yeah i mean i think i worked here until the end of season two. You had a rather smart Vespa and you kept out doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've still got that Vespa. Do you know it got nicked? And I ended up buying my own Vespa back off eBay. Off of a friend of a friend of a criminal. You've heard that so many times. I've still got it. Still use it. It just makes a slightly different sound going up the hill than it used to. Slightly more strained.

30:55If you like listening to Ruthie's Table 4, would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

31:15Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Toyota-thon is on and right now your local Toyota dealer is celebrating with can't miss year-end deals on the vehicles that built Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability. Discover the stylish and efficient Camry and Corolla, both available with all-wheel drive. Or go with a RAV4 or Grand Highlander. Versatile, adventurous, and ready to take you and your family wherever the road leads. Need muscle? Take it up a notch with a Tacoma or Tundra, built tough and always ready for the long haul. And no matter which Toyota you choose, you'll find smart financing and lease options available to qualified customers, making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for.

32:06But don't wait. These year-end savings won't last. Shop the entire Toyota lineup and find a great deal today on buyatoyota.com. Toyota. Let's go places. So let me get this straight. Your company has data here, there, and everywhere. But your AI can't use the data because it's here, there, and everywhere? It seems like something's missing. Every business has unique data. IBM helps your AI access your data wherever it lives to change how you do business. Let's create smarter business, IBM.

32:48I once saw an interview with, a great interview, Michael Parkinson with George Best and Beckham. And George Best talked about the difference between his vulnerability when he became a huge figure and he had no one, there was no one. He went from being a kid kicking a ball to being somebody that was followed by paparazzi and given deals. And now when you think, you know, the kind of surround that you have of agents and PR and it's a very, you know, level. I think what I did quite well, but only through naivety and passion, I guess, is I looked after myself pretty early. I had an agent for a bit and she was fantastic, but like I knew she had many people and I knew I was one of many.

33:38So I sort of started the production company. We didn't know what we were doing early. employed someone to look after me from like a legal point of view so I did that I think that gave me a lot of freedom in the early days and I think in those early days you can get eaten out and spat out in about four years quite quickly and luckily I always sort of say it was like um like when I set up 15 it was such a beautiful thing and a beautiful premise so and and and and why did you do it I said well I wanted to I could and I did and it was as simple as that I was young enough stupid enough and able enough to do it and obviously the scenario of having a 24 year old kid I'd gone from having no money to having like money in the bank and I spent all of it on 15 which was a charity so so like my dad was so worried about me he thought I'd lost the plot because he'd never made an easy pound so he was he thought he was very concerned um and there It was about three weeks when I was theoretically bankrupt.

34:40But luckily I got... Let's talk about 15, because when you say it was a beautiful concept, it was. It wasn't just opening a restaurant. It was a restaurant with values and a kind of philosophy and an idea of fairness. Tell us about... Well, really it was kind of like... I think I felt from being that kid that struggled at school, like, is there anything that we could do to kids that have gone off the rail or got lost or had problems with the law and even homeless kids. And so we set up 15 because the profits from the restaurant would take 15 kids every year and train them for like 16 months. And really, it was a very beautiful blend of the values that I'd learned at the River Cafe with you and Rose, mum and dad and Gennaro.