Does London really need the return of Jamie’s Italian?

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show. Jamie's Italian was once a game changer for casual dining. Now, nearly two decades after it was founded, the celebrity chef has partnered with Bravo Hospitality to bring the brand back. But is there an appetite in the capital for another Italian restaurant chain? When I opened the first James Italian, it was in Oxford, and my 100 % heart and soul was into that. And out of nowhere, we were in recession again.

0:44And I looked at the menu and I looked at the pricing and I'm like, right, we're going to fight this recession with optimism, a spring in our step. But we had these golden seven, eight years. Truth be told, I never had a wage or a dividend. And probably in that time, I employed like 21, 22 ,000 people and trained hundreds of chefs. I got bitten up the arse in the end, but ultimately I feel like a complete failure if I don't try and get back on the horse.

1:13That was a clip of Jamie Oliver speaking on the BBC Radio 4 series Young Again. His once popular high street restaurant chain, Jamie's Italian, is making a comeback, with the first UK branch in six years opening in London's Leicester Square next spring. It's been hailed as a triumphant return to British soil, but comes at a time when UK hospitality bosses have complained of a tough trading environment, increased staffing costs and changes to business rates. When Jamie's Italian launched, it was designed to disrupt mid-market dining in the UK, with great value and much higher quality ingredients and best-in-class animal welfare standards.

1:56At its peak, there are more than 40 Jamie's Italian sites across the UK, but after rapid expansion and a changing market, the company ran into trouble. The arrival of countless competitors, places which you'll be familiar with, such as Ask, Zizi and Pizza Express, tempted customers with offers and vouchers, and soon Jamie's Italian found itself squeezed out of the market. The celebrity chef's restaurant train went bust in 2017, and despite Oliver's best efforts, the business failed in 2019, resulting in 1 ,000 job losses and leaving him with a debt of£80 million. Here's what Oliver had to say six years ago, speaking on Channel 4's Jamie Oliver, the naked chef, bears all.

2:43So Will, what happens now? When's the end? We will try and sell what we can from here and from the other sites across the country. But, you know, I don't think our expectations are set that high in terms of what we're going to realise. We use that money then to pay what we can to creditors. And at the end of that process, the company will be dissolved and we'll be no more. To survive in this industry is really tough. I was very naive at the time. I was good at running one restaurant. I'm kind of like, you know, good at quite a few things, but not necessarily brilliant at everything. And I think like we did it plenty wrong.

3:22I opened lots of big restaurants and I think people like smaller, medium-sized restaurants and you kind of have these big cathedrals that you can't fill. And joining me now is The Standard's food and drink writer, Josh Barry. Josh, what was your initial reaction when you heard that Jamie's Italian would be returning? I was quite surprised actually. I know he's been opening restaurants or at least franchise partners have been opening restaurants around the world but I sort of thought when it closed in 2019 That'll be it for his Jamie's Italian brand in the UK. The first branch opened in Oxford in 2008.

3:57Do you remember stepping foot in one? Yes, I went to the original in 2008 in Oxford and I remember what I ate as well. I had a bottle of brisecco, a meat plank, some arabiata, prawn linguine and sausage and fennel pappardelli. Can you describe the Oliverisms which you mention in your article? Well, you know, he rose to fame surrounded by the word pucker. And so on the original menu at Jamie's Italian were things like the world's best olives and Catherine Wheel sausage and so on and so forth. You know, it was playful and fun and quite accessible to a country back then which didn't really know all that much about Italian food, I'd say.

4:37Was it sort of flawed from the beginning then? The first Jamie's Italian was a good restaurant. The cooking was sound. I went at least four or five times. The service was decent, the produce was good, but over-expansion hurt the brand because the food quality suffered. How many good chefs can you get across however many restaurants you had? And I think when you expand a restaurant to become a group and then to become a chain, a restaurant is then run by the boardroom, not the kitchen. And you have to sort of acknowledge the fact that then it's not a sort of independent, nice neighborhood restaurant with a food focus, it's a business.

5:14And that's all very well. And there are many businesses that cosplay as restaurants, but as a business, it didn't work either, evidently. So there used to be more than 40 restaurant sites. What did this brand offer consumers that was different? Was it an outlier at the time? Back in the day in 2008, I think it was reasonably original. It was original actually, because most Italian restaurants were either kind of very small independent ones that were run by Italian families or they were sort of, I don't know, did Prezzo exist then? Did Zizi? Did Bella Italia? I mean, they're all shockingly bad.

5:50So it was certainly better than them. And what was the restaurant scene like in the 2010s? I mean, it was growing, you know, it was, there's this long been this fated dining renaissance in Britain, which kind of was kicked off in the 90s, perhaps, and has, you know, really found its feet at the turn of the millennium. And by the 2010s, there were some serious, serious chefs and serious restaurants happening. I think people started waking up and doing things properly outside the sort of fine dining landscape. It was a casual modern European menu started kicking off and so on. How much of the early success of Jamie's Italian was tied up with his celebrity TV personality in the late 90s?

6:28Well, for sure. I mean, like by 2008, he was he was a big dog, wasn't he? He had been on TV, he had some incredibly well selling cookbooks. and so he was a name. So, I mean, there were queues outside the front restaurant I remember in Oxford when it opened. You've told me that you can remember the entire original menu. This is how good my memory is with food and drink, right? Penne arabiata was£5. Catherine real sausage on polenta, mushroom and parmesan polenta,£9.50. This is off the dome, by the way. I'm not reading this out. Prawn linguine,£5.50. Fennel and sausage tagliatelle, which was actually the recipe of his wife Jules,£5.50.

7:08You had a pear and walnut salad with cheese. Can't remember how much that was, probably about six quid. Prosecco, you had the world's best olives,£3.25. You had a bread basket, including Jamie's music bread, which was£5. It's like a thin cracker sort of bread, really nice. Good for dipping. It makes a sound when you crack it, I think. Now, you've said the restaurants ended up a certifiable shit show. why was the restaurant chain forced to shut down and what exactly went wrong? Well they were really bad by the end which is why they closed you know. Over expansion, some poor business decisions and probably maybe a saturated market.

7:44I mean in 2008 it was relatively novel. By 2019 there were good restaurants all over the country. The food quality got worse and I'm not an economist and nor am I a business person. All I can tell you is the last time I went to a Jamie's Italian was 2019 because I went to see the Lion King at the cinema and we had no time but I was really hungry didn't want a preter a leon and I saw Jamie's Italian in Victoria and I was like oh let's just quickly dive in there for a bowl of pasta and it was bad bad bad bad just didn't taste very good poor service sloppy food let's go to an ad break coming up can Jamie's Italian recapture the zeitgeist we'll see you back here in just a moment

8:33welcome back currently there is a standalone site in covent garden do we know if his concept for the relaunch is different the second time around well it's with the bravo hospitality group which owns pretzo which is notoriously shit as a restaurant and maybe it serves a purpose in a sort of like shopping center sort of way so it's with them and so clearly he's got some sort of financial backing or at least a bit of a safety net perhaps or whatever. I don't wish ill upon the idea. If it does well, that's great. It'll be popular with tourists. Leicester Square, where it's going to be certainly shows that he's going after a different customer base perhaps than he was before.

9:12Now, people might be wondering why Oliver has decided to bring back this brand now. We've recently had the news of business rate hikes, which will be a challenge for the hospitality sector and obviously we still have the cost of living crisis. But this is what Jamie said. In theory, it's not the easiest time to return, but conversely, I think it's the perfect time. I believe the mid-market needs excitement, surprise and delight. And that's exactly what I'm planning on delivering. Well, that's fine. Yeah. If the mid-market needs surprise, excitement and delight, then he knows better than me. Mid-market?

9:46What would you put in the Mid-market. Pizza Express, Nando's, some of the cooler Swisher London casual restaurants. What's affordable? Does mid-market, the term mid-market, come with negative connotations? Because I was just thinking of some really affordable good places like the Devonshire, where you can go for lunch for 25 quid. That's mid-market. But does it come with a negative connotation? I don't know. It's not the easiest time to bring a brand back. But I would also say in 2008, we had the credit crunch and the shit show that we're in now was only just beginning. I mean, we've had credit crunch, we've had Brexit, the Panny D.

10:22It weren't Pete Tong long ago. So if you want to take the risk and open a restaurant, then I don't think there's ever been a really good time for it. As good a time as any, I'd suggest. So who is his target audience, do you think? Well, he's clearly aiming this at sort of, you know, passing trade, tourists, people visiting London. I wouldn't say he's aiming it at like diehard London foodies who buy Pirello olives and wear Birkenstocks. Do you think there is a customer appetite for this type of mid-market establishment? Yeah, I do. I think, you know, Janet and Kath from Swindon are well up for it.

10:57Is this just a passion project or an ego boost? He's long been saddened by the demise of his, he's talked about that very openly and fair play, you know, because he built something great, which fell much like Troy. Perhaps there's a little bit of vanity in it because he wants his name back in the UK where he operates. But equally, his name's on countless cookbooks. He's still on TV and he's got his flagship restaurant in Covent Garden, Jamie Oliver Catherine Street, which has been there. And so he's got a presence in London already. It seems to me that it's as much a business plan as anything else.

11:29Now, you've said that he might have orchestrated his own demise. Can you tell me a bit more about that? He taught the nation to cook alongside D 'Lure and Nigella and so on. So we have that to thank him for i mean back in the day 2008 i very much doubt most people would have known what arancini are or polenta and now everyone makes polenta at home don't they or a lot of people so certainly in london he taught a nation about good italian food and then as his restaurant expanded it got a little bit worse and they're like well you know we know about this food now so we want to go over it also he trained so many good chefs you know tim from padella which is one of the best places to get pasta in london you can get a really good bowl of pasta for 12 13 quid in there and that's a smaller operation.

12:10They've got two sites, although they're opening a third, so maybe they need to be careful about expansion as well. What's the Italian food scene like now in London? How does it differ to when Jamie first started out? Well, 2008 compared to now, it's brilliant. There are countless Italian restaurants that are wonderful. Chullo, Fidella, Ida, up in north-west London, although that's not new, that's old. So many, so many places. Di Mario in Notting Hill, which is a funny old sort of British-Italian place. Giuseppe's in Borough, which is hilarious. That's a sort of creaming carbonara sort of place.

12:42I mean, the food there isn't great, but it's quite funny. And then you've got like new ones, Artusi and Marcello and just some fantastic Italian restaurants to visit. Finally, is he going to be able to pull off this comeback? Will he pull off the comeback? Yeah, let's go with yes. I'll probably go in out of curiosity, actually, just to see whether it's any good.

13:09And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. We'll be back here tomorrow morning. We'll see you then.