‘We don’t want to make the same mistakes’: Jamie’s Italian reopens in London
Jamie Oliver’s head of restaurants is optimistic about new recipe of smaller site, slimmed-down menu and no burgersWhen Jamie’s Italian crashed and burned in 2019, with the company in £83m of debt and causing 1,000 job losses, no one imagined the celebrity chef would try again.But seven years later, Jamie Oliver has opened a flagship site under the same name in Leicester Square in central London, and believes he has a new recipe for success: a smaller restaurant with a slimmed-down menu, which features cheaper cuts of meat and no burgers.At its peak the chain, which opened in 2008, had 47 UK restaurants.Now it just has the one.Ed Loftus, the global director of Jamie Oliver Restaurants, has worked with Oliver for 20 years and is charged with making the reopening a success.
This is a nerve-racking job; the team certainly does not want to fail twice,But the restaurant has been open for a month and Loftus feels optimistic,“100% I was nervous,” he says,“Bringing something back that’s failed in the eyes of the public and the trade, and the rest of it, there were definitely nerves and a few sleepless nights, no one wants to do anything and get it wrong,”The new site is much smaller than the previous iterations.
At the time of its collapse, Jamie’s Italian was known for operating in giant, cavernous spaces, but the company found that often towns and cities couldn’t support such scale.“We don’t want to make the same mistakes again, that would be the worst thing in the world.”The old menus were also huge and ranged from burgers, fillet steaks and salmon to traditional pasta dishes.Now diners will find a much more edited offering, with relatively low prices for a central London restaurant.Starters begin at £8, pizzas and pastas start at £13 and the most expensive main is a £29 sirloin steak.
“We aren’t giving people a huge amount of choice, it’s not a vast menu,” said Loftus,He added that they were using cheaper cuts of meat to keep costs down,“For our bolognese we are using pork shoulder, we aren’t serving fillet steak and premium cuts,” The result, Loftus argues, is “very affordable food that is also high quality”,Beef prices in particular have skyrocketed in recent years, owing to shrinking global cattle herds, rising costs of feed, energy and labour, and growing international demand.
“It’s not a beef-heavy menu.A fillet steak would have to be £40 to make sense.We use beef mince in our bolognese, which is a combination of rib and chuck.It is quite a heavy, earthy, rich meat ragu,” Loftus said.Pride of place on the old menu was the Jamie’s Italian Burger, but that’s gone.
“We don’t have a burger on the menu.We don’t want to compete with everyone on mid-market, we want to be the best Italian option on the market,” he said.With times tough for hospitality as higher business rates, rising inflation and new taxes converge, it seems a risky time to reopen.So why now? “Jamie was super keen to do something positive on the high street, the high street has been all doom and gloom,” Loftus said.Oliver was heavily involved in the opening, “living there every day, cooking in the kitchen”, Loftus said.
The scrawled menus are in his handwriting; the chef took calligraphy lessons to make his writing more legible and this was turned into a special font for the restaurant,“It was one of the most emotional projects he’s ever done, being given a second chance, not everyone is fortunate enough to have them,” Loftus added,“It’s very personal to him,”Oliver’s favourite dish on the menu is either the spaghetti nero, which is squid ink pasta with tomatoes and seafood, or the plank of meat and cheese, which in typical Oliver style is marketed as including “incredible” slices of speck,“He likes to have a plank and some antipasti, share that food, get the table humming,” said Loftus.
Italians may applaud the authenticity of the menu because Oliver has refused to put cream in the carbonara, which is made in the classic Roman style with egg yolks, guanciale, pecorino and freshly made pasta.“When you walk in the door, on the right-hand side there is a pasta machine and the chefs make it a couple of times a day,” Loftus added.Despite the careful menu planning, Loftus is slightly nervous about what the future holds, with rising inflation and a government that has been accused of being ambivalent towards hospitality businesses.He thinks the government should cut VAT for all restaurants and bars.“I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on in the world.
Unless things change, prices are going one way,” he said.“Minimum wage should go up, but the other things that have come out from the autumn budget like business rates, if there was business rates and VAT reform, they are the two things the sector needs.“The sector wants to pay people more, but it would be good if the government could acknowledge that VAT is so high at 20%.Germany has single-digit VAT, Ireland had relief and many other countries had relief, so we should look at that.If that is looked at, people can hold prices, people can still afford to eat out.
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