By Danny Gutmann
Copyright walesonline
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been at the forefront of British cooking for decades, but has now revealed that he hopes one major career change is just five years away. Over the years Jamie, 50, has become a household name thanks to numerous TV shows and cookery books sharing his knowledge and expertise on the industry he has been in for most of his life. However, while his career continues to go from strength to strength, he recently opened up about the difficulties he faced while launching his first restaurant , which left him “a couple of hundred grand in debt”. Speaking about his plans for the future, with Woman’s Day magazine he said: “I’d like to run a restaurant. I dream of that. I want to get in a kitchen. Hopefully next to my house so I can walk to work and my veggie patch.” He added: “I know that sounds romantic but that’s what I’m building now. And hopefully that’s just five years away. To feed people is such a thrill.” It seems that Jamie hasn’t been deterred by struggles at his debut restaurant venture, Fifteen, in 15 Westland Place, London. Opening in 2002, the eatery was part of a social initiative that saw Jamie welcome 15 unemployed 16-24-year-olds to come and train in his kitchen. He told Davina McCall on her Begin Again podcast: “I spent all of it (his money) on building Fifteen. Not only all of it, but I think for three weeks I was a couple of hundred grand in debt because the builders were fighting with the designers and it was kind of going over and I didn’t understand business.” Luckily, Jamie’s business was rescued by money that came in from his cookbooks, adding: “Thankfully, another royalty cheque from Penguin, thank you, saved the day and we built Fifteen and we launched it.” By that point in his career, he was already well on his way to becoming a success after he had received huge acclaim upon the release of his debut cookery book, The Naked Chef, which hit bookshelves in 1999, with his TV show starting to air at around the same time. There are currently no Jamie’s Italian restaurants left in the UK after the company went into administration, leading all of the premises to shut in 2019. The chef previously launched his own restaurant chain, Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group, in 2008, which included 42 Jamie’s Italian restaurants dotted across multiple countries during the height of its success. While he first found fame after the launch of his Naked Chef series, it was years earlier that he first began to pick up the skills of the trade. He began his career working for the national Italian chain Carluccio’s, where he was a pastry chef, until he left for London’s River Cafe.
