If surrounding shoppers weren't aware already that Jamie Oliver was in town, the loud cheering and screaming from more than 50 staff at Jamie’s Italian who waited well over an hour to see him would have been enough to alert them.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
People gathered to photograph the superchef through the windows of the Bunda Street eatery and watch as he told staff just how important they were, even in far-flung Canberra, to the Jamie brand.
On site for an hour, Oliver insisted on selfies with every staff member despite strict instructions from managers before he arrived that selfies were definitely off the agenda because of tight timing.
“”Lovely! It’s really, really nice to meet you all,” he declared at the welcome, telling staff how important it was that they delivered what customers expected from the brand. “I know you guys are doing a great job because I’m on Twitter. If you were doing shit I would know all about it.”
He hugged and charmed his away among staff, signed cookbooks and spoke with Fairfax Media before leaving for the Pace egg farm at Parkwood, three Woolworths executives among his entourage including Australian managing director Tjeerd Jegen.
Oliver will be at Parkwood through lunch and is to leave about 3pm today, flying to Sydney and straight from there back to London, after a week in Australia.
Olivier said he never thought as a lad he would ever get to Australia, let alone own a restaurant in Canberra. And yes, he has been asked by a lot of people why he set up a Canberra restaurant. The answer is he takes the advice of the local team, “and if they feel it’s the place to go, great”, he said, pointing to the central location in the city, one of the aims of the “democratic” Jamie brand, which also aims to keep produce local and fresh and the price point down.
His down-to-earth formula – being proficient but “with a bit of swagger” and a laugh - probably worked more naturally in Australia than anywhere else, including Britain, he said.
In Australia, the three Jamie’s Italian restaurants (two more coming this year) are in the hands of a franchise – Kingsleys, but in Britain Oliver said he funded them all himself. He had made a commitment six years ago not to “be depressing” in the face of the global downturn and begin redundancies, but to go all out with “balls” and invest heavily in the business – with the result that he had created 7000 jobs there in six years. “So I’m really proud of that,” he said, albeit feeling “thrashed”.
Asked how he maintained control on quality across the more than 30 Jamie’s Italian restaurants around the world, in Britain, Dubai, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, Singapore and Hong Kong, he said it was about having the standards, structures and suppliers in place, and then a few tricks like secret diners. He employs secret diners to visit his restaurants, including the Canberra one, every week, he said.
Oliver arrived in Perth a week ago and his “mental” itinerary has taken him from his Jamie’s Italian eateries in Perth and Sydney, to the Southern Highlands where he toured the Li Sun Exotic Mushrooms tunnel near Bowral and ate at Biota restaurant, to Geelong where his Ministry of Food runs cooking classes, to the announcement of his first pop-up kitchen in an Adelaide shopping centre.
His message has been all about health, with Australia the fourth fattest nation on earth behind Mexico, the United States and New Zealand, and more than 60 per cent of people in hospital there for a diet-related disease.
England and Australia were side by side in the statistics, Oliver said, with “dark pockets” of bad health. But he said the response to his contest to host the pop-up kitchen had brought him to tears, with 200 entries, and an “incredibly emotional” job to whittle them to 30, then choose a winner. He hoped now to be able to fund another 10 of the kitchens, which teach people how to cook. And he said the cooperation between Woolworths and the Good Guys and the availability of matched local government funding in Australia was unprecedented.
Oliver defended his partnership with Woolworths, saying his reasons for working with the big supermarket chain had nothing to do with money “on my children’s life”, and everything to do with the fact that Woolworths had 18 million people through the door every week, making it the most powerful single thing he could do to improve eating habits in this country.
Oliver’s visit to Parkwood was part of his partnership with Woolworths. Pace Farm is converting its Canberra factory from battery eggs to barn eggs. Woolworths head Mr Jegen said by July, cage eggs would no longer be sold at Woolworths’ Canberra supermarkets; by 2018 they would no longer be sold in any Woolworths nationally.
Some of the staff of Jamie’s were at work at 6am preparing for the 9.30am visit, setting the tables and changing the trademark vegetable and cheese display hanging at one end of the shop. It meant “more than you can mention” to have their idol on the spot, one of the staff members said, taking the experience of working for Oliver “through the roof”.
