Jamie Oliver’s restaurant empire is calling in administrators, putting more than 1,000 jobs at risk.
The company, which includes 23 Jamie’s Italian outlets, plus the Fifteen and Barbecoa restaurants in London and Jamie’s Diner at Gatwick airport, said KPMG would be appointed as administrator.
Oliver said: “I am deeply saddened by this outcome and would like to thank all of the staff and our suppliers who have put their hearts and souls into this business for over a decade. I appreciate how difficult this is for everyone affected.
>>19319 It's not that surprising though - have walked past many of his properties over the past few years and all we nearly empty, even those in prominent places.
I'm sure one of our resident professional chefs can comment.
Frankly I'm loathe to pay a restaurant for any Italian food, because it's piss easy to make yourself for less than a tenth of the price they're usually asking. Chances are ayone who wanted to eat at a Jamie Oliver restaurant will have read his books or seen his shows, and sussed out for themselves it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to pour a gallon of olive oil over a tomato and mozzarella salad.
The branding was just really off. In what way does Jamie Oliver add distinctiveness to an Italian restaurant? It's not particularly authentic, it's not a fun and easy New York Italian vibe, it's not "a modern twist", it's just... nothing. There was nothing to sustain the business beyond the initial hype associated with a celebrity name, no reason to eat there rather than Zizzi or Ask or Prezzo or Bella Italia or any number of other semi-generic Italian restaurants. You're trapped in a very nasty zero-sum game with some much more experienced operators.
Exactly this. The reason middling chains are struggling is because quite simply, every other programme on TV for the last decade has been a cooking show, and people have slowly but surely learned that cooking isn't actually hard, especially not the sort of food you can chuck out for fifteen quid a plate in a plush high street location. And Jamie Oliver lead the way in the new, accessible TV chef back in the day. My mum was terrified of the kitchen until The Naked Chef came along.
It's not just him, either, you go onto most of these chain restaurants websites and they're full of recipes showing you how to make their signature dishes at home - this is basically an attempt to say "look, our food is proper and not out of a freezer!" but really just allows someone who's watched Saturday Kitchen a few times to realise that actually, carbonara is really, really fucking easy, and not worth £18.
I personally think that the Great British Bake off had a lot to do with the rise and sharp fall of Patisserie Valerie - when Britain started falling in love with baking, business was booming - but at a certain point people start having a go themselves and start making their own cream horns or whatever the fuck and no longer need to pay over the odds for them.
Also, All chain restaurants really only can sell you an 'experience' - a french cafe or italian side street, they aim to make you feel like you're having an authentic experience, but that veneer is a lot thinner when most of your target market actually knows what a french bistro is ACTUALLY supposed to serve you, and has watched twelve different celebrities make a Bourginon on the telly anyway.
On top of all that, brexit and the prevailing economy has crippled the very tight margins these places operated under. It's not cheap to rent or own 70 premium locations while still turning a profit amidst all the offers and vouchers you're forced to run to stay competitive.
Carluccios is likely next, then probably Cafe Rouge. The biggest ones will fall fastest, with the exception of Wagamamas, because they have a solid model and British people still don't understand Japanese food. I really don't know what the UK restaurant scene will look like once these lumbering giants topple, but hopefully it'll be a lot more exciting and independent. I won't hold my breath, though.
>>19322 Reminds me of the "Mister Lasagna" chain in London. I'm almost positive it's a money laundring operation, there's one Air St which is abandoned during lunch time while the "deli" next to it has a queue out the door, and one on Rupert St with it's busy lunch time food stalls that's equally abandoned. Both locations can't be cheap and you're not funding that on selling £20 quid of pasta a day.
>>19328 I've a theory that all pasta places in London are nefarious. I used to live in London and at the end of my road was a fantastic (no really) pasta/pizza place that did take away - take away pasta was very much a rarity in those days. It did a pretty good carbonara for a couple of quid, and had some low rent tables and was very greasy-spoon like. The food was good.
My friends and I often wondered why the place wasn't more popular (particularly in what is now a very posh Kentish Town area) or how they actually stayed in business. I googled for them a couple of years back - they were busted in 2010 with 23 kilos of cocaine. Wish I had known at the time, would have been a useful service.
I feel like Wagamamas is the sort of place you'd still go even if you knew how to cook it yourself anyway. because it's not altogether unreasonably priced, and to get that quality of ingredients I'd have to go miles out of my way to visit the Asian supermarket in town.
I don't think their food is necessarily amazing either- I honestly think my Super Noodles where I chuck a bit of pre cooked chicken in a bowl with loads of paprika, soy sauce and an oxo cube tastes better than the broth in their ramen dishes. But some of it is a pain in the arse to make, you wont find me rolling out the cases for my own gyoza and deep frying them any time soon.
Italian is dead because any cunt can throw some spaghetti together in fifteen minutes.
I've always found Wagamamas to be over priced and tasty like shit. I'll grant you I haven't been in one for 15 years, but it was bad enough I've never returned. Mind you I live in London so I actually have options of competing Japanese restaurants.
That'll be the day. Gordon Ramsay doing a Kitchen Nightmares at Jamie Oliver's. Don't the two hate each other to begin with?
Also, I was going to say, doesn't Ramsay own restaurants as well. But his approach seems to be different, he doesn't appear to run mid-market chain restaurants, but instead his places look like there's more variety and they are more upmarket:
>>19335 I disagree - he has chain restaurants too and they are starting to look a lot like Jamies. My team recently visited one of Gordons for lunch (okay we're City Boys, but this was just pizza) and it was utter shit.
>>19334 Agreed, there are a few Japanese places that just ruin Wagamama and any other faux Japanese places. Eat Tokyo outside of Zone 1 in particular is just such a solid stand by it's hard to go back. They are not exceptional, but solid to the point where you'd have to spend 2-3 times as much to get a geneuine improvement. There are a few other places around that do compete without effort but I won't mention those.
Wagamama is almost McD tier. It's not bad as such, but you pay double for something half as good as a proper meal.
I think Marco will go before Gordon - he's opened too many places at once and, at least looking at the one that tried to hire me, they're aiming too high. They wanted to pay me about 20k over the going rate (admittedly I'm overqualified) without any rhyme or reason as to why - they didn't want me to have any creative input.
Ramsey will survive on the back of his bulletproof image as 'the dead good chef' and his popularity in the US. Plus the fact his restaurants are properly aimed at City boys who aren't paying for their meal anyway.
Wagamamas is japanese Nandos, it works for exactly the same reason - it's utterly inoffensive and easy to understand, but ut still feels like you're in a restaurant and you can still order the Firecracker Chicken and look like a big man on your date when you're 17.
It's quite hard to quantify from a restaurant industry perspective, we never really know for sure if the customers we lose are sat at home with a Deliveroo or somewhere else entirely. But I can say with relative confidence that it will have had an impact - the mid market chains are aimed at exactly the sort of person who will also spend £40 on some posh takeaway.
I know a lot of restaurants have tried to get in on the Deliveroo etc game, but it's pretty fucking difficult to manage alongside a traditional service - you all know how busy a typical kitchen is, now imagine you have an entirely seperate order stream that needs to be out within x minutes otherwise you get bad reviews etc. It just ruins the flow of the kitchen and makes everyone's experience worse. Plus these delivery services are pretty cutthroat and will usually side with a customer in any complaint. It's not worth it for proper restaurants, so you simply can't compete.
An interesting approach to this is again, something Wagamama does - in large cities, they've built extra kitchens in some of their restaurants and hired entire teams just to deal with online orders. That's really that only way to do it at volume but good luck scraping together the funds for that unless you're wagas.
I find delivery of certain foods to be abhorrent. They just lose all of their quality during transport and what you eat ends up being a pathetic lukewarm congealed version of what you would have got in a restaurant. If this is your solution over going under and you don't make food that is designed for that purpose you are fucked anyway.
Gordon Ramsey's restaurants going into administration would be an absolute PR disaster for the self-proclaimed food business fixer. But he's so loaded that he could probably wind the business down slowly with cash injections.
>>19340 Do you think this so-called "cloud kitchen" idea will take off? Kitchens that are setup solely to serve delivery, and don't have a normal restaurant/take-away attached.
This is something that takeaways have done for a while, so I could see it happening. I feel like people want to imagine their food coming from a real, proper restaurant, but I suppose they never need to know it's actually a warehouse on an industrial estate, and the associated increase in quality and lower price you'd be able to swing from such a venture would work out.
It's hard to say as the public is fickle and buying restaurant food has always been skewed in favour of image over substance. But I reckon calling it a cloud kitchen might be enough to sway them.
>>19352 Maybe not an industrial estate, you'd still want to be within 10-20 minutes of your resdiential catchment area to keep delivery times short. The rest feels spot on, however. If you could ditch the shop front etc. you forgo the chance at becoming a "happening" place that makes money from walk ins, but who opens Just Eat, Deliveroo or whatever to look for the last place they had a nice sit-down meal and have it delivered? Delivered food is a separate skill. Food needs to be compatible with being delivered, though, potentialy in an insulated hotbox for an hour. Wet things in box plus sauce based thing wins without effort.
Sticking the auxiliary kitchen a bit further out in the suburbs is an advantage, because it extends the delivery range. In a major city like London or Birmingham, you ideally want the second kitchen a few miles from the restaurant to minimise the overlap between the two.
