Jamie Oliver reflects on collapse of his UK restaurant empire

Jamie Oliver has reflected on the collapse of his restaurant empire, admitting that while he and his team excelled at the creative and operational 'hard stuff', they failed to get the fundamentals right.

About Jamie

Jamie Oliver, one of the UK’s most influential chefs, rose to fame in 1999 with The Naked Chef and went on to sell more than 50 million cookbooks worldwide. He built a restaurant portfolio that included Fifteen, Barbecoa and Jamie’s Italian, which at its peak operated over forty UK sites.

Beyond restaurants, Jamie has shaped public attitudes to food through campaigns on school meals and sugar consumption, earning him an MBE and global recognition. Despite the setbacks, he continues to publish best-selling cookbooks and returned to the restaurant scene in 2023 with a flagship opening at Theatre Royal Drury Lane. 

The podcast 

Speaking on Davina McCall’s Begin Again podcast, Jamie looked back at the closure of more than 20 Jamie’s Italian sites in 2019, which cost around 1,000 jobs and left the business £83 million in debt.

At the time, the closures also brought down his other ventures, including Fifteen and Barbecoa, in one of the most high-profile collapses in recent hospitality history.

Jamie admitted: “I’ve failed when I’ve got all the hard bits right, but the basics wrong, I spent a lifetime refusing to accept responsibility around numbers and maths."

Despite the setback, Jamie remains philosophical, framing the experience as part of a wider journey of growth. He said: “That pain and failure is part of shaping your senses. Sometimes I’ve failed because I was too early and people weren’t ready. Sometimes I’ve failed because I was too late.

“Failure can mean different things to different people in different ways. I mean it could be as simple as a cut or a burn or it could be losing something that you've spent every ounce of your savings on and it's gone like that. It could be letting people down that you love.

“So I think failure can be very painful and I also think that as you get older, the concept of pain - pain is always seen as a negative thing - but really pain is an extraordinary gift as a whole concept. When you hit your foot, when you get a splinter, when you get a burn… if you didn't have that, you’d be dead thirty years ago. So I think it's a real true gift."

At the height of the collapse, Jamie personally stepped in to pay staff wages, but now admits he was “naive” about the realities of running a large-scale business.

He said: “I didn’t know how to run a business successfully at the time."

Yet he also emphasised that the 13 years of Jamie’s Italian were not wasted.

Jamie added: “We had 13 amazing years and learned loads. I was a young man when I started, and I’m much older and wiser now.”

Looking ahead, Jamie says he is back with renewed focus and plans for a new food delivery venture.

He added: “We will go again. I’ve never been more rounded, I’ve never been more experienced.”