Lloyd used to sell drugs and steal. Marlon seems to have something of a past,
too. Portia was into cooking, “But obviously not the posh stuff.” And Jamie?
He has previous form as a sweary, self-proclaimed “gobs****”. In his
last-but-one cookbook – the one that accompanied the TV series on
Italian cooking and which teed up the launch of his latest restaurant chain,
Jamie’s Italian – he sneaked in a rude name for a recipe: tonno di nonna
fangita. That translates as the words for tuna, grandmother and slang for
the female genitalia, as nicked by Jamie from the work of Ali G.
It’s gone 10pm at the lovely old Bloomsbury Ballroom in central London, and
the annual charity dinner in aid of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Foundation is in
full, boozy swing. The feathery-haired man himself is stalking the floor
between the dining tables, half-smart in a suit jacket accessorised with
jeans, blethering into a microphone. “You’ve got to have big balls to do
this,” he tells the audience by way of hustling them to part with (he hopes)
somewhere north of £250,000 tonight. “We’re not a poxy little charity.”
Fifteen was established by the chef in 2002 to give disadvantaged and
marginalised young people a training – an education – in cooking. The
initiative spawned a restaurant in London (since joined by sister
establishments in Cornwall, Amsterdam and Melbourne) and, perhaps
inevitably, a TV documentary series. Lloyd, Marlon and Portia, cajoled from
the Bloomsbury Ballroom kitchen on to the floor by Oliver, are among
Fifteen’s recent success stories. The restaurants are run as businesses,
with all the profits going back into the charitable foundation. Nonetheless,
the annual intake of 20 trainees per restaurant costs approximately £30,000
a student, to pay for their training, equipment, stints at catering college,
etc.
Now comes the next plan from the indefatigably expansionist 33-year-old: the
establishment of Fifteen’s own training academy, offering a course tailored
to the needs of the modern food industry. “There’s no point in teaching them
how to make 15 derivatives of béchamel any more, because no one makes
béchamel any more! Do you just do it because it was stamped into a book?
There’s no point in teaching anyone salmon in aspic jelly because no one
puts that on!
“Here lies the problem,” our iconoclast says with customary bluntness. “Most
of my young people have been crap at school.” But their first months on the
Fifteen course are spent at college – “a world that looks just like the one
they were s*** in: corridors, loads of people, the usual malarkey going on.
It’s not intimate, it’s not family, it hasn’t got a culture per se. So
historically, we’ve actually lost most of our students in that first
four-month block. So by bringing our own academy in, 50 metres away from the
restaurant – gold.”
That gold won’t come cheap, though. Remodelling a building and fitting it out
with a commercial-scale kitchen will cost £800,000. So there’s an extra
urgency to this evening’s A Big Night Out with Fifteen. Various well-heeled
“friends of Jamie” have purchased ten-seat tables, from Penguin, publisher
of his cookbooks, to FremantleMedia Enterprises, production partner in his
TV shows.
On the guest list are sometime Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri and young jazzer
Jamie Cullum (both are performing, gratis, for their celebrity chef pal),
model Sophie Dahl (Cullum’s girlfriend), Burberry creative director
Christopher Bailey and Oliver’s wife Jools (four months pregnant with the
couple’s third child). All told, 190 chums are enjoying music, a charity
auction and a five-course dinner cooked by a kitchen brigade comprising
Fifteen graduates and apprentices. “There’s always something a little bit
embarrassing about doing a charity fundraiser,” admits Oliver. “But we’re
really excited about the future. And we’ve got great stories to tell with
our students.”
Four hours earlier on the same evening, teams of chefs, waiting staff,
cocktail makers and PRs are bustling around Bloomsbury Ballroom, preparing
for the looming festivities. Oliver is sitting in what will be Jamie
Cullum’s dressing room. “Basically, it’s a lot of rich people who wanna
give,” he is saying of the evening’s attendees. “But they also wanna feel
that it’s going to something tangible and something trustworthy… They don’t
wanna give money to a raving idiot or a liability. It’s important that
Fifteen is profitable.”
In his topsy-turvy Essex-geezer speaking style, Oliver seems to say that one
of the reasons the training costs per student are so high is that “a large
proportion of our students historically have always come from prison, or
post-prison. And that’s partly the reason I can go into a court and get a
kid out six months early if I feel if it’s warranted.” You’ve done that? “I
have done that, yeah, yeah. In actual fact, the last person I did that to, I
just promoted to be sous chef, Dennis. He was basically gonna go down for
reckless driving – he didn’t kill anyone but it was bloody stupid, mindless
stuff – and that happened before he’d started the course. So he’d done nine
months of the course and actually was showing really good strength and doing
great. He liked cooking. So I felt it was appropriate – and I will always do
it if it’s appropriate – to turn up and say, ‘Look: this kid’s good, don’t
put him in jail, ’cause it’s gonna cost you 80 grand a year. Just give him
to me and it’ll cost me 25.’ I didn’t negotiate with the judge
to get a little cash!” he laughs. “But, basically, 76 per cent of our
students have ended up being chefs or working in the food industry.”
Earlier this year, a Fifteen report described the course as “hit and miss” and
said that the foundation wanted to raise the graduation rate to 70 per cent.
How does that figure square with Oliver’s claim of 76 per cent of students
securing food-related employment? “That report averaged out the past six
years, and that’s where we got that [figure],” says Penny Newman, the new
CEO of Fifteen, who joins Oliver for some of the interview to help him with
facts and figures. “But, actually, we’re very much on course to go above
that. Our target is to go for 80 to 90 per cent.”
Oliver thinks that one of the reasons the graduation numbers weren’t
sufficiently high was that there were a couple of years where he was “very
passionate about getting really hard-to-reach kids. Not just f***ing
hard-to-reach kids – really hard-to-reach kids.” Was he trying too hard to
fulfil two rehabilitative roles: teaching socially excluded young people how
to create nice Italian-influenced food while weaning them off criminality
and/or drugs?
“I can’t glamorise…” he begins, then stops. “More than often, there are one or
two areas of their lives that’ve been quite spoilt. When you get into drugs,
debt, sexual abuse, prison, bad family, you have a lot of problems. And once
you’ve fixed one, you’ve got… You know, it’s kinda like taking a chicken out
of a battery farm, it just sits there for days, wondering: ‘Oh, I’ve never
been able to do this before.’ So I think what we’ve learnt is, pick the
right ones, from the right background, but also at the right time in their
life where we can make them brilliant.”
