Speaking to Davina McCall on her Begin Again podcast, the chef and restaurateur said that his struggle with numbers was a contributing factor in the closure of his restaurant empire.
“Sometimes I failed because I was too early, and people weren’t ready. Sometimes I failed because I was too late. Sometimes I failed and I got all the hard bits right and I got the basics wrong because I spent a lifetime refusing to accept any responsibility around numbers and maths, which goes back to school,” he said in the podcast.
“It’s my issue not the school’s issue. I didn’t pass maths. Conceptually within that I’m thick. So, when I lost my restaurants, all the hard stuff we got right, all the stuff that most people struggle getting right we got right, we were really good at the hard stuff. It was really the basics.”
At its peak, Oliver’s UK restaurant business operated almost 40 sites across its Jamie’s Italian, Barbecoa and Fifteen brands. It collapsed in May 2019.
He later launched West End restaurant Jamie Oliver Catherine Street in Covent Garden and opened a flagship cookery school at John Lewis & Partners in Oxford Street.
Oliver also spoke about the challenges of opening his first restaurant Fifteen and the money involved. “I spent all of it 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.”
Speaking to The Times in 2023, Oliver also admitted that the model for his Jamie’s Italian was ‘wrong from day one’ and that a ‘feeling of cockiness’ led to bad business decisions.