“If Jamie can mirror this early Oxford form,” wrote the Guardian’s eating place critic Matthew Norman in 2008, “he’s going to quickly be driving a prize herd of recession-proof cash cows across the land.” Norman was reviewing the primary department of what would emerge as a rustic-huge franchise, designed, in Jamie Oliver’s phrases, “to undoubtedly disrupt mid-marketplace eating inside the high road in the UK, with top-notch price and lots higher-quality elements, satisfactory in elegance animal welfare requirements and a super team.”
Fast forward a decade, and this becomes the Sunday Times’ Marina O’Loughlin’s verdict on the “tagliatelle with cakes” on the Jamie’s in Westfield Stratford. “Appalling, a honking, salty swamp of a sauce, brown and dusty with nutmeg. Tiny chunks of tasteless black truffle, no longer shavings, lurk around, like mouse poos in the soup.” A mere eight months after that damning review, the celebrity chef’s eponymous chain, along with manufacturers Barbecoa and 15, has gone into administration, placing 1,000 jobs in peril.
In an email to a group of workers on Tuesday morning, Mr. Oliver blamed “the nicely-publicized struggles of the informal eating sector and decline of the UK high road, along with soaring enterprise prices,” for the company’s fall apart. Once visible as competition to Jamie’s, Italian chain Strada is down to three branches. At the same time, Carluccio’s has been compelled to shut approximately a 3rd of its restaurants after losing tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos.
Burger logo Byron, French cuisine chain Cafe Rouge, and pizza stores Zizzi and Prezzo are not faring much better. But a group of workers at Jamie’s was hopeful that a turnaround turned on the horizon. “We knew it wasn’t doing as well as we’d want it to be,” says Lucy, who labored on the Glasgow branch for over three years. Staff, she says, were caused to accept as true that a refit changed into across the nook and that taps providing Brewdog beer could soon be set up.
Instead, they got a simple email. “My partner turned into intended to be on shift this morning,” says Lucy, who requested for her actual name now not to be used. “He changed into informed on the closing minute not to come in because the locks had been modified. “We were then invited to sign up for a convention call and instructed we had all been made redundant, effective now.”
Lucy and her accomplice, who worked at Jamie’s for five years, say they experienced a lack of transparency at the company. “I wish they hadn’t told us that it turned out nice, while it obviously wasn’t,” she says.
Multiple problems
But the 27-year-old is in no question as to what brought about the chain’s demise. “Firstly, the restaurants are ways too big,” she explains. Due to pared-down staffing numbers, she might be ready on as many as 11 tables straight away on busy evenings, even as managers and cooks also felt overburdened.
Then there were tie-ins with voucher schemes, including Groupon, which attracted fickle bargain hunters and “did not inspire loyalty or normal customers”. Tourists and people who passed off to be passing with the aid of became the key purchasers, says Lucy, with “only a few human beings coming in because of the exhilaration of being at a Jamie’s Italian.”
Despite the team’s hard work, individuals who took the time to check neighborhood rankings on their smartphones typically stayed away, too. “Unfortunately, because it’s far pretty luxurious, we might now not be at the top on TripAdvisor,” says Lucy.
