Jamie Oliver, Aaron Craze, Jamie’s Chef,
Category Archives: BRITISH
Here comes the book
Oscar Wilde with a Leeds accent
He’s not French. He speaks with a Leeds accent and has just written the archetypal warts and all autobiography – a vastly therapeutic experience in which the loss of his mother (when he was 6, in Leeds) plays a dominant role. Among the spicy tales we can expect from London’s first and most Thatcherite supersexychef (thrice-married),there will be the one about what made the trainee Gordon (Ramsay) cry on his last night at Harveys, MPW’s notoriously eventful Wandsworth flagship. All parts of the building featured in the seduction of diners and waitresses. There was a service hatch in his office.
While the two men are now sworn enemies (they won’t eat in the same restaurant, that’s how you measure it,naturally), they are at least both as super as each other (with Gordon the richer and probably the happier and certainly the healthier). In the good old Harveys days, Gordon was one of the guvnor’s top bruisers , leading the Kitchen Gang into all sorts of local scraps and even gaining an extra tooth in the top of his head for his trouble – seeing off a local gang who lobbed coke bombs into the restaurant. Then there was the time they ambushed Worral Thompson….
Vote for your local hero
Mad about Marmite
Small became beautiful twenty years ago. Now the beauty lies in the local and the ethical, and the-starting-small-but-hopefully-getting-as-big-as-possible: anything to reduce the poke of the supermarkets.
And Gary, most patriotic of all the celebrity chefs and most dedicated to re-discovering and communicating the glories of every aspect of our cuisine, is doing his bit. Recently he has even been focusing quite rhapsodically on Marmite. . His antics (all safely confined within his own London restaurant 24) climaxed with a torturously poetic Love/Hate pudding during which a Marrnite sauce/syrup is dispensed from a specially made squeezy tube with chocolate and ice-cream.
The best of British,revamped on the amazon
One in the eye
Does anything clean this mouth out ?
The United Kingdom’s richest chef is also the most foul-mouthed. The branding and merchandising is ****** ace; a ***** perfect foil to the exquisite food that is spreading across Britain and now the USA. Via Channel 4 here and Fox over there, the man and his tongue and our taste buds have netted him about 60 million quid . And , yes, it is a ****chat show for Gordon and he is buying a loft in New York and opening a restaurant while he’s at it. Yes, he’s got about twice as much loot as Jamie, three times more than Rik and nearly five times Delia’s pile .: so **** off about Glasgow Rangers , his former club , who can presumably expect a bid from their former player.
But the news is that he was definitely polite to someone recently: a doctor who happened to be training in his Nightmare Kitchen also happened to cause some boiling hot stock to fly into his eyes: the burning question for some time being
Was he ****** blind ? All was well, all was quiet : the doctor from Chelsea and Westminster flipped straight into professional mode and saved the day.
As nice as pie
Just do what it says on my tin
What ? Only 13 million pounds ? Well, that puts her ahead of Anthony Worral Thompson and testifies very definitely to the enduring need for the Ordinary Things in Life. While she’s never been famous for any particular style or recipe and is nowadays more conspicuous (on TV) for her footballing activity (she and her publisher husband have just been voted onto the Norwich City board and Delia has come up with the most comical of understatements “ well , it’s a relief not to be favourites”), she does have some news for her culinary faithful : Delia’s going on line.
Going down under
Cheers my dears
How much good does a chap need to do before registering as Saving the World ? Having saved telly-bellies from the middle-aged Delia Smith and Keith Floyd, the improving British diet from mere aspiration or pretension (with his ‘metrosexual approach to herbs’ – as they say in Germany) and all the while saving Essex boys from linkage to Essex girls, how could we have ever suspected that this was just the beginning?
When he opened his restaurant Fifteen – which gives work and hope to disadvantaged and problem teenagers – could we have foreseen that, only 3 years later, another one would be opening in Sydney, Australia ? ( And New York to follow) Yes. Because such a good ‘ol boy always had to go global and mainstream (they call it inverted imperialism) – and his assault on our post-Dickensian school dinners, now symbolized by the turkey twizzler, was always going to be just a domestic tiff consigning some Very Bad Things to oblivion : much to the annoyance of many other chefs, it is an wholly-unprocessed Jamie who has been dubbed the liberator of the obese, the hyperactive and the unhealthy youf…
Is it possible?
Is she a re-incarnation ?
The question is : is she a real goddess or just the closest we can ever get to one? Should we be splitting hairs ? Who can say for sure?
After all,. could we possibly conceive of a goddess who wasn’t a media star, internationally recognized and prepared to travel across the Atlantic for a Roast Chicken and Tuscan Bread Salad ?
Isn’t it pure goddess that the apparition known as Nigella is supposed (yes,in reality) to be actually THIN – while also being THE ‘curvy’ inspiration to all larger women/cooks who adore her unashamedly fattening recipes, along with her divinely provocative licking of the chocolatey finger ?
An academy is born
Professor Novelli’s laboratory
What does Jean-Christophe do when he’s not ..extravagantly wooing a Russian opera singer, promoting luxury tourism for British Airways, chucking Michael Winner out of his restaurant (ie standing up for chefs being abused by critics)…oh ..and cooking ? (And apart from training for a charity Triathlon on August 5 ?)
Yes, he’s opening an Academy of his very own, based at his home and in his garden, which is dedicated not only to eating deliciously and in harmony with the seasons and gardens of any size and situation, but also to the pleasure of eating outside – having also cooked it there first in an outdoor kitchen and having picked the ingredients immediately before that.
Forget dejeuner a l’herbe. Using this meticulously designed academy as a template, and the produce of his garden, the Professor will be giving practical instruction in how to achieve a new blend of horticultural and culinary delight : this is a synergy lifestyle at its most down to earth and its most bespoke – for petit dejeuner, dejeuner, le diner and tous les petits quelquechoses in between. From planting the first seeds to doing the washing up, the process will be in the hands of the maestro.