The Naked Chef's Big Plans

Celeb Chef's Eatery Helps Disadvantaged Youths

(CBS) 
In the kitchen, Oliver says food makes him happy. "If you can eat with mates or friends or family, I mean it's such a brilliant thing, isn’t it? If you feel really rubbish and you have a nice bit of food, it makes you feel good, you know."

One pasta dish, called "Ritollo" makes Oliver feel particularly happy — it's what he calls his discovery dish. He was cooking this dish as a 21-year-old unknown chef, when he was given a walk-on part in a TV program about London’s fashionable River Café. The day after the program was broadcast, Oliver's phone didn’t stop ringing with offers of his own TV show, although not all of those calls were genuine.

"In the morning, all the managers from the restaurant were phoning up pretending to be the BBC, teasing me, and after a while I started like abusing them, as you do in the kitchen, you know," he recalls.

"And then the real people started phoning up and I just remember the BBC phoned up and he said, 'Oh, hello, this is so and so from the BBC.' And I told this guy from the BBC to stick his own head up his own backside. And then he mentioned the word 'commission' and 'pilot' and I went, 'Oh, I'm terribly sorry. Maybe you could call me after lunch?' " he says, laughing.

The BBC did call back after lunch and the outcome was "The Naked Chef," so-called because the food, not the chef, was stripped down to bare essentials.

One TV series followed another and when his programs were shown here in the United States, Americans also acquired a taste for Oliver and his food. The accompanying cookbooks, where readers were encouraged to "get stuck in" and "whack the food in the oven," regularly topped the best-seller lists.

"You’re responsible for bringing a lot of young men into the kitchen who in the past probably wouldn’t have been caught dead in the kitchen but now it's OK for them to go in the kitchen and cook," Bradley says.

"When I wrote the first book, I kind of implied that, you know, 'If you've got a boyfriend that don't get stuck in, you know, give him a kick up the backside, you know. Give him the book and say if that young boy can do it then so can you, what are you, bone-idle?' So what happened was actually a lot of women around the country started giving their boys grief because of me," he replied, laughing.

But it's not just the young who are fans of his cooking; when Bradley and the 60 Minutes crew visited "Fifteen," a group of ladies of a certain age were lunching at the eatery. And the food wasn't the only highlight of their visit — they squealed with delight taking photos with Oliver.

Fresh ingredients are the key to Oliver's style of cooking. He showed 60 Minutes around London’s Borough Market where he’s a regular, and where even he often finds himself upstaged by a stallholder who sings operatic arias, for example.

When he wanders through the market, it's clear that Oliver is among friends but in the world of celebrity chefs, the knives can sometimes come out.

Clarissa Dickson Wright, who rose to culinary fame as one of the "Fat Ladies," accuses Oliver of prostituting himself by endorsing farmed salmon for a major supermarket chain in Britain, even though he refuses to eat or serve it himself, preferring the more expensive wild fish. But Oliver argues that it's better for people to eat a good quality farmed fish than no fish at all.

So what does the Naked Chef have to say about the Fat Lady?

"She’s a poisonous old bitch really," he says.