The Naked Chef's Big Plans

If you've become a household name as a celebrity chef on TV, and you sell over 2.5 million cookbooks a year worldwide and you've just turned 30, what do you do for the main course of your life?

Well, if you're the British chef Jamie Oliver, you campaign to change the eating habits of school children, not just in Britain, but here in the United States. And you also open a restaurant. You might think there's nothing unusual about that, but as correspondent Ed Bradley reports, there was.

Just over three years ago, Oliver put up more than $2 million to finance a restaurant from which he will never make a profit. He runs a charity and staffs it with disadvantaged young people that he essentially takes off the streets. Today, Oliver's restaurant is one of the best in London. But in the beginning there were moments when it seemed that the young chef had bitten off more than he could chew.

"You've been kicked out of school all your life, right, and you've got an opportunity here to blossom and to shine. And if you're not going to do that, piss off," Oliver told prospective chefs.

Never noted for speaking the Queen's English at the best of times, Oliver's language became increasingly saltier, when the restaurant opened for business.

"Kerry Ann, you're making a salad that (expletive) dies. Get your grater. It's dying!" he scolded one of his students in the documentary.

Oliver admits he swears a little bit.

"See, I swear a little bit in normal life, a little bit, and I'd like to say to my mum right now, in context to life," he says laughing. "If you had taken a vicar and put him in that situation I think you would have got a few swear words out of him as well. It was just very stressful times really."

In spite of his Cockney streetwise image, Jamie Oliver's upbringing was very different from that of his trainees. He had a comfortable childhood, growing up in Essex in a 16th century inn, which belonged to his father who serves food that is well above the usual English pub fare. Oliver is still close to his parents and often drops in to see them with Jools, his childhood sweetheart, who is now his wife.

Oliver's father, Trevor, says his son started working in the family's inn when he was about 8 years old, doing odd jobs such as washing up.

"My bedroom was just above here," Oliver tells Bradley, pointing at the low ceiling of the barroom. "And if you turn all the lights off and turn the lights on upstairs you can see gaps all the way through, and that's where I heard all the swearing."

"So that's where you picked it up?" Bradley asks.

"Yeah," Oliver says, laughing.

As a child, Oliver was happier working with his father in the pub's kitchen than he was at school. He was dyslexic and was teased by the other kids when he was taken out of class for special instruction.

"They used to sing songs as I left, 'cause they used to come every Wednesday to pick me up right in the middle of English class," Oliver recalls. " 'Yes, please, we've come to pick up Jamie and Richard Saunders for special needs.' And everyone used to turn round … and then they sort of, like, you know, (would sing) 'special needs, special needs, special needs, special needs.' They'd be singing it … but you know, I kind of managed to handle myself."

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.

Oliver has also confounded other critics who called his idea of training disadvantaged young people to become chefs just a flash in the pan. But it wasn't. Every year, he takes on another 15 new trainees. Some of them find they can't take the heat in the kitchen and drop out. But for many, this is a rare opportunity to escape from what most likely would have been a life of crime.

Every fall, Oliver takes his trainees to Tuscany for a tour of the vineyards and olive groves. They visit Chianti country, which produces some of the best wine and olive oil in Italy.

There, they learn from Giovanni Manetti, the owner of an estate, how the olive oil they use in the restaurant is made, and how to appreciate the authentic Italian food and wine that has so inspired Jamie Oliver.

But Oliver says that the trip is not just about eating and drinking. For many of the trainees, it's a turning point in their lives.

"They get a purpose of what it's all about, you know, they get a romance," Oliver says. "I think with Giovanni and this particular vineyard it's kind of, they meet him, they get to know his personality and generosity and they see how he makes his wine and then they drink his wine and they finally realize that every damn thing in his life is consistent. And, actually, if you start acting consistent in a good way from today, it's only a matter of time before you, too, can be an expert and a master."

When he's not traveling, Oliver spends his weekends with Jools and their two daughters at their country home in Essex, doing what he calls "the daddy thing." But that doesn't mean he stays out of the kitchen.

"At the weekends we always sort of bake bread and sort of make silly little faces and then cook it and then they'll have that with their lunch and, you know, it's lovely," Oliver explains, shaping a loaf that looks like a face.

But not content with ensuring that his own kids have a good lunch, Oliver is out to change the tastes of a generation of British schoolchildren.

Oliver has practically become a national hero in Britain for exposing the unhealthy diet of junk food that is served in schools at lunchtime. To prove that good food can be produced as cheaply, he took over the school catering in one London borough and cooked a range of fresh and healthy dishes.

Oliver is proposing to carry out the same experiment in American schools but he says that we shouldn't expect an overnight transformation. Cooking good food is one thing — getting the kids to eat it is quite another.

After six months of perseverance, the kids began to enjoy his food. But even then he met with resistance from an unexpected quarter.

"The real shocking thing for me is when we banned the junk, the kids started getting used to the food, right, but you still get the odd parent phoning up and saying, 'When are you putting proper food back on the menu?' " he explains.

But there have been no such complaints about the food cooked by the trainees at Oliver's restaurant "Fifteen."

In a few months, he will help his apprentices find positions as chefs in some of the finest restaurants in the world. For the moment, they work alongside him and other professional chefs, as they serve a full restaurant every night.

To eat at Jamie Oliver's restaurant, one has to make a reservation weeks in advance and there are no exceptions. Even former President Bill Clinton couldn't get a table when he tried to book at the last minute.

How did the 60 Minutes team snag a table? Believe it or not, they had to make a reservation six weeks in advance.

"I'm going to try and make the most of it," Bradley says, over a plate of gnocchi. "This is good … it's cooked perfectly. Sometimes this can be a difficult job!"
Produced By Jeanne Langley