Jamie Oliver's staggering net worth, restaurant struggles and surprise film role
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is back on Channel 4 with his show Jamie's £1 Wonders & Money-Saving Meals as he presents budget-beating recipes and tips for delicious food at low prices. The show begins on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday, January 6.
Jamie shot to fame in 1999 with his BBC show The Naked Chef and has gone on to present many other cooking shows across multiple channels and release lots of recipe books. He is also known for his campaigning for healthier school meals.
It has been reported by Ecole Ducasse that Jamie is worth a massive $300 million and this is despite one of his businesses failing. In 2008 he launched his restaurant Jamie's Italian which went on to have 42 different restaurants across the UK and included branches in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Qatar, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, the UAE and Singapore.
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The restaurant chain, which included a branch in Cardiff, went into administration in 2019. In January 2020, KPMG, the firm administrators, said that most of the £80 million Jamie Oliver's restaurant chain owed after its collapse in May 2019 will not be recovered.
Speaking on the Channel 4 documentary Jamie Oliver: The Naked Chef Bares All, he told his non-restaurant staff: "It's a really tough one. For many, many months now I have been walking around the office and you have been like 'Jamie, are you alright' and I have gone 'Yes' but the truth was no I'm f*****g not, it's f****d.
"I am utterly devastated, financially I have exhausted everything I could, I used every card, I used every trick, I used every contact. We got cocky, we thought anything we did would work."
The chef was moved to tears when speaking to Davina McCall in the documentary about the restaurant collapse. When asked by Davina what went wrong, Jamie said: "To survive in this industry is really tough, I was very naive at the time.
"I was good at running one restaurant but I wouldn't call myself a businessman. I'm good at quite a few things but not necessarily brilliant at everything and we did plenty wrong.
"I opened a lot of big restaurants and I think people like small-medium sized restaurants. You have these big cathedrals that you can't fill." Jamie has also had a surprising role in a very popular film.
He was the voice of the health inspector in the Disney Pixar film Ratatouille. For the latest TV & Showbiz news, sign up to our newsletter.
