‘We don’t want to make the same mistakes’: Jamie’s Italian reopens in London

Jamie Oliver’s head of restaurants is optimistic about new recipe of smaller site, slimmed-down menu and no burgers When Jamie’s Italian crashed and burned in 2019, with the company in £83m of debt and causing 1,000 job losses, no one imagined the celebrity chef would try again. But seven years later, Jamie Oliver has opened a flagship site under the same name in Leicester Square in central London, and believes he has a new recipe for success: a smaller restaurant with a slimmed-down menu, which features cheaper cuts of meat and no burgers. At its peak the chain, which opened in 2008, had 47 UK restaurants. Now it just has the one. Ed Loftus, the global director of Jamie Oliver Restaurants, has worked with Oliver for 20 years and is charged with making the reopening a success. This is a nerve-racking job; the team certainly does not want to fail twice. But the restaurant has been open for a month and Loftus feels optimistic. “100% I was nervous,” he says. “Bringing something back that’s failed in the eyes of the public and the trade, and the rest of it, there were definitely nerves and a few sleepless nights, no one wants to do anything and get it wrong.” The new sit