“When you hit your foot, when you get a splinter, when you get a burn … if you didn’t have that, you’d be dead 30 years ago. So I think it’s a real true gift.”
When Jamie’s restaurant group – which also included Barbecoa – went bankrupt in 2019, 1000 jobs were lost, and 22 of his 25 eateries closed.
Reflecting on the bankruptcy, Oliver – who is dyslexic – said that “pain and failure is all part of really shaping your peripheral vision and your senses”.
He continued: “I think, whatever it is that you’re trying to do, you might not have failed because you were wrong, sometimes I’ve failed because I was too early and people weren’t ready. Sometimes I’ve failed because I was too late.
“Sometimes I’ve failed and I got all the hard bits right and I got the basics wrong because I spent a lifetime refusing to accept any responsibility around numbers and maths – which goes back to school, it’s my issue not the school’s issue – you know I was in the worst group for maths, I didn’t pass maths at school.
“Conceptually within that, yeah I’m thick. I have a negative view of myself when it comes to maths.
“So when I lost my restaurants, you know, all the hard stuff we got right – all the stuff that most people struggle getting right, we got right, we were really good at the hard stuff – and like, it was really the basics.”