The chef has many successes on his plate, but his attempt to reinvent the pizza with all-British toppings was not one of them. Now he should concentrate on what he does best
Jamie Oliver is a businessman, not an idiot. The three Union Jacks restaurants being closed in Chiswick, Winchester and Holborn clearly weren't working for Oliver and his partner, Arizona pizza king Chris Bianco. The apparent lack of trade can't just be due to punctuation pedants protesting the missing apostrophe by staying away. But while Union Jacks blame a challenging climate, could it be that the natives just don't find Oliver's bright, positive, large-scale approach to Brit nostalgia palatable?
It is not every tourist who passes through Chiswick, Holborn or even Winchester, home of Europe's longest medieval cathedral. But many might have a passing tussle with Covent Garden, where the remaining branch of Union Jacks continues to "trade well" with prawn cocktail with Morecambe Bay shrimp, pizzas topped with Westcombe cheddar and British salami, and fish and chips (with skinny chips. Yes, it's an outrage. Take it elsewhere).
When the Holborn branch opened in 2011, around the same time as the Jamie's Great Britain book and TV series were wafted in front of us, it wasn't bad. Some critics liked some of the food, though calling their hot, thin, topped breads "flats" – wisely, they're now known as pizzas – was daft. But there was always going to be a problem.
Oliver can do whatever he likes to Italian food. Indeed, he has been very successful doing it – if he wasn't, what with all the Rose'n'Ruthie connections and the bronze-die pasta and the deep, profound love of pouring olive oil over everything, we'd be worried. New branches of Jamie's Italian will open soon in Piccadilly and Newcastle, with sites in Canada, Moscow, Bali, Stockholm and Australia all on the expansion list and a new brand, Jamie's Trattoria, already doing it relaxedy-style in Richmond.
You will notice that Italy is not on the list. And I repeat: he is not an idiot. This is the man who brought shoddy school dinners and unpleasant farming practices to the nation's attention, even though not everyone wanted to listen; he's the dyslexic who has sold gazillions of cookbooks, but first read a novel aged 38. We might be happy to accept Italian food through the Jamie looking-glass, but he wouldn't be so foolish as to try to feed Italians (apart from the chefs and passers-by in his TV series) Italian food. And now the three less-touristy branches of Union Jacks have closed, he is, blessedly, not trying to sell patriotism on a plate to us either.
The thing is, we can get it better, more "authentic" elsewhere, and we know it. The Great British food revival, no matter how complex and flawed and niche, is best expressed in the littlest restaurants and pubs around the country (among many, many others you will be wanting The Salon, Aumbry and The Quality Chop House, the tiny-production cheeses (give Claire Burt a bell), the oddball farmers and the mini chicken-men of Sutton Hoo. Union Jacks, notwithstanding its decent Brit-booze selection, is not in this spirit.
It might be a food pipedream that many of us leave in the supermarket car park, but we want (or think we want) a semblance of independence with our island nation nostalgia. Jamie might have grown up in a pub named after a kind of quintessentially British summer foolishness, but he is not the little guy any more. Neither are many of his Union Jacks suppliers – the kitchens of a four-strong chain place a serious demand on producers that the smallest are unable to meet, resulting in a menu full of good but relatively (and it is relative) commonplace British ingredients. The roll out-ready scale of Union Jacks, and the size of Oliver's brand, could have compromised its bulldog spirit. The tourists are welcome to it.