Cook harder, cook better, cook faster

Jamie’s Italian is opening in Nicosia in a few days. THEO PANAYIDES meets the lively female chef in charge of bringing a cooking giant to our doorstep

Jamie Oliver isn’t just a chef: he’s a one-man revolution, a culinary Jacobin. “He makes a difference. He’s one of the only chefs that I can, hand on heart, say actually makes a difference to the world,” says Charlie Barr – and admittedly Charlie is biased, being the Operations Chef for Jamie’s Italian International (the overseas arm of Jamie Oliver’s Italian-inspired restaurants), but she has a point. Jamie’s strategy – or just his approach – has been twofold, a double whammy: first, to demystify cooking with a boyish, unthreatening, unpretentious style; second, to use his position in the hearts of TV foodies to evangelise for good eating habits, his latest (successful) proposal being a UK ‘sugar tax’ on soft drinks.

Jamie Oliver outside another of his Italian restaurants

There are currently 22 international branches of Jamie’s Italian, ranging from India to Brazil to Dubai to Australia; No. 23 opens in a few days in Nicosia. Like the others, it comes with a Jamie seal of approval, not just in terms of food but also “ethos”, as Charlie puts it. “No banned e-numbers [i.e. preservatives], they’re not allowed in the business. Everything’s higher-welfare or free-range. Sustainability. All our fish is sustainable. Everything, every item on the menu, must adhere to Jamie’s ethos”. How this squares with using local produce, which they plan to do “as much as humanly possible”, is a moot point – though, if it ends up nudging local suppliers to up their game, I guess ‘we’re winning’, as Charlie might say.

That’s the way she talks, by the way, two of her favourite words being ‘brilliant’ and ‘fantastic’ (or sometimes ‘faaan-tastic’). She’s 35, five years younger than her current boss, but has much the same direct, unaffected, enthusiastic demeanour – a round-faced bespectacled woman, five-foot-two in her chef’s whites with their rolled-up trouser legs, who’s overseen 17 of the 23 international openings for Jamie’s Italian. She’s been here for about two weeks, training the staff – the training including six days of “food passion”, where everyone tries everything on the menu and runs around the room pretending to be free-range chickens – and hasn’t had time to go out much, but did have dinner at a place near the Cleopatra Hotel a couple of nights ago, which we eventually deduce to have been Barrique Wine & Deli. “I ate there,” she declares firmly. Pause. “Brilliant.”

Charlie has a hearty-but-sensible air that seems too down-to-earth for a big-city girl. She looks like she might’ve grown up on a farm, honing her cookery skills on fresh-laid eggs and veggies with the soil still clinging to them – but in fact she was born and raised in Birmingham, the daughter of two nurses, and didn’t even know (or care) that cooking was something you could do for a living until her mid-teens. It’s actually a remarkable story – because being a chef is a vocation, a difficult and highly-skilled job, and Charlie had quite a CV as a kitchen chef before joining Jamie’s in this more organisational capacity: she started out at Rick Stein’s (“one of the best – well, the best fish restaurant in the UK”) and later worked as junior sous-chef at Simpson’s, a Michelin-starred restaurant. Many would assume that someone cooking at this level has been cooking, or at least madly interested in food, her whole life.

Not Charlie Barr, it turns out. For a while her mum was actually worried about her, because she ate nothing but bananas. Even in school, in cookery class, she only ever made fruit salad, because it was easy. “I had no idea,” she admits, looking back at how her life has turned out. “I had no idea this is what I wanted to do, I had no idea. Even now, my family are like ‘Well, you weren’t like this when you were a child. Where has this come from?’. And I really don’t know”. Young Charlie was a tomboy, forever climbing trees and getting into trouble. “I was always playing hockey. Or I was over at the park. Or I was up to some kind of mischief. Or I was on my bike, or just hanging out”. The family ate quite healthily – Mum was “militant” about vegetables – and sometimes went out for meals, but she never quite made the connection as a child. “I didn’t even know chef-ing was a job.”

The “epiphany” – or just stroke of dumb luck – happened when she was 16, and working part-time as a waitress in a hotel. “The chef at the time got a bit mediaeval,” she recalls, “and fired all his chefs, and I was just the first person in his eyeline. And he was like ‘You! Do you want to come and help in the kitchen?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, cool, let’s give it a go’.” She might’ve previously shown some vague interest in the life of the kitchen – I assume that chef wasn’t completely irresponsible – but mostly it was just a shot in the dark. On Monday she was given a quick tour, “and then on Tuesday I was on my own. And I loved it, I absolutely loved it! Cooking chose me, I didn’t choose it.”

A year later, she was on her way professionally – mostly by fetching Rick Stein a cold beer. Charlie was backstage at the Good Food Show in Birmingham, doing work experience for a Food Preparation course (“You know when they say ‘Here’s one I made earlier’? Well, I made the ‘earlier’”), and Stein was among the VIPs. “I just went up to him and said ‘Can I have a job?’ – and he said ‘Yeah. Get me a cold beer’. So I did. And I got a job.”

Does that happen a lot in the world of food?

She laughs: “Probably not”. I suppose it could’ve been a disaster, a teenager with barely a year’s experience in the kitchen of a top fish restaurant – especially because (a little detail she may have neglected to tell Rick Stein) Charlie was, and is, allergic to fish. Even now, though she takes a pill every day to reduce the symptoms, she can’t handle seafood for any length of time without gloves and, though she can have a little taste, she definitely can’t eat it – yet “I love cooking fish, it’s my favourite thing to do. You should try my acqua pazza, it’s aMAzing!”. Others apparently agree: Charlie has won Seafood Chef of the Year twice, despite being unable to do more than sample her creations. Food, it turns out, is stranger than fiction.

In a way, she personifies Jamie Oliver’s mission to democratise food, living proof that gourmet cooking doesn’t require being born in the ‘right’ sort of family and undergoing years of Cordon Bleu training – that a know-nothing girl of 16 can walk into a kitchen and cook well, right off the bat. Then again, the truth may be exactly the opposite – not that anyone can be a chef but that, as Charlie puts it, “you’re either a chef or you’re not”. She’s a bit like the rat in Ratatouille, an unlikely chef with a natural gift – but don’t imagine for a moment that what she does is easy.

“You know, I think people watch TV and think ‘Oh I can do that, no problem’,” she muses, sitting outside the restaurant with cars zooming by on Griva Digeni. “[But] the reality is, you’re doing it all day. It’s hot. You’re going to cut yourself. And it’s high-pressured as well, because every single dish needs to be perfect. And then you’ve got big names attached to it, and you don’t want to let them down… So yeah, it’s hard. It’s not for everybody.”

I assume you need to be thick-skinned as well, I note, thinking of explosive Gordon Ramsay types hurling expletives at beleaguered staff – but she shakes her head.

“Life’s changed,” she replies. “Kitchens aren’t the same anymore. It used to be very hot-headed and angry, and it’s not anymore. I don’t believe in that,” she adds firmly. “I believe you have to have a structured kitchen – almost like the army, you have to have structure, a bit of a hierarchy. But the whole – demeaning people? It’s not cool. It’s not right. And it’s something I don’t believe in, and I sure as hell know that Jamie doesn’t believe in it”. Instead, the trick is to “grow people”, spotting their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has them; Charlie herself is “absolutely rubbish at desserts” – though she did once create a cappuccino panna cotta that had Raymond Blanc himself asking for the recipe – and “the boys” on the Jamie International team are all types of people from all types of backgrounds. One trained as a lawyer, another has a Masters in Languages. Some have a lot of “theatre and passion”, others work quietly and keep to themselves. It takes all kinds.

Talk of ‘the boys’ does invoke one thing that hasn’t really changed, however: the world of chefs is still very male-dominated. “For a long time, you have to prove yourself [as a woman]. You almost have to cook better, cook harder, cook faster.” This would be the place for a self-pitying rant about entrenched sexism – but Charlie prefers to go for laughs instead. What’s it like, training a kitchen full of men? “You just use it to your favour,” she shrugs. How so? “Oh it’s easy, you just use guilt. So instead of getting angry, just say ‘I’m really disappointed’. And that’s, like, straight to the heart! They’re like [small male voice] ‘I’m so sorry…’” She laughs delightedly. “I can’t ever reach anything, either! And my whites never fit!” That’s why her trouser legs are rolled up, because she’s wearing men’s whites (the ladies’ version only comes in a couple of styles, both ugly) and most men tend to be bigger than five-foot-two.

I suspect that’s quite a typical moment, though – the fact that she doesn’t embark on a lecture but instead makes a joke of adversity, and simply resolves to work harder. I also suspect that made a difference in how she managed to land such top jobs as an inexperienced youngster: talent is obviously important – but a kitchen is also a hothouse, a family, and she seems like she’s fun to be around. “I’m funny. I like humour,” confirms Charlie. “I don’t think you can survive without humour”. She’s sometimes tempted to leave the UK, especially with all her recent travelling (Brazil is a mad place), but “I quite like the sarcasm of England, and the sense of humour”. She’s a livewire, fond of “a laugh and a giggle”. What does she do for fun? “I play hockey.” I’d have thought something more demanding, like chess. “Oh god no.” She makes a dismissive ‘pfft’ noise: “Boring! Anyway, I can’t stand still for more than 20 minutes”.

Jamie Oliver is like that as well, a bit of a card, a bit ADD – or at least he’s like that on TV, though Charlie emphatically insists that what you see is what you get: “That’s him! That is him. What you see on TV is him. Omigod, no. No, no, no, what you see on TV is the guy in person. He probably even tones it down for TV!”. Then again, Jamie – for all his bonhomie – is also the lecturing type, the line between food education and just plain preachiness being quite a thin one. Charlie, predictably, demurs when I ask why they want to make people feel guilty for having a can of Coke: “I think it’s to make people aware, not to make them feel guilty”. After all, she points out, the restaurant has a dessert menu – and Jamie’s “the first one to like a bit of cake, or a doughnut”. He doesn’t want sugar banned, just consumed in moderation. “You know,” she adds, “how we used to eat”.

That’s how the Barrs used to eat back in Birmingham: no white bread, no fast food (“In the 80s? In Birmingham?” she gapes, as though I’d asked her if they surfed the internet), no pizzas, sweets on Sundays only, maybe the occasional fish and chips on a Friday. That was a whole other life for Charlie Barr, and the path from that life to this one – sitting in the Nicosia sunshine, getting ready for her 17th restaurant opening – was both unlikely and startlingly, almost implausibly easy, indeed it was so easy that I almost wonder if she ever regrets not having tried anything else. But she shakes her head.

“This job has got me around the world three times. I’ve met some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve cooked some of the best food that anyone can ever imagine. I’ve had the honour of working with some of the best chefs in the world – and I get to have a laugh and a giggle every day!” And she goes back inside, to the wood-panelled walls and Chianti-laden shelves of Jamie’s Italian.