Jamie’s Italian is squeezed into the Devonshire Arms on Denman Street, Soho, borne on the duplicitous winds of TV shows and book deals. It’s an odd fit, like a Flump meeting Dante. The Devonshire was a pub at the end of the world, a Victorian dystopia made of violence and despair. Now Jamie Oliver — an aghast teenager running to fat even as he declares war on the Turkey Twizzler and the civilisation that wrought it — has sucked it into his empire of Jamie’s Italians (there are 41, from Aberdeen to Gatwick), installed a roof terrace and written ‘Established 2014’ over the door.
At first glance, Jamie has done nothing to the Devonshire Arms. It is still a grim London pub, now struck down with a late-term identity crisis. He has not even removed the signs that told the very drunk they were in the Devonshire Arms, rather than New York, or a swimming pool, or hell.
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