Is Jamie Oliver's London meat-mecca steakhouse restaurant headed to our shores?
"Is there room for Barbecoa in Australia? Absolutely. When and where? I'm not sure yet," Oliver told Good Food on the eve of his visit to tour the new outpost of his restaurant empire, having acquired the Jamie's Italian restaurants from the floundering Keystone Group.
The British celebrity chef says his first priority in Australia is "steadying the ship with me at the helm".
"Until the liquidation, the restaurants were incredibly well run and managed, and profitable, so it's healthy to consider relevant growth, right?" Oliver says.
The deal to buy the six Australian restaurants with his name on the door has been finalised, so Oliver will spend time working with local teams during his May visit, with Jamie's Trattoria in Parramatta under the Jamie's Italian banner.
"When Jamie's Italian came to Australia, it did exactly what it did in the UK, it disrupted mid-market dining," he says. "It was never designed to be the best meal of your life, it was designed to be an incredibly accessible, delicious experience, with the most amazing staff, celebrating really high-quality ingredients. The environment is changing, just like it is in the UK, so we're using this opportunity to evolve our offer, our menus, our service and we'll keep on doing that."
Oliver marvels that some of the best staff and operations are "halfway around the world" and hasn't been put off franchising after the Keystone experience.
"We're not big enough to do it everywhere we'd like to," he says. "What we hadn't foreseen in Australia is that our original partner would be bought out. But look, we're in a better place now because it's mine."