High on a wall at one end of Fifteen Cornwall's dining room is the man's signature, large, loopy, bright pink and with a big smacker of an x beneath: Jamie O. There's no escaping him here, his spirit pervades the place: zingy Italian-inspired food; disarmingly friendly staff; chatty menus peppered with "amazings" and "fantastics".
But that's pretty much where the relationship ends between Jamie Oliver and the restaurant and social enterprise founded six years ago, with his blessing but not much more, on top of a beach in north Cornwall. "He puts nothing in, takes nothing out," they say here. Commercially at least, this is not part of the £100m-plus Oliver empire.
Which can, sometimes, be a problem, because people tend to think it is. "When you say: 'No, it's actually a charity. It needs money,' people go: 'Jamie Oliver? Needs money?'" says head chef Andy Appleton. "They don't always get it."
So what exactly is Fifteen Cornwall, then? For starters, unavoidably, a view. You could wax poetical about what's beyond the picture window here: the glistening, two-mile sweep of Watergate Bay; the restless sea and sky; the surfers, windsurfers, kitesurfers; the small children busy with buckets and spades.
It's also a very popular eatery. The restaurant's cooking has won multiple awards; in season, April to October, its 120 covers are fully booked for lunch and dinner most days; breakfast is busy too. That's 80,000 contented customers a year.
Fifteen Cornwall opened in 2006 after a determined campaign by residents, the local council and the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA), who succeeded in persuading Oliver that the success of the social enterprise model he had developed with Fifteen London in 2002 – the subject of his TV series Jamie's Kitchen – could be made to work in Cornwall.
It makes money: turnover of £3m-plus a year, profits consistently topping £300,000. Plus, in one of the poorest parts of the country (Cornwall's GDP is 62% of the national average), Fifteen pays 70 full-time salaries and spends £1m a year with local suppliers; one, Rob Hocking, says his plot once fed just his family but now, growing heritage tomatoes, herbs and berries for Fifteen, provides three decent incomes.
Clearly, it's the association with the chirpy TV chef and bestselling author – only JK Rowling has outsold Oliver in recent years – that pulls many first-time punters in, happy to pay £60 a head before drinks for the five-course evening tasting menu and half as much for lunch. But Jamie or no Jamie, Fifteen Cornwall is doing all right.
But that's as well, because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be doing what it was actually founded for. "To be honest," says Emily Hunt, who later this month will be part of the sixth cohort of young chefs to graduate from Fifteen Cornwall's apprenticeship programme, "I don't know what I'd be doing if it hadn't been for this. Working in a cardboard box factory, probably."
Hunt, 22, was drifting when she heard about the programme two years ago. She had dropped out halfway through sixth form, no idea what she could do; worked in a pasty factory, as a shop assistant, as a delivery driver: "Just a string of crap jobs, really."
Now she has just finished a month-long placement at the River Cafe in west London, and takes up her first professional position as a chef there after graduation.
Other apprentices have come from tougher places. Many have had criminal records; some have done time in prison. Plenty have drug, alcohol and anger-management issues. Others have faced abuse, and suffer from low self-esteem.
One, in Hunt's year, is battling a long-term mental illness. A current chef de partie at a top restaurant in Newcastle began his apprenticeship at Fifteen after a year spent recovering from a near fatal late-night stabbing in an alleyway.
"The thing is," says Michael Mallet, one of the first Fifteen graduates who, after working around the country and abroad, is now back here as a chef de partie, "there are just so many of these sh*tty little estates in Cornwall, with absolutely nothing to aim for. There's just nothing much down here, really. No prospects, for so many. No hope."
The restaurant was built with a £545,000 grant from the EU's Objective One regional development fund, matched with £482,000 from the SWRDA. It is owned by a charity, Cornwall Foundation of Promise, to which it pays all its annual profit. The foundation's aim, says chairman Roger Furniss, is simple: to create viable career opportunities for disadvantaged young people in Cornwall, and help as many as it can to realise them.
"It's about Cornwall's economy, Cornwall's employment, Cornwall's young people," Furniss says. "These are deep-rooted problems that need deep-rooted solutions; they won't be solved by facile quick fixes to please funders."
So the foundation re-invests all Fifteen Cornwall's profits, plus an extra £150,000-£200,000 a year of mainly public funding, into the apprenticeship scheme, which is anything but a quick fix and costs around £500,000 a year to run.
To apply, candidates must live in Cornwall; must be between 16 and 24; and must not be in employment, education or training. "Sometimes, it's their grannies who apply for them," says training and development chef Karl Jones. "Sometimes social services. The probation service may do it. We've even had letters on prison notepaper."
Maybe 100 will be invited for interview. Selection is "an inexact science. Almost the reverse of a normal recruitment process: usually you look for the most employable candidate; here we're looking for the least employable. We try to identify who needs this the most, to uncover the reasons why things haven't worked out for them so far."
But at the same time, Jones says, and crucially, "we have to see a spark. There's got to be something there, something we can bring out and work with. And we have to believe they're ready to take this on. It's hard work."
Interviews include a taste test. "We don't expect them to say what they're eating," says Jones, "just to describe it. Salty, bitter, sweet. They need to be open to tasting new things. We need a sense they're interested in food; this is a professional kitchen."
Sixty would-be apprentices go on a character-revealing weekend bootcamp. "We tell them it's dry: no booze, no drugs," says Jones. "But there are always some who try it on. We can handle users, if it's under control. But not dependency. We tried once. It was a disaster."
Thirty are then selected for college, a four-month NVQ level one in catering to learn basic food theory and practical skills. The final cut sees between 18 and 20 new apprentices enter Fifteen's kitchens each spring. The 10 or 12 not chosen are given practical help and advice by the foundation's full-time welfare officer; many have come back to Fifteen, years later, to say that even if they weren't selected for kitchen, the process kickstarted something.
"But every year, we face the question," says Jones. "Suppose everyone graduates: did we screw up on recruitment? Did we really choose the people who needed us most? Or did we go easy ... On the other hand, you need a core who you're pretty sure are going to make it. You can't take just the hard cases. So we walk a tightrope."
They walk a tightrope, too, once the apprentices actually start in the kitchen. "Work has to be fast and accurate," says Jones. "Chefs are short and sharp. It's hot, stressful, tempers fray. Then into that mix you throw someone with issues ... We've had some near misses, apprentices who lose it in the middle of a service. But so far, we've always managed to get them out of the kitchen in time. Which, you'll have noticed, is open." Diners at Fifteen can indeed see everything that happens in the kitchen.
Fifteen Cornwall's apprentices, in white chefs' hats, work one-on-one with the restaurant's 18 professional chefs, in black hats, for the best part of a year. They earn £100 a week, plus a £30-a-week bonus for showing up to all their shifts.
(They also get taxis to and from work; Cornwall's public transport system isn't up to the job, and the couple of times the foundation tried providing shared housing in Newquay, it didn't work. Transport is one of the charity's biggest recurring expenses; upwards of £60,000 a year, including a much-valued sourcing trip to Italy.)
It's hard, but for the majority it works. "Cheffing just does it for these people," says Jones, who spent nine years in the army catering corps. "Partly because they're taking something raw and turning it into something special; they can see what they achieve, every day. But partly, too, because a kitchen has its own discipline and hierarchy, and for many of them, it's those boundaries they were looking for."
Nonetheless, between three and six drop out most years. Mallet, from the first intake, has little patience: "When I was an apprentice, I wanted it so badly I worked eight to midnight, for four months. So I won't take any sh*t. I won't be a bastard, but I get angry if I see people wasting opportunities. All they have to do, really, is set the alarm and get out of bed; even the taxi's paid for. Not a big ask, is it?"
Hunt, from this year's intake, is more circ*mspect. "You do get one or two challenges in the group," she said, carefully. "But look, that's what Fifteen's about, isn't it? Helping people. You just have to pull together, do what you can."
And for every failure, there's a notable success. Jones shows me a thank-you card from "our toughest case last year. He'd had the lot: lost his parents, school failed him, in with the wrong crowd, trouble with the law. He was in assisted housing when he applied. Here, he got verbal, written, final warnings. Our biggest headache. He's just been offered a job from his work placement in Bristol. We couldn't be prouder."
This year's graduates bring to 90-plus the number of young chefs the foundation and Fifteen have successfully trained. Some have found other jobs, usually in catering, but three-quarters are still cheffing, many in prestigious establishments. That's a lot of young lives set on a different course: off benefits, on a career track.
What makes the project work, they say here, is that original social enterprise model: without the apprenticeship programme, Fifteen would be just another high-end restaurant; without the high-end restaurant, the foundation would be just another youth training centre, divorced from commercial reality.
Matthew Thomson, a Cornishman home after 15 years in voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations (most recently the London Community Resource Network), has just been appointed the project's new CEO. "The brief now is to spread the brand, and maybe take the model on to other areas," he says.
"Fifteen is a big brand in Cornwall, relevant, well-developed, successful, a solid place to start. It's narrow and deep, which I support. But at present, we deal with a maximum pool of a few hundred kids. We have to help more, develop the foundation further."
The charity is already in talks with Cornwall Council on a wider educational project, still under wraps. Thomson sees other areas where the model could be applied – the marine sector, for example ("Should there be a Fifteen trawler?"), maybe renewable energy.
And there's more scope in food: "I could imagine other centres, with a bit of the Jamie magic, but maybe not quite the same high barriers to entry." (The value of the Oliver brand, he adds, is "quite priceless" in achieving social change).
All is not entirely rosy. After a few fat years, public money is running dry, and fundraising is going to be a big part of his job. "But look," Thomson says, "what are we worth? It costs £25,000 to train a Fifteen apprentice. A year on benefits might cost £52,000; a year in prison, £70,000. This isn't just poverty alleviation. There's a real transformative agenda happening here."
