I'm a lifer in hospitality.

So I left school at 16.

And as you say, I started life in the kitchens and, you know, spent probably 10, 15 years working away in kitchens and really a whole variety of things from hotels to Michelin star restaurants, bakeries.

I was a pastry chef for a while, lived in New Zealand.

and then slowly progressed into sort of multi-site operational roles more commercial roles and um as of today yeah running the Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver restaurant group i don't think there's a huge amount of chefs out there that are in these sorts of leadership roles but um that's been my journey it's been a really interesting one i think actually a lot of the time in kitchens and restaurants has has really benefited me in terms of how i see restaurants, restaurant groups and what matters as well.

In my view on hospitality is it's a bit of a team sport really, a group of people coming together to achieve a common goal and I think that applies as much in terms of the four walls of a restaurant as it does from a head office leadership support function.

How do you think around scaling Jamie's individual profile and the brand globally? Did you need to think about the business differently when you're looking at markets around taking a celebrity chef concept effectively to new markets? And how did you pick those markets, for example?

One of the sort of things that we face with our business is that it's not just a restaurant group.

There's a person behind it and that brings significant opportunity.

Jamie's got a huge global profile and the media side of the business You know, it's super active every year and putting Jamie top of mind and he's always campaigning and there's always presence.

So that's, that's a huge opportunity, but it's also how that comes to life in each market and how the, the, the different audiences that come to the restaurant, what their, what their expectation is of a Jamie Oliver restaurant is something that is different by market.

You know, what they expect is different.

how people eat when people eat and all of those things are nuanced and i think prior to 2019 we were very much more of a one-size-fits-all for the international space and really what we've lent into massively over the last six seven years and we're still perfecting it we're not we're not we're not there a hundred percent i think um that's going to be a forever challenge but how do you localize whilst keeping the brand's dna kind of intact and there is is something that um we we've really worked hard on and that localization bit's really really important really feeling like you connect with a local market in a lot of the countries we're in you know we have a really good healthy blend of tourism and also local um local diners coming to our restaurants and that's really important for us it's really important that we connect with local people but that doesn't just happen you have to kind of work hard around the interiors you have to work hard on the menu or the sourcing on on making it feel relevant and part of the local f b scene um so that's that's something that that we're always focusing on and one of the biggest ways that we do that is just spending a huge amount of time in market And I think that also franchising is, particularly in the casual dining space, mid-market, it's a big lesson and it kind of exposes a lot of things within the business.

Maybe talk to us a bit about what's different in this iteration for guests and patrons who go to Jamie's Italian.