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As celebrities and local dignitaries tucked into spicy crab pasta, sea bass with asparagus, and tiramisu on Friday at Jamie Oliver's glitzy launch of Fifteen Cornwall, few were aware that they had walked into a good old Cornish stew of emotions, threatening to sour the EU-funded venture. Nor that their normally charming host had lost his cool after an awkward question from a BBC radio presenter.
At the end of a day of interviews to publicise the restaurant, Oliver told a group of media students he had just been interviewed by "some stupid cynical bitch from Five Live". He was referring to presenter Victoria Derbyshire, who had asked him if he was training chefs who would simply take their skills back to London.
"Stupid cow," he blurted. "When you're up there, people want to give you a slap every now and again."
Ms Derbyshire had touched a nerve
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Locals aren’t happy with the chef’s new Cornwall restaurant, finds loic rich
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and if the traffic on Cornwall's online forums, and the talk in the pubs, is anything to go by, Oliver is going to need nerves of steel to get through the welter of local disapproval that has greeted the opening of Fifteen on the seafront in Watergate Bay.
The main point of contention is that by hiring a small number of "disadvantaged young people" as staff, the restaurant has secured more than £1 million in funding to help set up a restaurant for wealthy outsiders.
"The last thing Cornwall needs is yet another self-promoting media-tart cook pretending philanthropy whilst pursuing an agenda of self-promotion and self-enrichment," declares Team Kernow on the online forum cornwall24.co.uk. "This [is a] grossly reckless, short-sighted distribution of public funds."
Porthia1947, writing on the same site, is more reasonable. "Good 
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