London | Last August, Jamie Oliver admitted that 40 per cent of his business ventures had soured. He can now add his restaurant empire to the list after it crashed into administration: 22 of the chef's 25 restaurants were immediately closed and 1000 staff will lose their jobs.

He said he was "deeply saddened" by the collapse, while KPMG said other directors had worked "tirelessly" to save the outlets of Jamie's Italian, Jamie's Italian Coffee Lounge, Jamie Oliver's Italian, Jamie Oliver's Diner, Barbecoa and Fifteen.

Oliver shocked insiders by pulling the plug late on Monday (Tuesday AEST). Sources close to the negotiations claimed that one of the reasons talks to save the business by offloading it to an outside investor were scuppered was the looming wage bill. "The business was consistently portrayed as a viable going concern," said one person connected to the sale. "It wasn't the world's hardest deal."

In truth, the failure of Oliver's restaurants had been a long time coming. Restructuring experts Alix Partners had been scrambling to find a new "investment partner" for months. But the seeds of this week's collapse were sown much longer ago than that.

Oliver rose to fame in the late-Nineties as the "pukka" happy-go-lucky frontman of The Naked Chef. He'd made fame and food stick through the Noughties. He was one thing other TV chefs weren't: cool. He cooked for, and mixed with, Hollywood. He even played the drums in a band.

It was this brand Oliver set about expanding at breakneck pace. Cookbooks, historically the stuffy preserve of the likes of Delia Smith, were an easy target. It was only a matter of time before he opened the first of his eponymous eateries, in 2008 in Oxford. Aggressive growth followed. By 2016 he had 43 restaurants. At that point things started to go badly wrong.