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Jamie Oliver’s Mobile Kitchen Inside a Land Rover Discovery Is Still Insanely Awesome

Here’s something you hardly ever say, or hear: your car is nicer and better equipped than my kitchen. Jamie Oliver, on the other hand, must have gotten that a lot.
Jamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenities 19 photos
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
Jamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenitiesJamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenities
Jamie Oliver isn’t exactly a car guy, and least of all, if you compare him to other celebrity chefs like his all-time rival slash nemesis Gordon Ramsay. Instead, the former Naked Chef likes driving tractors and the more practical, family-friendly vehicles. This also means that he’s a longtime customer and friend of Jaguar Land Rover.

In a way, getting the two together to work on a special project must have come about very organically. In 2017, Jaguar Land Rover and Jamie Oliver joined creative forces to create Jamie’s “dream car,” which also happens to be one of the most awesome and inspired custom vehicles and a very successful promotional car. Jamie called it his kitchen on wheels, and he was absolutely justified to do so.

And it was the most bonkers, insanely creative and well-equipped kitchen ever to roam the roads of the UK. Luxurious, too. The Land Rover Jamie Oliver car was publicly unveiled in October 2017 as a one-off designed for promotional purposes, as a platform that would showcase the kind of work JLR did at their Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) department, where JLR customers can customize their new cars.

Jamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenities
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
The vehicle, which came with a reported price tag of £175,000 ($211,645 at the current exchange rate), was featured in a 3-part series of specials made available online on Jamie’s YouTube cooking channel and, to this day, it’s considered the “most perfect” way of combining advertising with the passion for cooking of the entire community of Oliver supporters. That might sound like an exaggeration, but a single look at the vehicle will confirm it to be accurate: it was awesome.

If you’re going to go all the way out to create something out of the ordinary, you might as well go overboard, the SVO team must have thought when tasked with customizing a car for Jamie. He asked for a rotisserie to be integrated into the grille of the Discovery and a fold-out table in the trunk and also floated the idea of turning the wheels into butter churners. And what good is an armrest fridge in your car if you don’t have a toaster as well? Or a coffee machine?

Both JLR and Jamie talked a great deal at the time about how this one-off vehicle was meant as some sort of manifestation of a family car from the future, when family meals are no longer a concern. That part is marketing talk and is very obvious in all the promotional videos, which, to a more trained eye, come across as scripted, though not offensively bad because of it. That doesn’t change the fact that the re-design of the car and the build were of outstanding quality and, just as importantly, that everything was perfectly functional.

At the front, the Discovery featured an extendable, 5.2-foot (1.5-meter) rotisserie for up to three average-sized chickens, a turkey, a lamb’s leg, or even a small piglet. Mounted behind the Land Rover badge, the rotisserie drew power from the engine, as did the pasta cutter that used the same mount. The rotisserie came with a 40-inch flat-screen TV with connectivity, just in case Jamie’s family didn’t find his cooking must-watch entertainment during their outings.

Jamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenities
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
Inside the engine bay, the SVO team integrated a 4.7-liter slow cooker, because what’s life without one, right? The cabin also held several surprises, including a toaster by the fridge, a special compartment for jam and chutney hidden in the dashboard, a portable coffee maker, and a USB-charged portable vacuum in the passenger footwell. Jam and toast might be the go-to breakfast, but no one likes crumbs.

The real surprise was in the back, though. Here, SVO built an entire fold-out kitchen, including a two-burner gas stove and a sink with running water, and a fold-out and slide-out countertop that doubled as a table. Into the tailgate, they integrated separate vinegar and olive oil dispensers, repurposing a couple of car stalks for them. A gear shift was turned into a salt and pepper grinder, while a custom pestle and mortar were made to resemble a piston.

On each side of the car and accessible through rear windows was a herb garden and a condiment rack, while a secret compartment in the trunk held Jamie’s hottest spices. Another major surprise were the butter churners in three of the wheels, as the fourth held an ice cream maker.

Since no family outing is complete without a barbecue, Jamie’s car had one too. Made out of the grille of a Discovery, it folded out and sat on a folding metal table encased with a standard 25-liter (6.6-gallon) modified jerrycan.

Jamie Oliver's custom Land Rover Discovery was a rolling chef's kitchen with incredible amenities
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
The vehicle had prominent LR-JO badging throughout and, at least on the online limited cooking series, a matching license plate. As the two videos available below show, every last one of the features mentioned was fully functional, so Jamie’s excitement at trying them out is understandable, even if his A-list status means he’s probably accustomed to outrageous stuff.

Promotional vehicles are all about showing off. This one helped JLR show off too, but it did it in a way that pushed the envelope in terms of things you can make your car do. Many of today’s vanlifers are proud – in a rather annoying kind of way – in showing off what their mobile homes can do, but let’s put this out there: not one of them can hold a candle to the kitchen facilities on Jamie’s Discovery.

We couldn’t find any trace of the vehicle past 2017, but we’ll update this story when and if we hear back from JLR on its whereabouts.

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About the author: Elena Gorgan
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Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends.
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