Jamie's spat over mushrooms

It started over Jamie Oliver but it's all about mushrooms, really. Forget whether or not that touslehaired young scamp on a scooter really knows his onions. For two of London's top Italian chefs there is a far more crucial culinary question - who knows most about mushrooms?

This may not seem like a vital topic. But it is to Antonio Carluccio, proprietor of the Neal Street Restaurant, where Jamie first worked in the mid-Nineties. Carluccio, 64, is probably Britain's foremost forager for fungi. He's had his own book and TV series on them. He's got a deli and a cafÈ chain that sells loads of mushrooms and truffles. When people want a mushroom expert they come to Carluccio.

You simply cannot underestimate the importance of mushrooms in his reputation. But now a rival restaurateur - and former employee - has cast doubt on that reputation. Enraged by Carluccio speaking ill of the Naked Chef, Gennaro Contaldo has decided to spill the borlotti beans on his old boss. Contaldo, who worked as Carluccio's assistant for 14 years until he left in 1998 to start his own restaurant, Passione, now claims: "When we met, Antonio could only identify a few mushrooms."

Carluccio, currently promoting his latest book about "wild food", must be choking on his porcini today because none of this would have happened if he had not been quoted in the Daily Express casting aspersions on Jamie. Carluccio now claims he was "misquoted" and "taken out of context". But the paper stands by its report, in which Carluccio described Jamie's popular shows as "too flash," and as "tacky and gimmicky".

His own forthcoming TV show, he promised, would be "very different" from those of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Well, that's for sure: no one has commissioned it yet, but he's "in talks" with a cable channel. In a postscript, Carluccio added: "I am not in it for the fame factor. I do not want producers to ruin my show with music and funny camera angles - that is a terrible insult to the food."

Hardly the most damaging personal attack you've ever heard, but Contaldo, who has remained friends with Jamie since they worked together for Carluccio, rushed to his defence - although Jamie himself stayed out of the whole affair by adopting a diplomatic silence. "Jamie says it doesn't matter, but I feel I have to speak out for him," Contaldo explained as he sorted through mountains of mushrooms at his restaurant in Charlotte Street.

"He is never rude to anybody and he especially adores Antonio, so of course he was upset. I used to love Antonio, too, with all my heart. Even though he paid me s*** I would spend my days off cooking mushrooms for his restaurant. But when I left to start my own restaurant he didn't want to know me any more. I have seen Jamie shooting his TV shows and at least he works hard."

Contaldo claims: "I helped develop the recipes in all but one of Antonio's books. I prepared all his meals for filming the television programmes, I wrote the menus and even carried his bag.

"I went out and found the mushrooms for his programme Mushroom Magic and I put them out so it looked as if he'd picked them himself. He did nothing at all; he had to get me to identify mushrooms because I had studied mycology.

"I know when he was young he used to go out in the woods, but when I first knew him he could only identify a few types of mushroom - I taught him the rest.