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Celebrities love to customize cars, but all too often, their unchecked creativity at the auto-body shop can be a recipe for disaster, like that time Snoop Dogg commissioned a Pontiac for Kobe Bryant. Other times, however, their projects turn out, well, “delicious” is the word that leaps to mind. Fortunately, good taste prevailed when Land Rover and British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver cooked up a Land Rover Discovery that really puts the gas in gastronomy. (Ba-dum-pum!) When this posh pantry on wheels rolled in to downtown Los Angeles over the Thanksgiving weekend for its public debut at the Smorgasburg L.A. holiday market, we checked out the leather-lined lunch truck for ourselves.
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While Oliver himself was not present, his friends and local chefs Donal Shekan and Caroline Artiss were there to serve up some turkey banh mi sandwiches—basically a Vietnamese-inspired twist on the post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich. Chef Shekan gave an animated three-minute tour of the truck’s numerous added ingredients (as seen in our video, below). These include a slow cooker in the engine bay and a rotating spit roast sprouting from behind the Land Rover grille badge like a jouster’s lance. Inside, there’s a small refrigerator under the armrest, each door features a plate holder, a toaster has found its way into the center console, and a jelly tray flips down from behind the HVAC knobs. Cleverly concealed beneath the left side rear quarter-window panel is a spice rack, while the other side hosts an herb garden. Not installed that day but part of the package that Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) created for the vehicle were the ice-cream maker/butter-churn wheel covers and the pasta cutter, which shares its mounting point with the spit roaster.
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Out back is where all the sizzle lives. A large countertop deploys from the rear of the vehicle and includes two burners, a food prep area, knife and spice/sauce drawers, a huge flat-screen TV—because celebrity!—and, yes, an actual kitchen sink. Particularly clever details include hoses that drop down from the tailgate to dispense olive oil and balsamic vinegar—using turn-signal stalks as spouts—plus a salt-and-pepper shaker designed to mimic the rotary shifter and a mortar and pestle crafted from pistons.
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Since all modifications to Chef Oliver’s so-called Incredible Kitchen Car were executed by Land Rover’s SVO team, Land Rover is technically able to replicate any number of them—or every one of them—for any customer inclined to pay the bills. “A consumer could work with SVO to re-create the vehicle, all of its elements, and more if they wanted to,” said a Land Rover spokesperson. “However, this was a one-off project with Jamie Oliver, and there are no plans to produce more than the one.” Until another one appears, perhaps with even more culinary commodities aboard, we suppose this will remain the—wait for it—panultimate automobile for the adventure-seeking chef.
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