THE LAST TIME I met Paul Flynn I made him drop his glasses in alarm. I was paying the bill the morning after dinner and an overnight stay in the Tannery Restaurant and Townhouse in Dungarvan, and his wife and business partner Máire recognised me.
We made our introductions and then she picked up the phone with a glint in her eye and summoned her husband, telling him the reviewer from The Irish Timeswas standing in his restaurant having eaten there the night before. I think his blood ran cold. He arrived in a lather of stress, dropped his specs in a fluster, and I got to meet the man whose food I've admired for years.
The encounter was typical of Ireland's latest celebrity chef. He does a self-effacing and gently-humorous schtick in a world where self-belief and iron-clad confidence are everything. And although he has been on telly before, Flynn has never had his own TV show until now. Paul Flynn's Irish Food, which starts on RTÉ on Tuesday, marks a 29-year journey from stove to screen. The fact that Flynn will be on the box says much about the demands of keeping a restaurant in a small town viable. It may annoy the hell out of food purists, but camera skills and a killer smile are overtaking knife skills as an essential for kitchen success.
The journey to television has not happened overnight. Flynn shot a pilot cookery programme two years ago and decided he was terrible. “I was stilted and boring, with no sense of humour.” In the two years since then, he has hosted cookery demonstrations in the Tannery cookery school, which he likens to stand-up comedy. “You can see in people’s eyes whether you’re getting through or not.” And the new programme was devised by RTÉ Cork “in a way that I don’t have to be talking to the camera and it means I can be much more myself”.
It's no coincidence that RTÉ Cork also made Martin's Mad About Fishwith another successful restaurateur, Martin Shanahan of Fishy Fishy in Kinsale. Flynn has always known telly was something he needed to do. "I learned fairly early on you need to get your name out there. It's not enough just to be a good cook, especially when you make the fantastically-sound business decision to base yourself in a town with 9,000 people." Then he adds gently, "I'm joking about that by the way."
The eight-part show will be “an autobiography starting with my childhood and what we used to eat and my journey to being a chef”. He has revisited his scouting days and his time with the FCA (Irish Army Reserve), made his death-row meal (a battered sausage and coleslaw) in a Waterford chipper, and gone back to the food he ate as a child.
“My mother embraced convenience food with great gusto,” he says. Anything that could be pierced and reheated was a typical dinner in the Flynn household. At one stage he downed cutlery and refused to eat any more crispy pancakes. “So I ate nothing but Bourbon Creams for two months.” Flynn is the youngest of eight, and his older sister remembers family dinners of rabbit stew. “So maybe she was just fed up cooking by the time I came along.”
At home with Máire and their two daughters Ruth (five) and Anna (four), food is simple without reaching for the nuggets. “Any chef who has children starts out with ideas that they’re going to be little gourmets,” Flynn says. Then reality dawns and the pasta and chips creep in. “I’d like them to eat something new and different every day.” The compromise is lots of tray bakes. These might consist of lamb chops, potatoes, rosemary and garlic all thrown in with plenty of olive oil, “or maybe fish, new potatoes and broccoli with lemon and olive oil. We do eat pasta a lot, but we don’t want to have to wash up four saucepans.” And the barbecue has replaced the oven as the place where most of the home cooking, even the Christmas turkey, is done.
The show will also feature Flynn cooking in a studio kitchen, recipes which are “Irish but without being Oirish. I want to get away from the brown bread and pine kitchens idea of Irish cooking.
“The most important thing I’ve learned since I opened the cookery school is communicating with people. There’s no point in being cheffy when you’re feeding a family of four. I want to show them the kinds of recipes that make a turnip glamorous.”
It’s those “big, burly vegetables” that Flynn loves, the ordinary ingredients cooked with a bit of flair. And how do you make a turnip glamorous? Cook it with cider and butter and thyme, he says.
One of his favourite books is Tom Norrington-Davies' Cupboard Love. "I love cooking from the cupboard so you don't have to make a special trip , and you can cook cheaply too because people have to have an eye on their budget. "If there was ever a mission I had, it was really to get people cooking more and eating together. People are just too busy now, but if food is right at home, it's a really important start to life."
He is, he admits, “no stranger to takeaways and frozen pizzas”, but they are occasional meals rather than staples. “I was driving down from Dublin recently listening to late-night radio and heard a woman say she buys a takeaway for her children every day of the week. I was horrified.”
And how does he feel about becoming a TV chef after all these years? "I was disdainful of it; no doubt I always thought I would have the gravitas borne out by hard work and respect from my peers. And I think I am in a happy place being the kind of chef I am. I am wary of it, but it's very fulfilling to have done this programme." It's based on his first cookbook ( An Adventure in Irish Food), which came from his food column in this magazine.
Flynn rode the Michelin rollercoaster in London at Chez Nico in the 1980s. “I was head chef of a two-star and I spent nine years trying to bring it to three. I left in September and it got three stars in January. So yes, that was galling, because it was my work. But I got tired of all that kind of food and wanted to cook sausages and gravy. A good sandwich should never be looked down on.”
He sums up his career with the pithy line: “I think I spent 15 years learning to be a chef and the rest learning to be a cook.” The cooks he respects have an “innate feeling for flavours” rather than an ability to create foams and squeezy bottle patterns on the plate.
And despite his reputation and hard work the past three years have been “a real struggle” to balance the books in recession Ireland. “We bought the cookery school at a huge price and put huge money into it.” Finding good staff and getting them to work in Dungarvan has also been a recent battle. Does he hope the show will bring new diners and fresh-faced talent to the Co Waterford town? “I hope so. That’s the biggest part. I just want people to come so we can do our job.”
The most important ingredient in a restaurant is “laughter and noise and a din and the sound, hopefully we’ll hear again soon, of the opening of Champagne corks,” he says. “I’d never want the silence of a three-Michelin-star restaurant, although that’s changing, too.”
His days of sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and some trash on TV are fewer, he says. Now it’s about networking, meeting and tweeting. In her Twitter persona as @TanneryDungarva, his wife Máire has taken to Twitter with ease. “She has, God bless her,” he says with the resignation of someone who sometimes communicates with his wife in 140 characters or less. He is a more recent convert to the social-networking site. “She definitely finds me more funny on Twitter than she does in real life,” he says. “She reminds me every now and then that she has twice as many followers as me.”
Is he looking forward to his series debut? “I’m truly delighted,” he says, following that with a typical Paul Flynn qualification, “and apprehensive and nervous.”
Paul Flynn’s Irish Food begins on RTÉ1 at 7pm on Tuesday, June 28th
Roast rack of pork with apple gravy
1 x four-bone rack of pork (800g-1kg)
Sunflower oil
Salt and pepper
1 large onion
4 garlic cloves
1 sprig thyme
1 sprig sage
2.5cm knob fresh ginger, peeled and grated
500ml water
100ml sherry
2 tbsp apple jelly
Fry the pork on a medium heat in a non-stick pan until it has a golden colour all over and nice, crisp crackling. Season the meat.
Put the sliced onions, garlic, ginger and herbs in a roasting tray. Arrange the pork sitting on top of the onions and herbs. Add enough water to the roasting tray to cover the onions and herbs. Drizzle in the sherry.
Cook at 140 degrees/gas mark one for an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes. Remove the meat from the pan and allow it to rest.
Strain off the remaining stock from the roasting tray and reduce it slightly in a saucepan. Add the apple jelly to the reduced stock, and heat gently until it is a good consistency.
Sweet potato and chorizo gratin
3 potatoes
1 sweet potato
1 clove garlic, crushed
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
350ml cream
200ml milk
Salt and pepper
8 slices of chorizo
Put the milk, cream, garlic and nutmeg in a large stainless steel pot and bring to the boil. Thinly slice the potato and sweet potato on a mandolin or with a very sharp knife. Add to the milk and cream mixture. Season with salt and pepper. Cook on a gentle heat until the potatoes are semi-cooked. Check the seasoning again.
Place half of the potatoes in a baking dish. Add a layer of sliced chorizo. Top with the remaining potato. Bake in an oven at 180 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, until fully cooked.
Serve with a baby spinach salad and crusty bread.
Recipes from episode one of Paul Flynn's Irish Food
