He has been at the top of the pile and the bottom of the heap, but chef Conrad Gallagher is back with a new TV3 series, Head Chef. Donal O’Donoghue meets him.
"Because I had been unstoppable for so long, I started to believe what people were writing about me", says Conrad Gallagher. "Everything that I touched turned to gold. And then everything I touched afterwards turned to s***. It was the university of hard knocks. You put your foot in and realise that the water is boiling so you burn yourself a little bit."
Back in the heady days of 1998, Conrad Gallagher was perched at the top of Ireland’s culinary tree. At 26, he was the youngest ever chef to be awarded a Michelin star, and he lorded it over two restaurants in Dublin, the flagship Peacock Alley and Lloyds. He owned a home in Rathfarnham, he sported a Rolex watch and he drove a flash car, which he paid for in cash. His face was regularly on TV, he boosted the coffers with overseas consultancy work and he had penned a cookery book sizzling with recipes from Peacock Alley.
It was then he decided to expand, moving Peacock Alley into the newly opened Fitzwilliam Hotel. It was to be his big break, the move that would make him. "It was probably the ruining of my career", he says now. "I was at that point where everybody wants you and then nobody wants you." Gallagher is a big man, six foot four inches and despite his many travels he has not lost his Donegal accent or colloquial turn of phrase. "One hundred per cent", he says often, affirming some detail or other.
But he also seems to be in a hurry – having arrived in RTÉ direct from the school run and now itching to get to his Dublin restaurant, Salon des Saveurs. He’s carrying his chef’s whites and a scarf which at one point he vigorously wraps around his neck as if trying to choke off his words. "Do I seem happy?" he asks, arms folded. In truth the 40-year-old does: and why shouldn’t he? Gallagher has survived testicular cancer twice, bounced back from a number of disastrous business ventures and not only served time in jail in New York and Dublin but lived to write the tale.
Now with two restaurants (in Dublin and Sligo), he is about to launch a new cookery series on TV3. The original pitch for 'Head Chef' was an Irish version of 'Hell’s Kitchen', Gordon Ramsay’s theatre of fire and fury. Gallagher was not interested: "I felt that it was a show designed around Ramsay and it wasn’t my personality", he says. (Ramsay once quipped of Gallagher’s business acumen that he wouldn’t have the man run a bath).
After a number of meetings with the producers, a new format was ironed out: 16 fledgling chefs do battle under the watchful eye of Gallagher with the winner, the Head Chef, pocketing a prize of €10,000 as well as a month’s work with the man himself. But surely his public image is not too far removed from Ramsay’s? He smiles. "I guess the difference is that I don’t shout and roar at my employees." So did he lose it at any stage during the series? "Of course I did", he says, as if offended by the notion that he wouldn’t.
Gallagher’s biography, 'Back on the Menu', which was published late last year, opens with the line: ‘My life is not normal.’ I suspect it never was. He pauses, leans back in his seat. "I guess it’s how we define normal", he says. "Was I a normal teenage boy growing up in Donegal? No I wasn’t, because I was into cooking and if you were a chef back in those days in a town like Letterkenny, with lots of hard men in denim jackets walking around, it wasn’t normal. But I was as happy standing in the kitchen baking an apple tart as most people were running around a football field."
He was the youngest of four and his family ran a B & B where all the kids mucked in. "Even before you went to school you’d take out the ashes and set the fire, fry up the bacon and crack the eggs", he says. By his teens he was working in a local restaurant and after his Group Cert, he abandoned school for Killybegs Catering College. He was taught to fry an egg wearing a blindfold and the first chef he ever worked under made him taste every spice and herb raw from a spoon. "I never forgot those tastes ever", he says.
Following his mother Evelyn’s advice, he moved to New York, where he worked at Blue Street restaurant, then the Plaza, and the Waldorf Astoria, before spending a year cooking at Alain Ducasse’s 3-Michelin-starred Monte Carlo restaurant. When he came home to Ireland, Gallagher was ready to open his own place, ready to make his name. 'Back on the Menu', a slim but turbo-charged race through Gallagher’s 40 years, describes a ‘rollercoaster life’ (the book’s sub-title). He wrote it himself (no ghost-writer) and it chronicles a career that chimed with the times.
Gallagher’s heyday was while the Celtic Tiger feasted (he writes of how an Anglo Irish Bank group racked up a bill of £38,000 in just a few short hours at Peacock Alley) and money flowed like water. But the book’s prologue – and centre-piece – is his arrest in New York City in 2003 by US Marshals. By then, Gallagher’s businesses had gone bust (there was also a failed venture in London) and he was facing extradition to Dublin to face charges that he allegedly stole three paintings that had hung in his restaurant in the Fitzwilliam Hotel. He was extradited, was tried and acquitted of the charges of theft by Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
"This book is based on the facts and a lot of the drama that revolved around the paintings was not based on fact", he says. He says that the whole episode was a fiasco. So how does he feel about that now? "I couldn’t care less." Not angry? "I’m not angry and I never was angry and I’m not bitter", he says, as he zips and unzips his trainer top. "I love my life and I love my family. If that didn’t happen, something else would have happened." Why? "Because what would have been next for me? I had an amazing restaurant, booked out for months in advance, I had every accolade and award known to man. So what was next?" More success perhaps? He shrugs. "It has made me who I am today", he says. "I wouldn’t have met my wife [Candice], I wouldn’t have had my children [Chandler and Conor] if that whole thing didn’t happen."
After Gallagher was arrested in New York, he was incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn for a month. Within days of his arrival, he copped a vicious beating at the hands and feet of other inmates. Fortunately, he was adopted by the Italian mob, an affiliation that probably saved his life. "Listen, there’s no question that your insides are churning and your stress levels are as high as they can be and you have to lick your lips because they’re so dry", he says of those initial days behind bars. "But for some reason this inner survival instinct kicks in as well. It was a very terrifying experience but this Italian guy called me up. He was reading an article that had been written about me in the New York Times that day. So he knew that I was a famous chef and that probably opened up some doors and probably saved me."
After his acquittal, Gallagher relocated to Cape Town where he met Candice Coetzee, the woman who was to become his second wife (he had been previously married to Jennifer Harrison).
Together, they ran a consultancy business but in the summer of 2006, Gallagher was diagnosed with testicular cancer again (he had already had one testicle removed). "What you actually think in that moment is: ‘What happens if I go today? Who will pay the mortgage and all of that.’ So I didn’t think of myself, I thought about my family. It was a rough old time that time. I’ve had a few rough times in my life."
Almost miraculously, his wife Candice had conceived seven days before the operation. "Conor is our miracle baby and he’s so like me", he says. "He has a little bit of a stutter (Gallagher stammered as a child) and he’s mad about food. I came in last night, and he was only four last Saturday, and he’s glued to MasterChef." When he left South Africa, he owed nearly €200,000 to two creditors. "I got fairly heavily involved in a number of properties", he says.
"Because of one particular property I was put into a sequestration, which is like temporary bankruptcy where you have X amount of time to get out of it. I got involved with a business that I didn’t know a whole lot about and got overexposed." So what did he learn? "What I’ve learned is that I don’t want to be a businessman", he says. "Listen, it’s very simple: I’ll stick with the business that I know. And you have to get a balance."
So he sees his kids as much as he can. "Lauren [13, his daughter with chef and food writer Domini Kemp], Chandler [5] and Conor [4], need time with me individually. Wednesday is when I usually pick up Lauren from school and spend a few hours with her."
If Gallagher’s life thus far has been a rollercoaster, is he now at the stage where the ride is levelling out? "Who knows?" he says, unwilling or perhaps unable to completely let go of life’s drama. "I still have some zump in me, you know." Apart from the TV3 series, there’s also a movie on the backburner, loosely based on his memoirs. "Harbour Pictures have developed a story around a chef who won a Michelin star and ended up in a New York prison", he says. "It is a fictional thing. The script is called Grilled.” But after all the ups and downs, the most important thing in his life is his family.
"I have a responsibility to my kids to create a lifestyle for them that they deserve", he says. "If I ever felt that I could not give that to them here [in Ireland], it wouldn’t cost me a thought to go somewhere else. They are everything to me. Nothing else matters."
Donal O'Donoghue
