This week, 18 Irish restaurants won Michelin stars, the coveted awards for excellence that for many chefs define their careers.
After a year that saw many of the country's top restaurants shutter, while newer ventures tried to keep afloat and adapt to the changing times, it's a remarkable achievement – even if we can't rush to book a table just yet.
Speaking to Ray D'Arcy, two of the winning chefs – Ian Doyle, Head Chef of Michelin star restaurant The House at Cliff House Hotel in Waterford and Robbie Krawczyk, Owner and Chef at Restaurant Chestnut, Ballydehob, Co Cork – shared what it means to win a Michelin star in one of the most challenging years for hospitality.
Read more: Ireland's newest Michelin-starred restaurants revealed
Having worked in Noma in Denmark, winner of Top 50's Best Restaurant in the World many times over, Ian is well-used to the high pressure environment that a top-class restaurant brings. Renowned for its approach to seasonal produce, which focused on foraging from the area around it, it's a hub for creativity, though Ian cautions against heaping too much praise on it.
"Foraging has been around a long, long time before the restaurant was but that brought it up as a topic again," he tells Ray.
But when it came to taking over The House at Cliff House Hotel, previously run by executive chef Martijn Kajuiter who also set up the format for the kitchen, might have been a whole new set of pressures.
In true head chef style, he brushes it off. "Pressure's for tires," he quips to Ray. "It's the name of the game, I'm used to it. I've been doing it for 14 odd years now."
He's almost as laid back when it comes to winning the coveted Michelin star. "I suppose it's saying we're at a good level", Ian says. "But I wouldn't say it's the be all and end all, but a lot of our goals and standards are aligned with Michelin's. For us, it's a stepping stone, a step in the right direction."
For Robbie, however, his entry into the chef world came later and many of the ingredients for his rapid success came from chance and coincidence.
"I grew up in West Cork, my parents live about 10 minutes from here," he tells Ray. He moved to Dublin at 18 to work, but got into cooking later in life. "The building came up by chance."
The "small and intimate" Restaurant Chestnut hosts just 18 people per sitting in a converted pub that still retains much of that "homely" and cosy character. It was only a matter of weeks after opening that they caught the eye of the Michelin inspectors.
"We were very fortunate. We're not even open three years now, it'll be three years in March. After two weeks one of the Michelin inspectors did come in and had a chat." Starting out with just himself in the kitchen, his fiancée Elaine out front and another staff member, theirs was a formula that took off quickly.
As for how he finds working with his partner, he says they "complement each other".
"You are around each other all day but we work very well together, we complement each other's strengths. We can have our moments like anybody! We have the same goals, the same vision, we know the direction we want to go in. We want to do something really special."
We didn't want to have an elite restaurant. We wanted people to come and enjoy and use the best produce around, and have a homely feel. We never wanted it to be a stuffy restaurant. We don't have table cloths or anything like that."
They've kept this ethos at the heart of their restaurant even amid a pandemic, as they pivoted to doing takeaways once lockdown hit last year.
"We normally close January and February," he explains. "We were already closed for two months last year so we said, we better do something."
"We've survived this far. We're very determined people, we've no intention of going anywhere. That's one of the reasons we wanted to do a casual take-out. We didn't want to do 'This is a Michelin-starred take-out' and you have a lot of components because it's very different."
Listen back to the chefs' full chat with Ray at the link above or by clicking here.
