Filmed across six months in 2021, this series of Beyond the Menu saw chef Mark Moriarty spend four days with six chefs, offering the audience unrivalled, behind-the-scenes access to some of Ireland's biggest talents.
Each episode aims to showcase the people behind the food, asking what drives them, showing their creativity and talent while noting the sacrifice and sheer graft required to be the best.
Tonight, in the final episode of the series, Moriarty meets with Mickael Viljanen of Chapter One, one of Dublin's most sought after restaurants.
In 2018, Viljanen received two Michelin stars in The Greenhouse, Dublin but just two years later everything changed, as Covid transformed the restaurant landscape, he left the Greenhouse and with it his Michelin stars, to launch his own restaurant.
Mark meets Mickael in what resembles a construction site as work gets under way to transform the building into Chapter One by Mickael Viljanen.
Taking on the name of a restaurant, which already had built an incredible reputation over 29 years of outstanding food and service, was always going to be a challenge. The food was the easy part according to Mickael, it’s the rest that was the challenge.
Over the course of three months, Mark visits the restaurant noting the progress from building site to a restaurant glowing with elegance, style and luxury, designed to ensure that the guests’ experience is a multisensory one that extends beyond the food, waited on hand and foot by a team hand picked by Mickael.
Each episode of the show features a pop up restaurant, what could Mark do to challenge a chef of Mickael’s calibre?
Mark puts in a call to the one person who is bound to daunt even someone of Mikael’s calibre- Andy Hayler, renowned fine dining food critic and the only reviewer who has dined in all the 3-star Michelin restaurants throughout the world.
Watch the final episode of Beyond the Menu on RTÉ One on Wednesday at 8.30pm.
