Stanley Tucci’s love of a particular brand of Irish butter is legendary. “We love Kerrygold – we have vats of it in our house,” he says when we meet in Dublin.
The American actor and writer of Italian descent, who lives in London with his wife, the literary agent Felicity Blunt, and their two small children, says that they use it “on everything” and that “the whole top of the refrigerator door is filled with Kerrygold”.
In 2020, in a diary for the Atlantic, he wrote about how he and his family spent their days at home during the Covid-19 pandemic. “If there is no Kerrygold butter left in the United Kingdom, it’s because it’s either in our freezer or we ate it.” As it was for many of us, there was a lot of cooking. For Tucci, there were also a fair few cocktails. And it’s cocktails, in part, that have brought him to Dublin.
On Saturday he will be talking to the novelist and baking-cookbook author Marian Keyes at International Literature Festival Dublin. But on Thursday he’s on a promotional visit to Diageo’s offices at St James’s Gate, in the Liberties, as “global brand partner” for Tanqueray No Ten gin, the spirit he reaches for when he makes a negroni for Blunt in the Instagram video that launched his side hustle as a cocktail creator. First aired in April 2020, during a pandemic lockdown, the flirtatious three-minute video has now been watched 1.3 million times.
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It’s a role that’s not without its dangers: traditionalists were up in arms when he shook (vigorously) rather than stirred (gently) the negroni, a traditional Italian cocktail that mixes gin with Campari and sweet vermouth. But he is unrepentant. “I like them shaken and I like them up” – served straight up, without ice – he insists. He recently caused a further stir when he was filmed making a paloma with gin rather than tequila, as is customary.
The videos, featuring cocktails and cooking, are mainly filmed by Blunt in their kitchen at home – so they also feature their customised bar, larder of dreams, gigantic island and kitchen cupboards painted in Farrow & Ball Downpipe. The couple met at the 2006 premiere of The Devil Wears Prada, in which Tucci starred with Felicity’s sister, Emily Blunt, and bonded over a shared love of food, and cooking.
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It is Felicity Blunt who is in charge of their eating plans during their three-day visit to Dublin – well, most of them: he’s being taken to lunch at Pichet by his Diageo minders after my allotted 10 minutes with him. “My wife has organised them all. I have no idea where I’m going. But I’m excited because she has very good taste,” he says.
Taste is something that clearly means a lot to him. It’s the title of his 2021 memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food. It’s also a sense, along with smell, that was affected during his treatment for oral cancer in 2018. “I never really was a person who liked a lot of spice, but now I really can’t eat it. My mouth is still incredibly sensitive. I have difficulty eating certain things, and spice is definitely one of them,” he says. And the after-effects are ongoing. “It’s been five years, and I don’t think it’s ever going to change.”
He’s just back from a trip to Bordeaux with Blunt and their children. He says the food was a highlight of their French stay, especially when invited to do a market shop and cook along with the owner of the small hotel where they stayed. But cook, rather than have food served to him, on holidays?
“God, yes,” Tucci says. The hotel owner “and my wife and I went back and we cooked together, and he made oysters.” The oysters they bought were cooked – “we would say broil in America; you say grill” – with butter, shallot and parsley. “So just in five minutes, absolutely just one of the most delicious things ever.”
Blunt is also an accomplished cook, as is her sister – Emily’s recipe for “English roasted potatoes”, shared in a video with the US food writer and TV presenter Ina Garten, became a viral hit.
Tucci and his wife have written a cookbook together, The Tucci Table, which marries British and Italian food. Writing, rather than acting, is taking up Tucci’s time at the moment.
“We’re supposed to do the second season of Citadel, which is this Amazon show that I did. We’re supposed to begin in the fall. But now, with the writers’ strike, depending on how things go, we might not do that until next year. So right now I’m writing a book and I’m just going to stay home, which is fine with me.”
With a minute left in our appointed time window, I ask Tucci if there’s anything I haven’t asked that he might like to talk about. “How about I ask you a question? Why do you do what you do?” he says. Seemingly satisfied with my answer, that I love food, the talk turns to restaurant reviewing. He was asked to cover as a guest writer for a restaurant reviewer for a UK publication, but the job did not appeal. “I just didn’t want to do it. I know how hard it is to run a restaurant; I know what it’s like.”
In the unlikely event that Tucci gets a less than wonderful meal in Dublin, we won’t be hearing about it. “There are times when you go to a restaurant and you’re, like, that place should be shut down, it’s so bad. With the book that I’m writing, if I’m writing about a certain place that I’ve been and I don’t care for, I don’t mention the name of the place. If I like it, I’ll mention it.”
So is it a restaurant book he’s working on? “It’s everything. It’s just about eating.” Sounds like a suitable follow-up to Taste, a memoir with occasional recipes, about which he will be talking to Keyes on Saturday.
He is happy to be back in Dublin. “I haven’t been here for, like, seven, eight years. And then I was here many, many years ago.”
His itinerary may be full, and his meals planned, but there may also be an unscheduled visit to an Italian chipper. He seems fascinated by the story of the migration of whole families, and entire villages, from the province of Frosinone to Ireland, and the proliferation of fish and chip shops they created. So watch out, Borza’s and Macari’s: that dapper gent in the queue might just be a famous actor and foodie, on the hunt for a one-and-one.
