COOKERY SCHOOL:Chef Paul Flynnshares his enthusiasm with his cookery school pupils
PROPHETS RARELY HAVE it easy in their own lands, especially in the early years. Paul Flynn returned home to Dungarvan in 1997 to launch the Tannery restaurant. On the opening night his first two customers read the menu, got up and walked out. In the first few weeks of business one diner admitted to enjoying the food but opined that the immaculately designed restaurant looked "like a chipper". Another described the food - and remember that Flynn was head chef for Nico Ladenis (of Chez Nico) at the age of 23 - as "muck and slop".
But Flynn, and his wife Máire, are not easily daunted. Despite the conservatism of provincial Ireland they developed a core group of appreciative customers from the locality in their first year and made a princely profit, of £2,700.
Times change. Flynn is now one of Ireland's most celebrated chefs and the Tannery is one of those restaurants where people don't just drop in. They make a pilgrimage.
And now there will be a further reason to take the road to Dungarvan. The Flynns have just opened the Tannery Cookery School in a restored townhouse just around the corner from the restaurant. The stunning bright, modern kitchen ("modern, but not all industrial stainless steel," says Flynn) has a hugely expensive computer and video system.
"This means that anyone who has done a course here can go online and remind themselves how a particular dish was done, actually watch it being done - at any time," says Flynn.
Outside the fine old townhouse, which accommodates both the school and seven luxurious bedrooms, is a vegetable and fruit garden which is being created by veteran organic grower Tim York. The land is owned by Glanbia, which has provided it at a peppercorn rent for what it regards as an unusual and worthwhile project.
York is building raised beds, filling them with topsoil, ordering manure from local farms, and commissioning a huge polytunnel. And both he and Flynn pore over seed catalogues. The idea of the cookery school has been in gestation for four years. "I've always wanted to do it," says Flynn. "I wouldn't be a flamboyant chef, you know, in fact I like to stay pretty quiet, just get on with cooking. But my favourite thing is passing on ideas. And a huge amount of thought has gone into this project. I can see myself doing this for the rest of my working life. I want people to come here to learn, eat great food, but most of all I want them to have great fun. Because food is about fun. Or at least it should be."
A big diningroom just off the high-tech kitchen has a vast table and this is where students will devour the fruits of their labours. "It's also going to be a chef's table for me," says Flynn. "It's a simple idea. Minimum 12 people, maximum 18. I'll get to cook stuff I can't do in the restaurant. You know, a great big bouillabaise, roasts, big platters of stuff that everyone shares."
It's interesting that Paul Flynn should be a big fan of Rick Stein, the man who put the Cornish village of Padstow on the map with his restaurant and, more recently, his cookery school.
"When I came back to Dungarvan after years in London and Dublin, I wanted to be Rick Stein. Well, a kind of Irish Rick Stein. You know, walking on the beach with Chalky and all that. It didn't have to be Dungarvan, but I ended up coming home. My parents had the pharmacy on the Square."
Flynn's gift for communication is very evident in his two cookbooks (a third is in development at present). His ability to write about food with infectious enthusiasm, something he shares with Simon Hopkinson and Rowley Leigh, who have been major influences, was something he only discovered in relatively recent years. "It was writing a food column for The Irish Times that concentrated my mind," he said. "If I didn't have that stint with the newspaper I don't think I'd ever have considered doing a book at all."
His cooking career started, at the age of 18, in a pub just down the street from the Tannery. "Then it was London," he says. "I worked in crappy jobs for a while, but I eventually got an interview with the Roux brothers and with Nico. The Rouxs gave me a job but I kept in touch with Nico and eventually joined the team and became his head chef in Park Lane. He was a great teacher, but there was no room for creativity."
After a while at La Stampa in Dublin in the early 1990s, he and Máire opened the Tannery. "It was terrifying but very liberating at the same time," he says. "I had to develop a confidence in my own judgement after the years with Nico, and now I love to experiment. I tried chocolate ravioli on a regular a few years ago. And he just said 'Paul, Dungarvan isn't ready for this just yet'."
"But I'm ready for the cookery school," he says. "I'm itching to start teaching. It's going to be great fun and if food isn't fun there's something seriously wrong."
The Tannery Cookery School opened on November 28th. See www.tannery.ie.