Éamonn Ó Catháin - chef, music lover and the owner of 13 mobile phones - talks food with Paul O'Doherty. And in an extract from his new book, he recalls his early days in Dublin.
When I arrive hungry at the Old Mill restaurant in Temple Bar, I'm grateful that owner Lahcen Iouani offers to get something together for me, and before long, while the photographer takes Eamonn Ó Catháin out onto the square, I'm digging into a scrumptious tagliatelle and chicken drumstick feast. A group of samba dancers bounces along with a litany of hangers-on, oblivious to the chef and broadcaster being photographed in the milieu.
I stare across the table at the space where Ó Catháin has had lunch. A mother-ship of a Psion Netbook laptop sits there. When he gets back, he explains. "People like to pigeon-hole me as a Mr Gadget. Most of my book was written on that machine and then sent by GPRS from Budapest and Prague and all the rest." It's also a database for something like 21,000 recipes - enough to cover every single day for the next 57 odd years.
Éamonn Ó Catháin's new book, Around Ireland with a Pan, charts his love of food - from the boundless enthusiasm of Neven Maguire's McNean Bistro in Blacklion, Co Cavan, to the vegetarian improvisation of Denis Cotter's Café Paradiso in Cork. The format is a county-by-county guide to some of the best restaurants in Ireland, highlighting favourite chefs and often their favourite recipes, using such ingredients as Cooley lamb, black Fermanagh bacon and Sonaghan lake trout.
It was written during his travels to a number of the recent EU succession states, while recording his fourth television series, Bia 's Bóthar for TG4. Ó Catháin is keen to point out that it's not a comprehensive guide. "It's just me."
He speaks with a soft I-got-out-of-Belfast-just-in-time accent, has a boyish grin and looks at home in his sleeves-rolled-up shirt and jeans.
"I was born in Belfast, but I left it at 18. I grew up in the 1960s and I went through the worst of the 1970s. I remember it being very bleak. Walking home backwards was my norm. Waking up in an cold sweat in the days of the Shankill Butchers and going to sleep to the noise of a gun battle every night was very much part and parcel of Belfast. My idea was to get the hell out of it. I couldn't take it any more. I opted to go to Wales and study French and Celtic Studies. Wales wasn't a very dangerous place, but it wasn't a very exciting place either. I spent four very, very long years there.
"Prior to departing Belfast, I became very friendly with the bulk of the French community there and began to learn French. I was always crazy about food. I didn't know that things could be better than they were, but I suspected that they might be. I remember these French people inviting me to a party that I took to be cans and more cans and then fall down drunk. It was anything but. They'd put tables outside their flat, covered in colour - it was a feast. After my first bite, I was hooked forever. The following week one of them made me what she called pâtés de sauce viande - what you and I would call spaghetti Bolognese. It was the first time I'd ever had freshly ground black pepper, and spaghetti that didn't come out of a tin. I tortured them for months: would you please make that for me again, would you teach me how to make it?"
Subsequently, his friends invited Ó Catháin to France, where he began a long love affair with France and with food. "This was a country made for me. People eat all the time there, and they talk about it all the time. This is a pattern that's been repeated throughout my life."
He is also a music lover, and has been "since I was born". His record and CD collection is close to 27,000 albums. "It's got everything, but there's a huge section devoted to African, Latin American, Caribbean and West Indian music. There would be a lot of classic Beatles and Dylan and many, many rarities as well.
"I'm a bit of a loner, although I don't feel lonely. I'm this big boy who never grew up. I still love my records and I want to play them very loud. I went to Trinidad for the carnival four times - a country dedicated to partying and loud music. Louder than I'd ever heard it. You could stick banks of speakers out the windows and no one would object. I thought this was wonderful."
All this fun and euphoria is also mixed with terrible loss and sadness. His brother was murdered by the UFF in 1975, and there were a couple of attempts on his own life. There were also other tragedies. A girl he had met in France was eager to see Belfast for herself. However, her parents didn't think it was a good idea. He interceded for her, telling them that foreigners were never touched by the Troubles. Her parents relented. "She duly arrived in Belfast and she was killed within two weeks, crossing the road outside Queens University."
As part of Ó Catháin's third year in college, he lived and worked in France. "I was given the princely sum of 200 francs a month, which was wonderful in 1976-77, and I had no rent to pay. I was 22 years old, teaching 18-year-old girls. It was fantastic. And they were gorgeous. A local restaurant charged 15 francs for a five-course meal including wine - £1.30 Irish in those days: real cooking at an honest price. Also, seeing how French people eat and live in their own homes was a massive influence on me. And I saw how easy it was to cook. I decided that once I left France I was going to reproduce this. So I spent my last year in university not studying but cooking. My house-mates were the best-fed students."
After Wales, he went back to Belfast, where he got a job in the Housing Executive, checking the contents of envelopes. Three weeks later he was working in a record shop in Ranelagh in Dublin.
"It sold hand-built instruments and what was to yet to be termed World Music, and a lot of Irish music as well. We got endless parades of French, Italian and German hippies trying out the instruments." Ó Catháin worked there for 18 months and also started writing a regular piece on traditional music for In Dublin magazine. Later, he instigated "a terribly arrogant restaurant column, berating restaurants for all kinds of things which, strangely, led to my own restaurant".
He opened Shay Beano in 1982. "It took me weeks to get up to speed. I made awful gaffs, over-cooking things and not ordering enough wine or coffee. Running out of food. One night I forgot the key, and with a queue of people outside screaming to get in, we tried to bash the door down. It was great craic and it was good fun when it lasted. The restaurant reflected me. That was always the way I looked at it. That's not always possible, of course; business gets in the way. Bank managers get in the way. And other people's manners get in the way."
It closed in 1991 when "after 10 long years I got fed up with it. I'm constantly looking for something else. It's one of my failings and also one of my strengths. And I was bored with being an unpaid VAT collector for the government."
Back in Belfast, he presented radio programmes for the BBC, mixing his love of music and food. One, The Global Gourmet, got a particularly glowing thumbs-up from journalist Mary Dowey, who happened to be guest radio-reviewing at the time for The Irish Times.
He was subsequently asked to be the resident chef, live on television, at the annual Royal Ulster Agricultural Show at Balmoral in Belfast. At the time, he was working in Fitzers at the RDS in Dublin. He travelled each morning to Belfast and then returned each evening to cook dinner in the RDS - a recipe that involved the co-operation of catering managers and the unreliability and idiosyncrasies of DART and Enterprise timetables.
In more recent times, he has presented programmes for RTÉ and Radio na Gaeltachta including Global Beat, Love Bites and Wide World Music. He hates sport with a vengeance, admitting: "I just don't get it. I think it shouldbe banned. At one stage in Wales I got involved in rugby, but as soon as I left, I never looked at it again."
Language is hugely important to Ó Catháin and a constant fascination. He tries to keep his knowledge of Welsh going, as much as he can, and has dabbled in Arabic and Portuguese.
Our table has more mobile phones than wine glasses on it. Pointing to his three phones, I ask him, is he busy? "I actually have 13 phones and something like 46 different SIM cards. I don't have as many as I used to, and I don't need as many. It's mainly because I'm moving between the two jurisdictions all the time. So in an effort to beat roaming charges I have multiple SIMS.
"I think Irish networks have just fleeced their customers. But now that they've introduced the all-Ireland tariffs, I don't need a British phone, and it's great to hand out an Irish number and pick it up in Belfast without being crippled by the incoming charges. That's yet another nail in the coffin of Partition as we head toward 2016," he laughs.