GEORGINA O'SULLIVAN - owner of Ballymore Inn
WE LIVE OVER the inn, so there’s no commute. I’m up at 7am for a run along the river bank. It takes about half an hour and it’s my sanity route.
While I do that Barry, my husband, goes into the garden to tend the fruit and veg in the poly-tunnels. If it’s nice we’ll sit out in the garden and have our breakfast. Those mornings are our summer because we don’t finish up until night.
After that staff start coming in, starting with the cleaners at 9am and the chefs and kitchen staff from 10am on.
From there it’s all go, ordering produce and drawing up menus and ensuring the breads are in the oven.
We have two kitchens here, one for the restaurant and one for starters and the bar food.
I used to work for Bord Bia and the work I did with nutritionists has informed my entire philosophy of food. It’s all about eating well.
Breakfast is particularly important, and yet so many people will skip it and just have coffee, when a bowl of granola, yoghurt and honey will keep you going half the day.
I recently finished a wine diploma and one of the things they said about wines and how best to cultivate them struck me as being very true about restaurant kitchens too – “there is no substitute for the footprint of the farmer”. It’s about giving constant attention to it.
All our food is cooked to order, nothing is pre-prepared, stock is made from scratch and chickens boned out. We have a sourdough going here, where we mix today’s dough to yesterday’s and it’s like a cat that has to be fed.
I’ll have lunch at noon. I’m not a fan of so-called healthy food, where you go on a bit of a diet that you end up obsessing about, getting bored with and then ditching. It about having a little of everything in your meals.
The afternoons are when I do all the dreaded paperwork, as well as researching recipes and cook books.
We eat out as much as we can in places where we think we will learn something new. They’re research trips, but they’re a pleasure too – food is always a pleasure.
I think women take a different approach to cooking. For us it’s about good food, so that everybody is eating well and feeling well afterwards.
I don’t think we’re as competitive about it perhaps as the men, we’re not trying to amaze people.
Evenings are busiest, but while Barry stays to the very end I’ll head back upstairs at about 9pm to get some time to myself, think and read, or sometimes head into town for the cinema.
I don’t do it as often as I should because every time I go to the IFI I think to myself, I really should do this more often.
The Ballymore Inn, Ballymore Eustace Co. Kildare, ballymoreinn.com
In conversation with SANDRA O’CONNELL