Aoibheann MacNamara made the news this month for giving away the contents of her new restaurant. Deirdre McQuillanmeets a powerhouse of creative ideas
Aoibheann MacNamara, who founded Galway's funky Ard Bia restaurant and gallery and has just taken over Nimmo's restaurant, behind the Spanish Arch, is a small hand grenade of a woman, full of explosive energy and vitality. In the middle of the city's water-pollution crisis, only someone of her calibre and confidence would open another restaurant unfazed by the prospect of having to wash everything in boiled or bottled water. Her take on the outbreak is as unconventional as she is. "We're not all dropping dead. I look on it as free colonic irrigation, a clean-out, darling," she says. ("Darling" is a favourite term of address.)
MacNamara's ideas about fashion, food and art and her extensive travels abroad converge in the venues she has established since she came to Galway. "The ethos has always remained the same" she says, "and we've always opened on Good Friday."
At her bright, modern apartment opposite the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas, art books, cookery books and hotel guides compete for attention on tables and the mantelpiece. This morning she is dressed in a T-shirt with a trompe l'oeil body-print image and a pleated apron front, from the exhibition of "conceptual" clothing on show in her gallery, which was designed by Marios, a Cypriot-Polish couple.
"You can wear the apron up, down or around - all the clothes can be worn in different ways. The whole idea is that you bring five elements of clothing to make 15 different outfits," she says. She found the Cypriot-Polish artists in Rome.
"Marios is a unique label and fresh and nothing like anything I had seen before."
From Ardara, in Co Donegal, MacNamara studied art history, archaeology and Italian at University College Dublin, followed by a postgraduate degree in arts administration in Galway. "And then I tootled around the world, working in film festivals and art galleries." Her experience working at Soho House, the hip private London club, was a strong influence.
In Galway she set up her first Ard Bia restaurant five years ago, followed some time later by the art gallery. "The idea of a concept store, conceptual clothes and conceptual works of art is very new here. We need to provide it here - Galway is an incredible city. I'm interested in developing a lifestyle. I see architects in the gallery and then they come to dinner, and you see people becoming attached to something that I am providing that is interesting."
She is brimming with plans for Ard Bia at Nimmo's. "It's going to be very bright, with affordable, rustic food and fantastic New Zealand Riesling. I'm going to exhibit Sophie Calle's chromatic images from Paul Auster's Leviathan - she ate food of only one colour for each day of the week and then photographed the meals. Art in a restaurant has more powerful penetration capability. It is anti-elitism. Part of my idea is to bring people along with me. Let's learn. Let's have red dessert wine and rosé Champagne - let's shake things up and make it interesting."
A prodigiously hard worker, MacNamara loves business, and she now employs 30 people. "For me there is something beautiful about the hospitality industry: feeding people, looking after them and creating a whole world for them. It is also incredibly difficult. A cappuccino can go wrong in a million different ways, so that it is hard to maintain standards. I have a fantastic head chef, Jessica Murphy, from New Zealand, and we get excited by the same things."
Growing up in Co Donegal in the 1980s, she got Elle magazine regularly and, through it, learned about everything from Yves Saint Laurent and Prada to Bali and Duchamp - she calls it "my access to the exterior world". She loves clothes - "they are a form of expression" - though she says she's not superstylish. "I wear Marios now because I identify with them. I like the people and what they do. But we don't need any more clothes, darling."
For her, work and life merge. "I am looking for art and looking for recipes. One doesn't start where the other begins. I have been showing art for years; between the gallery and the restaurant I now show 36 exhibitions a year, and we've had Arts Council funding in the past two months. We are also developing a pottery range and a conceptual bed-linen range with young NCAD artists."
Last Christmas she went on a six-month world tour that took her from New York and Los Angeles to Tokyo and India. After a visit to Beirut she organised a fund-raising campaign for the city's farmers' markets in the Galway market. She has also been in Istanbul and all over Morocco.
Next month she is sailing from the Shetland Islands to Iceland with a group of artists and philosophers, and later in the year she is heading to southern Turkey, then through Pakistan to northern India. "I am deeply connected to the Middle East and India, and I feel I belong when I hear the call to prayer."
In the meantime, Nimmo's looks set to become a powerhouse venue, with raw-food cookery classes, an arts-festival supper club and all sorts of events being planned.
"When there's a fire lighting, candles on the table, music in the background, art on the walls and you are wearing an outfit you like, that is wonderful. You develop a really strong relationship with your customers, and that's lovely. Food that is made with love is what the Indians call prana - living energy. That is what you have to put into food. That's what we aspire to."
Nimmo's is at the Spanish Arch, Long Walk, Galway (091-561114, www.nimmos.ie). Ard Bia Restaurant is at 2 Quay Street, Galway (091-539897, www.ardbia.com)