For most of us the concept of an Irish barbecue conjures up images of burnt chicken and dodging the rain. But Nico Reynolds is hoping to change that with his new TV series, All Fired Up, which has just begun on RTÉ. “Every single recipe in the new show is cooked on the barbecue. We didn’t go inside to the kitchen at all,” he says. And he reckons the Irish drizzle certainly shouldn’t be holding us back. “I’ve seen people out queuing for pints in the sleet and the snow during the pandemic, so I don’t think the weather should be an excuse any more.”
Growing up, Reynolds has the same barbecue experiences as most of us: burgers and sausages cooked over gas. He does remember he always had a fondness for fire, though, even as a kid in Sandymount in Dublin. “I remember my mum having to check my pockets for matches as I was going out of the house.” It wasn’t until he spent time in Argentina in his early 20s that his fondness for flames would turn into something fruitful. The plan was a typical Irish summer abroad chasing adventure, but Reynolds fell for the laidback lifestyle and ended up staying in Argentina for six years, working at all sorts of jobs. “I sold pizza, I was a personal trainer for a bit, I was a tour guide, an English teacher.”
Recipe: Nico Reynolds’s smoked hummus and grilled veggie flatbread
Somewhere along the way he started cooking. Reynolds has never trained as a chef; he says he’s just always had a knack for it. He started cooking with friends, which led to some pop-ups and dinners in Buenos Aires, and he just went with it. He began carving out his unique style with Irish and Caribbean-influenced dishes. “My mother’s side of the family was Jamaican, so Caribbean flavours were always on my table. I grew up with the background of the Caribbean but with Irish food and Irish ingredients.”
Cooking in Argentina, of course, means getting to grips with barbecuing, or asado as it’s better known, but this is not just a cooking technique. In Argentina, asado is an age-old tradition of cooking over fire, a social ritual and something he fell hard for. “I started moving the dishes I was cooking from the oven on to the coals.” It was worlds away from the one-dimensional gas-barbecue cooking he had known. “When you’re lighting a fire and cooking with charcoal, you start to think of it like salt and pepper. Gas is not the same: cooking over charcoal is like a seasoning. It becomes one of the main ingredients in your dish.”
Recipe: Nico Reynolds’s crushed pork and pineapple burger with chilli mayo and shredded slaw
But it seemed that, just as Reynolds was finding his rhythm in the kitchen, the sheen of Buenos Aires began to fade. Ultimately, the things that originally seduced him, “the mañana attitude, the slow pace of life, they were things I started to resent as I got a bit older”. So he headed back to Dublin, to figure out what was next—and “that ended up being Lil Portie”, his pop-up restaurant.
Lil Portie’s name is a nod to his Jamaican grandmother’s influence on his cooking. “The town where she is from is called Port Antonio; they call people there Porties.’’ He started doing pop-ups in Dublin, framing his Lil Portie food offering as Caribbean cooking with sprinkles of Latin influences via Ireland.
Recipe: Nico Reynolds’s grilled peaches with honey thyme mascarpone cream
It was while cooking this food on weekends at Two Fifty Square coffee shop in Rathmines that he attracted the attention of the American rapper and TV presenter Action Bronson, who was in Ireland for an episode of his food travel show F*ck, That’s Delicious. A producer got in touch and asked Reynolds if he would be up for filming with them. “It was a random message on a Thursday asking me to appear on the Sunday. I didn’t believe it at first. Things like that don’t just happen.”
The recognition the show brought meant new doors opened for Reynolds. He started doing some Irish TV-cooking slots and then got the job as resident chef on Lucy Kennedy’s TV series Lodging with Lucy. He was still cooking at events and thinking about opening a restaurant when lockdown hit. He used Instagram to share his recipes and snippets of his chilled-out Sandymount lockdown. On any given day you could find him grilling in his back garden or down at the beach, playing with flavours and live fire, filming as he went.
This turned out to be just the calling card he needed for his own TV show. In the summer of 2021 he recorded a pilot web series for RTÉ Player that showcased his cooking style and captured some of the vibes he’d show on his Instagram.
Now, a year on from that, he has a new primetime show that fuses all of his influences: growing up in Ireland, flavours and ideas from his time in South America, and recipes he learned from his Jamaican granny (who even makes an appearance in the show). Matches at the ready.
All Fired Up is on RTÉ One on Tuesdays at 7pm
