TV CHEF:Martin Shanahan is a man with a mission to convert us all to the bounties of fish, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
THE MAN IN the pink shirt unloading boxes and buckets from a white van is an unlikely celebrity. It’s a Saturday morning and the kitchen staff in Kinsale’s Fishy Fishy restaurant are busy. Martin Shanahan is hefting fresh fish and bags of salad leaves into the kitchen. A fan arrives to get an autograph on a cookery book. Then he sits briefly on a chair before a lightning tour of the restaurant. Finally we settle outside in the sunshine so the staff can get on with the noisy business of preparing for the day.
Martin Shanahan is a success story in a world where struggle and failure are commonplace. Business at his large Kinsale restaurant has gone up 20 per cent every year, even this year, he says. It may be partly down to the latest role for this restaurateur and fishmonger as a new telly chef. This career move has children nudging each other shyly as he passes on the street.
The star of the RTÉ Cork series Martin's Mad About Fishis on a mission to share his brand of madness. As the forgotten food of an island nation, fish may have moved up the scale from penance to healthy, but Shanahan wants everyone to find it "gorgeous" like he does.
Something is shifting, he believes. Fishmongers around the country are telling him that consumption is up. So what do we do when the common post-holiday intention to eat more fish meets the shrink-wrapped salmon darne and it’s about as appetising as a spoon of cod liver oil?
“I’m hearing it all the time. People say, ‘I can’t get fish like you get it.’ Chefs say it to me and I say, ‘You can but you have to make the effort.’ Not only that but you have to let the sea decide what’s for dinner,” he adds. This was a lesson he learned as a young chef 20 years ago when he went to his first fish auction.
“I had a menu in my head. When I got there, there were 400 boxes of fish,” but not for the menu he had planned. “You can’t do it that way. Buy it first. Then look at the recipe books.” On a Shanahan shopping trip, you ask the fishmonger what’s good today and that dictates your dinner. Store-cupboard ingredients such as “oil, butter, lemon, salsa, tomatoes, coriander, chilli, lime, ginger, sweet chilli sauce and lots of fresh salads” will cope with whatever the sea offers up.
The father of three trained as a chef in the now defunct Rockwell Catering College and worked in Waterville in Cork before coming to Kinsale in 1984 to work in Jim Edwards’ Bar and Restaurant. He met his wife Marie in Kinsale, and they moved to San Francisco. “We lived there for three years and had great fun. We cooked great produce over there.”
In 1991 they came back with the intention of opening a restaurant. But there was no available building. So instead they went into business with his former boss, Jim Edwards. They opened the Kinsale Gourmet Store. It was a fish shop in disguise because the very phrase “fish shop” caused most people to wrinkle their noses 20 years ago.
“We were described as a fish boutique. You could buy a bottle of wine, a picnic basket, a loaf of bread, a smoked salmon salad to go or a half or full lobster cooked.”
After 18 months, the Shanahans bought out their partner and went solo. “Interest rates were at 18 per cent. People weren’t coming out, weren’t spending. The business grew from selling wet fish to doing a multitude of things.”
The fish boutique became a cafe by degrees as more people wanted to eat the fish on the premises. When a local craftshop called Fishy Fishy moved to Cornwall they adopted the name, and in 1998 they moved to a tall, slate-clad building on a steep hill in the town. “It was the same concept with a few tables and chairs. There was a basic menu of fish and chips, prawn salad, steamed mussels and a glass of wine. Within a couple of months it grew. Because of the display of fresh fish, customers, especially our Continental visitors, educated us because they used to come in, point at the John Dory and say ‘I would like John Dory’. We’d say, ‘But it’s not on the menu. How would you like it?’ And they’d say, ‘Pan fried with a little olive oil and lemon.’ From that it just grew and grew.”
Five years ago he opened a larger restaurant, down the hill from the original Fishy Fishy. The two-storey restaurant can seat 90 people. A further 70 diners can sit in the garden on a good day. Shanahan believes the original cafe is a business model that could be rolled out to every coastal town in Ireland. The fishmonger puts in a fryer, a steamer and a cooker. “It’s very simple and you either employ a chef or go off and train yourself. “To have a successful fish shop you have to be able to diversify. With your raw fish, you should be able to sit and eat fish and chips. That to me should be the new fish shop.”
The more we support fishmongers, the cheaper the product will get, he says. In the next series of his cookery show, he hopes to try and educate people working on supermarket fish counters. “Supermarkets dealing with a very perishable produce like fish don’t have enough knowledge. If you ask where it came from they say the wholesaler down the road. But the wholesaler could have brought it in frozen from Iceland, from anywhere. I think there needs to be more traceability.
“I’ve been trying to get people to build up a relationship with their fishmonger, get to know him, trust him. Ask him what’s nice today. That’s all he sells. Supermarkets can’t be brilliant with 40,000 products. They can’t know all there is to know about 40,000 things.”
How do parents get children to eat fish? “Make it interesting. We did the fish fingers and the amount of kids that I’ve met since the programme has been amazing. Their parents say, ‘He loves your programme. We made the fish fingers together.’”
The TV show was born after Shanahan pestered some customers who worked in RTÉ Cork about the under-representation of fish in food programmes. After shooting a pilot, it got the green light. His one request was that it be shot in Kinsale. He delivered the recipes, as he does this interview, in his trademark mile-a-minute Cork accent. “Fish should be eaten in season. I was offered squid in a restaurant last night but I know there’s no squid in Ireland so I know it’s frozen. You get restaurants who put black sole on the menu in March when it’s €12 a kilo. By August it’s €22 a kilo and in November it’s not around but they’re still using it because it’s on the menu but they’re using frozen fish.”
The freshness is the difference. “It is such a better product when it’s fresh than when it’s frozen. When you eat the real thing you say, ‘Oh my God what have I been eating?’ ”
