The Taste of Dublin festival begins in Dublin's Iveagh Gardens next Thursday, with 22 restaurants and a host of producers showcasing their fare. Among the guest chefs is Gordon Ramsay's protegee Angela Hartnett, who now has her own Michelin-starred restaurant, her first cookery book and a TV series in the making. Louise Eastmeets her in London
If you've never heard of Angela Hartnett, you're not alone. Despite a Michelin star, her appearances alongside her mentor Gordon Ramsay on Hell's Kitchen and her OBE, Hartnett's name tends to draw a blank outside of foodie circles. That may be about to change. Her first cookbook, Angela Hartnett's Cucina, has just been published and, come the autumn, a television series called Kitchen Criminals will lie plumb in the middle of BBC2's prime-time schedule.
Sitting in her chef's whites in a bland back office at Gordon Ramsay Holdings, Hartnett is matter-of-fact about her growing media profile. "You've got to be a bit media-savvy these days. It might not be what you want to do, but you know, it gets your name out there."
Apart from anything else, there's a ghoulish fascination to meeting Hartnett; this, after all, is a woman who not only survived Ramsay's flame-thrower temper but thrived under it. Twelve years ago she walked into his kitchen with a degree in history but no formal catering training and walked out 17 hours later with a job.
"It was very early days. Gordon hadn't even got his first star," she recalls. "It wasn't so much thrown in the deep end. It was just that either you got on with it - accepted the screaming and the shouting and the long hours and then developed - or you walked out. And a lot of people walked." The other chefs opened a book on how long she would last, but Hartnett stuck it out. "Out of all the restaurants I visited, that [ Aubergine] was by far the most exciting. Twelve years ago there wasn't nearly as much coverage of chefs in the papers, but the little there was, Gordon was it. He was gunning for his one star, and everything was at a standard. It was phenomenal to work there, despite everything: the tiredness, the exhaustion . . ." She rolls her eyes mischievously.
So what's he like when the cameras aren't rolling? "He's definitely mellowed," she says fondly. "When I see him on TV now I think, my God, if they're worried about that, they should have seen him 12 years ago."
After the baptism of fire at Aubergine, Hartnett went on to work at most of Ramsay's other restaurants, as well as opening a Ramsay restaurant in Dubai. In 2002 she was given her own restaurant. And what a restaurant: in a testament to both his belief in her and his nose-thumbing mischievousness, Ramsay installed Hartnett - 34, female and all but unknown - as head chef at the Connaught, a plush and stuffy old London hotel commonly regarded as the ultimate boys' club. Regulars, including Stephen Fry, huffed and puffed, staff resigned and the newspapers had a field day. Hartnett just got her head down and got to work.
Out went the old-school British dishes and in came a much lighter, Mediterranean menu. Less than a year later, Menu at the Connaught earned Hartnett a Michelin star, making her one of a tiny handful of female chefs to earn the accolade.
Listening to Hartnett's flat Essex accent, it's hard to imagine why this thoroughly English girl opted for such an Italianate menu, but one look at her book is all the explanation you need. Alongside recipes for osso bucco and gnocchi are photos of Hartnett with her Italian nonna, her mother and her aunts, cooking and eating, making endless piles of anolini. "That's where my inspiration came from," she says with a shrug. "It's a bit of a cliche now, to say you learned off your grandmother, but I have. It's not bullshit written for the sake of selling the book. We've always cooked as a family."
In fact, Hartnett comes from a long line of fish-and-chippers who moved from Bardi, in Italy, during the 1930s, first to Wales and then to Essex. After her father, a native of Cobh, Co Cork, died (Hartnett was just seven), she spent every summer holiday back in Italy, helping her grandmother to shop and cook. Versions of these family meals appear on the menu at the Connaught, albeit honed, tweaked and customised, as well as on the pages of Angela Hartnett's Cucina.
Unlike many Michelin-starred-chefs-turned-writers, Hartnett has produced a uncheffy book. As she puts it: "You don't need to have 15 different types of jus in your freezer." Although her own is different in style and delivery, it's the books of Delia Smith and Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, of the River Café, she thinks of as role models.
"People look at those books and think: I can do that in 30 minutes and then get the kids into bed and still have half an hour for myself. As soon as people think it's going to take more than 45 minutes, they switch off."
Hartnett herself has not yet had children and is frank about the difficulties of being a woman in what is still a man's world. When she started in Aubergine all those years ago she was the only female employee, front of house or back. In 2004, the year Hartnett got her star, there were only three female head chefs at the 110 Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK and Ireland, and the other two were Rogers and Gray.
Hartnett readily admits that when she was offered her big chance at the Connaught she worried about how on earth she'd manage to do the job should she have kids. "You feel it [ the lack of a personal life] more as a woman than as a man," she says, then pauses and looks appalled. "That sounds so sexist, but I do think women are more likely to accept their husband is out working and they're not going to see him. I don't know if a man necessarily wants to be the one at home every night while his girlfriend or wife is out."
When it comes to her own relationships, she sighs and says: "Cooking removes the spontaneity; you have to organise weeks in advance." The obvious solution - dating another chef - no longer appeals. "I did once, but I kept it very quiet. I certainly wouldn't want to marry a chef now."
Currently on a six-month break while the Connaught is undergoing a massive overhaul, Hartnett has turned her attention to other projects, including filming Kitchen Criminals alongside John Burton Race - "We find people who really, really can't cook and teach them how" - and demonstrating at Taste of Dublin, which takes place in the city from next Thursday to next Sunday.
"I think Ireland has probably got some of the best produce around at the moment. I remember going up to Malin Head with friends of ours who live in Donegal, and we were able to buy fresh lobsters and crabs and oysters. It was just fantastic."
But it's clear that when the Connaught is back up and running, the real work kicks off again for Hartnett. When asked whether she's ambitious, she replies with characteristic candour. "I think I am, yeah. Gordon's probably instilled that in me. I never thought I was, and I certainly never thought I'd want to go for a Michelin star, but you just get hooked. I'd like to be the first British woman ever to get two stars in this country. There's always someone coming up behind, and at the moment I'm at the forefront of it, so I want to get it now." Somehow, you don't doubt for a second that she will.
Angela Hartnett Cucina is published by Ebury Press, £25 in UK. Angela Hartnett appears in Taste of Dublin's chefs' demonstration kitchen next Thursday, at 2.30pm and 8pm, and Friday, at 7pm. See www.tasteofdublin07.ie