Stop asking about my Michelin demotion, chef Kevin Thornton tells Catherine Cleary. His latest project, a photographic food book for charity, means more to him than a galaxy of stars.
We have ground to a halt. The man who is arguably Ireland's best home-grown chef is sitting at a table with his arms folded tightly over his chest, in silent irritation, while a toxic journalist sits across from him, looking for a piece of his unhappiness. Between us, on a crisp, starched-linen tablecloth, sits Food for Life, a beautiful book of photographs. There are raw ingredients, including the green stillness of a forest carpet of wild garlic and, more viscerally, a hare being skinned. The book has been a labour of love that Kevin Thornton believes may have cost him his second Michelin star. And if it did, he says, then so be it.
It was the M-word that created the uncomfortable pause in our discussion. "It drives me nuts," he says, just before the silence descends. "It's a grinding. People are grinding into you when you lose a star . . . I don't really want to talk about the star, to be quite honest. When I went with the book, nobody wanted to know, yet when something bad happens everybody wants a piece of it."
Who does he see enjoying this book? "People with eyes, with vision," he says quickly. Then: "You've put me off track. I just have to get a cup of coffee." The pause hangs for a few long seconds, then the air clears. He stays at the table and forgets the coffee. He sees the funny side of letting off steam. Later he jokes that he can see the headline "Kevin Thornton. Very Angry" over this piece.
Thornton and his wife and business partner, Muriel, got their first Michelin star in the mid 1990s, just months after opening their small canalside restaurant in Portobello, Dublin 8. The move to the Fitzwilliam Hotel, on St Stephen's Green, in the rooms once occupied by Conrad Gallagher's Peacock Alley, was an inevitable part of their success, he believes. A second star followed in 2001, but this year's guide sees them back to a one-star rating.
"If I regret it, then that means I shouldn't have done it. It's like everything: you grow up and you do what you have to do. I couldn't develop any more where I was. I felt I had gone as far as we could go . . . I regret what people say about the room [ criticising it for lack of atmosphere]. I think they're full of crap. It's like the old Irish thing: You're fine in your short pants, but, when you move, Who do you think you are? "Yes, the ceiling is a bit low. It's not a Georgian house. In a Georgian house, when it's naked it's beautiful. When this is naked it's not beautiful, so maybe that's the thing. But I think if you were in New York and looking out over Central Park you'd be saying it's absolutely gorgeous."
I argue that media interest in the Michelin-star stuff is not just an obsession with negativity but a curiosity about how it feels to have a reputation dashed on the rocks with a stroke of a delete key in an office in France. These days we invest more emotion than ever in our work, and the life of a chef who describes himself as being married to his work is all about emotion.
He remembers how, the night the news broke five years ago that they had been awarded a second star, his restaurant was empty and the media paid little or no attention (although he did feature on the cover of this magazine shortly afterwards.) "The book is for me a turning point. It's about trying to do something good, and yet all this about the stars, and the bullshit about losing the star, is coming out . . . It's sad, really, that they feed off sorrow rather than happiness."
The negative press of these past weeks is put in context by events a decade ago. In September 1996 the life of the couple's son Conor was saved by protein-C replacement therapy after he developed meningococcal septicaemia. Now, aged 11, the boy is in his dad's book, fishing in one photograph and holding a puffball mushroom the size of a football in another. His little-boy haircut is barely recognisable from the impressive head of pre-teen dreadlocks he sports as he passes through the restaurant with his mother, saying hello.
"Everything has an effect on how you think about life. Conor was only a baby. We were lucky. We were blessed. That's why I wanted to pay back and help other people, because you can't say thanks for somebody's life."
Thornton could not find a publisher for the book, whose proceeds will go towards meningitis research. All the publishers wanted recipes, and he was not interested in doing just another recipe book. So he took out a €55,000 loan and became a publisher, using his budget for lavish printing, heavy paper and silver-embossed prints of his hands on the front and back covers, under the dust jacket. He cooked all the dishes for the book, placed them like jewels on plates, lit them in his studio in the restaurant, then photographed them. None of the food was sprayed with varnish or treated with any other food-styling tricks. "I've spent a lot of time doing this, and so be it. I'm not ashamed, [ and I don't] feel my standards have dropped, but if I put so much time and energy into this book that we've overlooked some things, then so be it."
The symbolism - that everything in the book is the work of his hands - is also an insight into why the Michelin system arouses so much passion. If every top chef is a control freak, then Michelin drives them nuts because it is beyond their control. Stars drop out of the sky on them in recognition of something that meets a secret set of standards. And stars are taken away in a relentless cycle that some are beginning to criticise as an odd form of perfectionism.
There are examples of three-star restaurants that teeter on the brink of insolvency because of the four-waiters-per-table standards that Michelin is believed to insist on. "Everything is vanity in life," Thornton says. "You look in the mirror and see how you look, but for me it's a way of going forward, and what you try to do is to set your own standard. I could easily go to Michelin and get three stars by, firstly, getting a backer and investing a load of money, then get it totally whooped up to French style - a mega amount of staff in the kitchen, a mega amount of staff in the diningroom - and then lose a fortune every year. But I'm by myself."
Three stars give a chef a world platform, opening the door to publishing deals, television celebrity and stardom that leave some chefs very little time in the kitchen. "It's like the Chelsea football team. In order to get money you invest money. You have to wait until the right person comes along, and they have to know what they're getting into. But, to be honest, how many people would want to back a restaurant just because they love food? Very few. Because it's not mainland Europe. Restaurants like this are very important for the country."
Others in the business point to Dublin's four stars - Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud with two and L'Ecrivain and Thornton's with one each - as odd compared with a similar-sized city such as Brussels, which has more than 30 one-star restaurants. Belgium as a whole, with two and half times the population of Ireland, has 79 one-star restaurants. There are mutterings here that not all of the Continental restaurants are as deserving of their stars as their Irish counterparts.
Last summer the French chef Alain Senderens stunned the world of haute cuisine when he effectively handed back his three stars, reopening his Paris restaurant as a brasserie. He said he expected his prices to drop from €400 a head to €100. In their quixotic fashion, the inspectors promptly awarded Senderens's new brasserie two stars in this year's guide.
The Michelin system also came under scrutiny three years ago, when another French chef, Bernard Loiseau, killed himself after being downgradedby Michelin's rival Gault Millau; he was said by friends to be fearful of losing his third Michelin star. Thornton is unconvinced that Loiseau's story is as black and white as it seems. "I have a crisis in my life, and it so happens that the Michelin guide comes out and I walk in front of a car, and people say I killed myself because of the Michelin guide. That's a load of crap. You don't know what's going on with a person's life at the time. Everybody presumes that he killed himself because he lost a star. We like to presume what other people are thinking." The unimpeachable guide took a further knock when a disgruntled employee, Pascal Rémy, broke the century-long omerta and, in 2004's The Inspector Sits Down to Eat, claimed that Michelin's standards had slipped and that politics and lobbying played a large part in the star system.
Dublin restaurateurs used to be able to spot the Michelin man immediately. "It was a phone call, two or three weeks in advance, from an English number and a lone diner," says one. Now they are sending two diners and can be more subtle, but once a year the inspector makes himself - and it is usually a man - known to the chef. He will not be drawn on how the chef has performed. He will talk generally about restaurants and cooking, often asking about any rising chefs in town since his last visit. Then, in the weeks before the guide is published, a call from a journalist who has just seen the press release usually heralds the good or bad tidings.
The loss of a star has been estimated to lead to a 10 to 25 per cent drop in revenue. Thornton says he has seen no dip in business. In fact, he believes Irish diners may be more comfortable without the raised expectations that come with the star ratings.
The economics of fine dining are eye-watering. A €14 pizza, for example, costs about €1 for a run-of-the-mill restaurant to make, according to Thornton. By contrast, earlier this month he was quoted €2,500 for 250g (just over eight ounces) of gold caviar. He defends his prices as good compared with those of mediocre establishments and says that margins are tighter than ever. "It's not about making money, even though we make a good living."
Ironically, he says, the boom has not helped Ireland's fine restaurants, which he believes face extinction within a few years. "Our awareness of food has improved, but we can't say we have a food culture. We had one 30 or 40 years ago. A food culture means that people cook at home all the time. They go to markets to shop for stuff, to shop in the local store, where everything is fresh and not coming in from abroad." Just as people cannot find time to cook, they cannot find time to dine, and passing two or three hours over a meal is becoming a luxury.
Thornton once said he would like to live somewhere where he could produce his own food, but for financial reasons that no longer seems an option in Ireland. He would love to run a boutique hotel with a small spa and a cookery school. But without the money it's a dream. He has less than two years left on his seven-year lease at the Fitzwilliam. What then? "We'll take things as they come. We don't have backers, so we can't be moving every few years. We wait and see what happens. What we do is theatre. I just think we'll move forward and get better. If we get the star back, so be it. If we don't it's no big deal. I personalised this business by putting my name on the door. That's what I got. So there's my pie. Eat it."
Looking at the world through the lens of his camera has been refreshing for Thornton, who likes to relax by swimming outdoors. (He sleeps just four to five hours a night.) He loves to be underwater but has not gone diving since he was caught in a drift net off Forty Foot, the bathing spot in south Co Dublin, 11 years ago and almost died. He lost a friend in the accident. He cut himself out of the net and surfaced, assuming his friend had gone to get help.
There were moments of terror 10 metres down. At first he thought it was a current, then he thought it was kelp. The more he struggled the more entangled he became. He describes cutting himself free as "a matter of thinking and not panicking". It could well be his motto for professional life.
Food for Life by Kevin Thornton (€100) is available from Thornton's, St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, 01-4787008 ; Mitchell & Son, Kildare Street, Dublin 2; Berry Bros & Rudd, Harry Street, Dublin 2; and Greene's Bookshop, Clare Street, Dublin 2. He will be signing copies at Brown Thomas, Dublin, next Thursday (6-8pm) and Saturday (1-3pm)
CHEFS ON MICHELIN
Paul Flynn, the Tannery, on losing his Michelin "Bib Gourmand"
"As a chef I'd love to still have it. As a businessman it was impossible to keep. To qualify you have to offer three courses under €38, and, quite simply, our à la carte menu has had to go up by one or two euro here and there. We're not an expensive restaurant. More than half of our business is lunch and early-bird, where we give three courses, including tea and coffee, for €27. But costs are going through the roof. We had the Bib Gourmand for nine years, and I never wanted to have a star. Michelin doesn't pay the bills. It's the people who come through the door.
"People get infatuated with the El Bulli type restaurants, but I saw too much of it in London. People get obsessive, and stars become the meaning of life. First you get two, then you have to get three, and, before you know it, you're 60 and you die of a heart attack."
Ross Lewis, Chapter One, the Dublin restaurant most famous for not having a Michelin star
"We're happy with our standards and that we continue to do what we do, which is to cook the best food for our customers. If they want to reward us with a star at some stage in the future, that would be great."