COUNTRY LIVING: Kevin Dundon is heading for celebrity chef status. Marie-Claire Digby meets him and his wife, Catherine.
'I don't want my staff to have to wear name badges. I dislike unnecessary formality and I don't want them to be subservient. 'Look the customer in the eye and smile,' I tell them." Catherine Dundon is very clear about the impression she wants to portray at Dunbrody House, the country-house hotel and restaurant she and her husband, the globetrotting chef Kevin Dundon, run on the stunningly beautiful Hook peninsula, in Co Wexford.
As a result, Dunbrody House is one of a rare breed: a smart, elegant and interesting small hotel that also feels like a home. It is a place where you can look around, check out the family photographs, Kevin's culinary olympics awards and Catherine's graduation certificates on the walls, listen to the banter coming from the kitchen as dinner is prepared, without feeling as if you are snooping.
"I love to see guests feel free to leave their hiking boots at the front door and wander in in their socks, feeling right at home," says Catherine. Perhaps the reason they achieve this delicate balance between hotel and home is the fact that they don't live in the main house. "We have our own place, down by the hen house," she says in mock self-deprecation.
With its rambling grounds, sea views and almost two dozen luxurious rooms and suites, as well as the distinctive red Harvest Room, its award-winning restaurant, this is a relaxed, seductive place, and it's all too easy to be in awe of, and perhaps even a little envious of, the charming young couple who preside over the hotel and restaurant, the purpose-built cookery school and the brand new Molton Brown spa in the former stable block, where customised smoothies and sorbets accompany the beauty treatments.
Having served his time in kitchens at home and abroad - his precocious talent earned him the position of executive head chef with Fairmont Hotels & Resorts in Canada at the age of just 22, followed by a spell in the same role at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin - Kevin Dundon's media profile is on the rise.
There have been appearances on The Afternoon Show, No Frontiers and Ask Anna on RTÉ and Good Food Live on UK Food, a cable channel. He has also popped up on ABC and Fox TV and fronted an ad for Natural Gas in Canada, where he worked for eight years. Now there's the prospect of a show on Irish TV and a book deal.
None of this has happened by chance. Dundoshares his agent with the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. "Martine Carter, from the Deborah McKenna agency in London, looks after all my contracts, representation and public appearances, and she makes sure I'm well covered in terms of anyone using my recipes, photos and name," he says.
In addition to courting a media career, Dundon is involved in several consultancy projects in the US, including a contract to design the food concept for a new Irish gastropub and restaurant opening at Walt Disney World, in Florida, this summer and a consultancy with Nine Fine Irishmen, an Irish pub at the MGM New York-New York Hotel, in Las Vegas. No surprise then, given the amount of travelling he does, that Dundon recently won a couple of airline tickets for being the 50,000th passenger through Waterford regional airport.
Back home in Dunbrody House, the business flair and marketing acumen the couple bring to their business have seen the venture flourish. But it hasn't been all plain sailing: there has been hard graft, too, and some degree of winging it.
What's very evident, though, is that theirs is a highly complementary relationship, even if the boundaries are strictly drawn. "I stay out of the kitchen and garden, and anything to do with contractors and maintenance, and Kevin stays out of anything to do with sales and marketing, reservations, the wine list and interior design," says Catherine.
"We bought the house in October 1996 and started work on it the following January. Kevin acted as project manager while I stayed in Dublin and continued to work in exports. I would travel down every weekend and sand and scrape windows and shutters. Friends and family would come down as well, and it's funny now to be sitting in the bar with one of them, and they will say: 'Do you remember lying on the floor, scraping the old paint from that skirting board?'
"We really did work on a shoestring. Every penny we made went right back into the hotel, and each major development brought more pressure, but never as much as the initial opening. About a week after opening, in the middle of service one night, Kevin went upstairs in the dark and knocked his head open, so we had the local GP come in and give him a few stitches, but he still had to deal with the orders coming in from the restaurant. We did absolutely everything ourselves at the time, with a very limited staff."
So was it all blissfully harmonious? "One of the big decisions to be made at the start was the colour scheme for the dining room. It is such a huge room, and red is such a big colour for a room to deal with. I remember Kevin ringing me at work one day, saying he'd opened the tin of paint and asking if I was really sure about it. I worried for days, until I got down the following weekend. It is still red today, and I have no intention of changing it.
"I recently redecorated the ladies' bathroom, and when Kevin saw the wallpaper I had chosen he just rolled his eyes and sympathised with my decorator, John. But when he saw the finished article he saw where I'd been coming from, and now he loves it."
They have almost doubled the size of the house since they bought it, and Catherine has individually decorated the 22 bedrooms and suites. "The furniture has come from all over the place, antiques where possible but reproduction where necessary. I've had more trouble with antique wardrobes over the years than I care to remember."
The couple, both from Dublin originally, have known each other since they were 17 - "but we're not together since we were 17," Catherine adds hastily - and now have two children. "Emily started school this year, and Sophie, who is nearly two, goes to childcare during the day, so I get my office work done then. We have dinner together every evening, and once they go to bed, usually around 8pm, I can get into the restaurant."
Ironically, Catherine, who went on to study international languages and marketing, was advised by her mother against a career in hotel management, because of the antisocial hours. "Maybe her advice would be different now," laughs Catherine.
DINNER IN NEW YORK
When 100 members and guests of the James Beard Foundation, a US philanthropic organisation that "fosters the appreciation and development of gastronomy", sat down to celebrate St Patrick's Day with a gala dinner at the foundation's base on West 12th Street in Manhattan on Thursday evening, Kevin Dundon was manning the stoves.
"My head chef, Phelim Byrne, also travelled to New York. He knows exactly how I work, and he helped on the operational side of things while I had to do the PR bit with the guests. The James Beard Foundation supplies a full kitchen, with chefs and servers and a maitre d', but my wife, Catherine, was there to do the front-of-house stuff and to run the service the way we do at Dunbrody. Our restaurant is not overly formal, and we like our guests to be relaxed and enjoy all aspects of the dinner."
It's a prestigious honour to be invited to cook at the Beard House, and Dundon's guests included some of the top culinary names in the US, food critics and fellow chefs. The seven-course menu included cappuccino of colcannon soup; mini shepherd's pie; grilled Dublin bay prawns on a lemon-grass risotto with Guinness and prawn-bisque froth; rack of lamb served on Irish-stew consomme, Irish whiskey chocolate fondant, Mine Gabhar goats' cheese and woodland mushroom terrine, and Dunbrody petits fours.
Tourism Ireland lined up several television appearances for Dundon to talk about Irish food and in particular the James Beard dinner, and the event was a highlight of the foundation's spring programme. Now that it's over, Dundon hopes to catch up on the fortunes of his National Hunt racing prospect, Dunbrody Millar, in training with Michael Cullen in New Ross. "He's been third twice recently, and I'd love to see him romping home in style at Cheltenham one day. No harm dreaming." Given that Dundon's professional ambitions are being realised quicker than he can conceive them, it's good he still has something to dream about.
DUNBRODY GOATS' CHEESE, SWEET BASIL AND CHILLI CORNBREAD:
150g polenta
100g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
1 or 2 red chillies finely chopped
15g basil finely chopped
40g Parmesan
100g goats' cheese
2 large eggs
250ml buttermilk
2 tsp olive oil
freshly ground black pepper
salt
Mix together all the dry ingredients except the spices and herbs. Add the chilli, basil, Parmesan and black pepper. Stir in the buttermilk, eggs and olive oil. Crumble in the goats' cheese. Pour into a 1lb loaf tin. Bake at 180 degrees for 40 minutes. Allow the bread to cool before cutting it.