THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: IF A QUESTION is anything longer than a dozen words, Richard Corrigan will start answering it half-way through, so after a while you learn to try and keep them brief.
At times he’ll machine-gun a sentence with a blah-blah-blah or a da-da-da, so that in transcription it can read a little like the oddest Eurovision lyrics ever written. He rarely employs a pause. Words string out; sentences shunt up against each other like train carriages hitting a buffer.
Punctuation will be a simple expletive; his full stops are a “you know what I mean”; his commas an “I’ll be honest with you”. Most have been edited out here, because otherwise we’d get to the foot of the page without having got past question four.
Quiet, stillness and boredom do not suit him. “I like work. I like being busy. It’s a state of mind. I don’t think I’d be a happy person if I wasn’t working, so I keep myself busy. I don’t have pastimes as such. I go fishing and I get bored after an hour. I think, where’s the f***ing fish? Give me the fish and I’ll cook the fish and we’ll drink a nice bottle of wine, but I’m not sitting here all day looking for the fish. I went shooting a few times with a bunch of London city rich types who talk about shooting duck and then won’t eat the duck. I only like to go doing things with people who want to eat the food.”
Were they just too lazy?
“Absolutely. My idea would be to get the duck, pluck the duck, clean the duck, cook the duck, eat the duck. They’ll just stand there saying, ‘we don’t do wild duck’. I’m going, oh right, please. I’m not into just standing round some lake as the ducks come in, popping them out of the sky for a bit of pleasure. I think hunting and fishing has to be done with the whole idea of supplying tables with food. I don’t take it as some kind of recreational sport. That’s what was done as a child. Every Sunday we went out hunting rabbits. I have wild rabbit on in the Mayfair restaurant at the moment. We’ve squirrel as well.”
Squirrel?
“Yeah, from Lancashire. Grey squirrels. It’s just vermin, we can shoot them all day. If I put red squirrels on, I might have a little bit of a problem.”
Do people buy the squirrel? “People eat it, never mind buy it. It tastes a bit between a rabbit and a chicken really. It’s nice. They’re quite discerning in what they want to eat, squirrels. So that will always impact on the flavour of the meat.”
It’s impossible to resist asking if squirrels taste a little nutty, which he greets with a burst of rippling laughter. “Oh yes, it has walnut flavours on the back of the pallet,” he jokes, doing his best impression of a plummy foodie, before straightening up quickly. “In fact, I’ve eaten everything, baby crows, rook pie. I always think rook pie was invented by the landed gentry to give to the peasants, you know what I mean, because frankly it’s like eating boiled rat in a stew. I haven’t felt like throwing up often in my life, but eating the rook pie up in Arlington, in north Yorkshire in the Pennines, oh God that’s the nearest I ever came to throwing up.” What would he not eat? “I mightn’t eat dog. If I was hungry I’d eat dog. But if I had a choice I mightn’t eat dog. I like dogs. If you liked horses would you eat a horse? I don’t think so.” He would, he adds, eat horse.
I tell him that I've eaten whale. He leans back, glowering. "You see. I wouldn't eat whale. I'd eat foie gras. I know people call that cruelty and would call that double standards, but to eat whale I think you should be put up against a wall and shot. If you've got anything like a dolphin or a whale that has any level of intelligence . . . I'm only a cook, right, but clearly it has a little more [intelligence] than your dog, and reason or not to a certain extent, then I think we are talking about probably our own ancestors, something in our DNA. And I think we should be very careful."
Corrigan looks like he’d throw a person against a wall with little bother. He’s at least a couple of inches over six feet, and his short-sleeved whites are wrapped around a barrel chest that acts as a bellows for that voice.
Sometimes Corrigan talks, but much of the time he performs. In a quiet, near empty room he answers as if a crowd has gathered around. He is also a terrible name dropper. Replace the whites with a shirt and he could be an actor in repose.
In an early mention of him in The Irish Times, in 1992, the journalist noted that "anonymity is not a state he craves". The picture that accompanied it featured him on the steps of Mulligan's restaurant in London, whites on, mouth in mid-sentence, pint in his hand. Not that different, in fact, from some of the pictures taken for this interview, except that the pint is missing now. It's immediately obvious why it is a journalistic requirement for the word "garrulous" to be attached to him in any interview or restaurant review. Certainly, his personality appears to have been shaped out of the two major periods of his life: growing up in a large rural family; and establishing his career in the headiness of Soho. The result would have the potential to backfire on him, if he wasn't backing it up with food that has made him one of the most lauded, and interesting, chefs in Ireland and Britain.
CORRIGAN WAS BORN in 1964, one of seven children brought up on a 25-acre farm (“plus about 50 acres of bog”) in Ballivor, Co Meath. He was the third child, learning how to be cute “so you end up kind of being able to do things by mutual consent. In your favour.”
He left school at 14, and went into hotel work before going to Amsterdam at just 16, to be either broken or become a chef. He took with him the experience of childhood hunts and self-sufficiency, of fishing and growing, of birds draining from the ceiling, of tracking the seasons, of wasting nothing, of effort and preparation and, most importantly, of taste. He brought that informal education, influences and intuition to kitchens in London: a Michelin star in 1994 for Stephen Bull’s restaurant in London; another star at his own Lindsay House in Soho; a chef-of-the-year award.
His profile in Ireland has grown, although mostly through his comments about the poor state of Irish chicken. The reaction to his comments rattled him, but he says he has no regrets about them. In recent years, though, the food has come to the fore. He bought Bentley’s in London in 2005 and last year opened Corrigan’s Mayfair, to collective drooling among Britain’s food critics.
Until last year, he ran two restaurants at the late Dr Tony Ryan’s Lyons Demesne in Co Kildare, after which he opened a Bentley’s on St Stephen’s Green, which is where we meet.
While the restaurant fills up for lunch, we are upstairs in the near-empty Aviator Bar, with its wall-length paintings of melting bottles of Guinness and Coke, and mini-biplanes hanging from the wall. Outside the window, the winter sun sharpens St Stephen’s Green.
“I do like this building,” he says. “It’s not about the grandeur. I just think it’s nice that the public have access to this Georgian heritage that everyone treats so reverently.” The young barman carries an appreciable apprehension as he pours our tea. He addresses Corrigan as “chef”.
“Restaurants are not about smiling for the camera,” Corrigan says.
“It’s about motivating a lot of people to do a lot of little jobs, very well, every day, 365 days a year. A pretty monotonous task really, you know what I mean? You know, all those years ago when I starting off I was really happy, sort of; Jesus I was such an optimistic individual. I still am optimistic . . . ” he gives an exaggerated sigh, flops forward on the table “. . . but it’s getting tougher.”
In what way? “The responsibility of the payroll every month, the staff. I mean, I do care. I’m not some cowboy who flits around, who drives a f***ing Ferrari into work. I go around on a Vespa. I’m kind of proud of that.” He hams it up. “I’m proud of my working-class roots, really. You know what I mean? Any upgrade in my life I take with great embarrassment. I do, I do, I do.”
A couple of downgrades are currently on the cards. He will reduce his portfolio to three restaurants by not renewing his lease on Lindsay House, so handing in a Michelin star he’s had for 10 years.
“I didn’t lose interest in Lindsay, I lost interest in Soho,” he insists. He had experienced a creeping sense that he wasn’t fulfilling his potential. “For 14 years I’ve done nothing only Lindsay House, which is a quarter of the size of this place [Bentley’s]. I had a great membership to a lot of places, the Groucho Club being one of them. I’ve had a great amazing 10 years, the whole Brit Art revolution I’ve witnessed it, I’m part of that Soho bohemian set, so there’s another part of me you don’t see.
“But then there was one year I woke up, I think when I was 40, I thought that’s all really nice, I really had a great time, I mean I’ve done things like drinking champagne with Tracey Emin, you know what I mean? I’m a member of the Colony Club, the Groucho, you know what I mean? It’s hard to kind of understand in a Dublin sense. We were all part of that mad London movement, Labour getting elected, drinking champagne on the street, I was there, you know what I mean? I really enjoyed that. But when I reached 40 I thought that’s it, I’m moving on to the next level. Ten years, enjoyed it. And you could easily become your own caricature if you’re not careful. Late night, Soho, alcohol, blah-blah-blah. I was determined not to be the typical happy Irish drunk.”
This time he adopts a Peter O’Toole impression. “Oh, been there and done that in the 1950s and 1960s. So bang, stopped it.”
CORRIGAN HAS two sons, 19 and nine, and a daughter aged 13. His job does not lend itself to being a parent. “I think it is quite difficult, there’s no question about it, but when you’re as ambitious in your 20s and 30s you don’t see what you’re missing out on, you can only reflect on it as you’re getting a little bit older and more reason enters your brain, what you need to get the balance right. And certainly in my business it’s all-encompassing. You’re not home at five o’clock, you’re not home at nine o’clock, so there is a certain sense of missing out on things. There’s no question about it. And I do often think about that. I wish I was someone who went home at five o’clock every day, but I’m in this business and this business is 100 per cent and the day you don’t do it 100 per cent is the day it all falls apart into a dreadful mess.”
He wouldn’t persuade his children to follow him into the business. “My eldest son, I think he detests our business. Not out of anything . . . I just think he sees the graft, because he’s always been in the kitchens or in the business since around 13 or 14, helping and seeing the work and the exhaustion and the hardship. And I just think he runs a mile from it, and he’s right.” Corrigan’s eldest son is in Galway studying business, having been a boarder in a secondary school in Roscrea, Co Tipperary; his daughter is a boarder in Newtown, Waterford.
Their sense of Irishness matters to him. “Don’t take that as ultra kind of quasi f***ing nutter,” he says.
He has a plot in Arthurstown, Co Wexford, that he’d like to build on, but “I couldn’t afford an Irish builder up until now”. It has never, he insists, been a case of him coming back to Ireland because “I never left”. Yet, opening Bentley’s brought a certain culture shock. “I think suppliers in Dublin have been taking the piss for the last f***ng 10 years. Especially on fish. And basically if they don’t get real we’ll find our fish from other people, we’ll buy them straight from the trawlers, so get real. Get bloody real. A black sole in Dublin costs me €23.50, a black sole in London costs me €12.50. Hang on, is there something wrong, am I missing something?”
He has lofty ambitions for Bentley’s, but based on not so lofty principles. “Restaurants in Dublin at a certain end, they’re only for those with very deep pockets and very large overdrafts in banks and basically I’m determined to break that rule. I really am, I’m really f***ing angry about certain parts of it, you know what I mean? I’ve seen price rises in this town that are just out of proportion with any European country, there’s just no sense to it. “It’s not about coming in for Richard Corrigan to give you a little bit of f***ing gelatine foam on top of a little bit of fish, it’s not about that. It’s anti-kitchen ego. That’s what it’s about. And Dublin will get it. Bentley’s will become an institution over the next few years and I am determined to make it an institution.”
He laughs at how he has set up at a difficult time (“Difficult? What do you mean difficult? It’s the worst f***ing depression since 1932!”) and Bentley’s is currently one of six restaurants in Dublin offering midweek lunches for €20. “Recession brings a great deal of common sense with it. You put your egos in your back pocket and try and get on and be really excellent at what you do.” Chefs, he believes, don’t have to be consumed by the idea of fine dining to deliver good food. “I was more ambitious about food in my 30s, but I don’t think I had the same respect for food as I do now. It’s maturity. Maybe instead of giving yourself pleasure and ego, maybe you’re trying to let customers think ‘God that was good, maybe I’ll come back here next week’. Instead of, ‘thank you for our yearly visit to our fine dining restaurant’.”
WHEN IN DUBLIN he doesn't get overly involved in the kitchen, offering advice and help but opting not to crowd out Bentley's head chef Seán Smith. What does Corrigan think, then, of Gary Rhodes or Gordon Ramsay, who have each been criticised for being absentee chefs in their Irish ventures? "I'm not making any money on this place. This is my private and personal time I put into Dublin. I'm not on the payroll, there's no dividends because it doesn't make any money . . . Gary's time is about getting paid for every plate of food served over the counter. He's a consultant."
He says the word with a practised measure of disgust. “Gordon has his own consultancy deal in Powerscourt, he’s paid an obscene amount of money for being a consultant.” A grin takes over his face. “By the way, they signed the right deal. My naivety has led me to where I am, do you understand?” He gives them a slow, mocking handclap. “But well done Gordon, well done Gary. I should have asked them first, as a Scot and an Englishman, how to do a deal in Ireland.”
If he had put his energy and enthusiasm into any other profession, he believes he would be “living in a big house on a big hill with a f***ing butler and a cook and a private jet in the driveway. I really mean that.” When he says that he is proud of the team he has built, he adds: “I’m always beating their f***ing arse every bloody week, in every way possible you wouldn’t believe, about making things better, doing better.”
Is he hard to work with? He greets the question with a rare pause, gives the table a tap, tap, tap with his phone. “I’m relentless, which probably makes me hard. I’m not hard. I think I’m a nice guy, to be honest with you. I don’t mean to say that in a bad way. I can get contrary. I hate inconsistency. I shouldn’t say hate; hate is a s**t word. The annoyance and irritation of people making obvious mistakes, it’s ball-crunching.”
His new year's resolution was to give up shouting in the kitchen. "I'm not going to be passionately angry anymore, I'm just going to be passionate and maybe a little bit quieter. I am. And by the way, I think it's having a better effect. Everyone's expecting me to reach over and killthem, and I don't do that any more."
The interview ends. He motions to the young barman. “That jacket is too short. You need a better fit. Go and find another one.” Small jobs. Very well.
