PROFILE - CONRAD GALLAGHER:From the age of nine, when he pretended to be 14 to work in a kitchen, Conrad Gallagher's flair and ambition have marked him out as a chef of genius – and, as he is bankrupt once again, a disastrous businessman
THERE WAS A distinct feeling of deja vu this week with the news that chef Conrad Gallagher has been declared bankrupt in South Africa, where he has been based for the last few years. Haven’t we been here before with Gallagher, an over-expanding business, and financial troubles?
Donegal-born Gallagher, who currently owes almost €200,000 to creditors in South Africa, seems to have been around forever, so much has he packed into his life to date, but he’s still only 38. Part of the reason he seems to have been around much longer than he actually has, is that even as a child, he was already wholly focused on his primary life goal – cooking.
When he was nine, he pretended he was 14 so he could work in the kitchens of the Mount Errigal Hotel in Letterkenny. That a child of nine managed to pass himself off as a teenager says as much about Gallagher’s powers of persuasion even then.
Gallagher himself told this paper in 1998, “I spent most of my time mitching from my school in Letterkenny – I was too busy working in local kitchens, learning how to chop vegetables and prepare really basic things like soup and bread.” However you look at it, not many nine-year-olds possess that combination of strong personality, compelling work ethic and such utter certainty about what they want to do.
He attended the Killybegs Catering College before heading to the glitzier training ground of New York, where he worked at Donald Trump’s Plaza Hotel, and then the Waldorf Astoria’s Peacock Alley, a name that he was later to use for his own first restaurant in Dublin. He headed back across the Atlantic again to work with French chef Alain Ducasse in his three-Michelin-starred Monte Carlo restaurant, the Louis XV.
IN HIS EARLY 20s, he came back to Ireland, working briefly for Morel's in Glasthule before he opened Peacock Alley in a Baggot Street basement, in 1995. His food immediately received extravagant praise from the critics. In The Irish Times, John McKenna described it as "wild, outrageously involved cooking", declaring that "each course is an exhilarating excursion through flavours, an intense reworking of our expectations of what cooking is about".
The restaurant was always packed, and in less than a year, Gallagher had moved it to a premises twice the size, on South William Street. At the time he moved, he confessed that he was “having to rob Peter to pay Paul”. Was it at this very early point that the spending started to stray slightly out of control?
The new restaurant cost a small fortune to equip and set up. The specially-commissioned dinner plates alone, for example, cost €150 each – and this was 13 years ago. Within two years, he had won a Michelin star, was sporting a Rolex and driving a Porsche. He also successfully overcame testicular cancer, had a daughter with his then partner, Domini Kemp, and published the first of several cookery books.
By 2000, Peacock Alley had moved again, this time to the Fitzwilliam Hotel, and Gallagher had opened, or been involved with, three other restaurants: Lloyds Brasserie, Christopher’s Brasserie, later reopened as Mango Toast, and Ocean. Suppliers went unpaid. Rents soared. Restaurants closed. The day he went broke, he owed 12 suppliers. One pattern has emerged consistently over the years: in the kitchen, Gallagher has force, energy and drive, but he has been accused of being an epically lousy businessman. Speaking on Gerry Ryan’s radio show two years ago, Gordon Ramsey told listeners that, in his opinion, “Conrad Gallagher couldn’t run a bath, not to mind a group of restaurants”.
Eight years ago, he teamed up with the Mean Fiddler in London to open a restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue. The opening date was the supremely unlucky one of September 12th, 2001. The restaurant was not a financial success, nor a critical one. The critic from the Daily Telegraphdescribed his experience there as "one of the worst meals of my life". Within a year, Gallagher had left the restaurant.
It was back to New York, where he married Californian Jennifer Harrison, and set up yet another business in Manhattan. Traffic, a minimalist-style lounge bar, served food and was doing well. However, at home in Ireland, there was a dispute about the ownership of three paintings by Felim Egan worth €10,900, that had previously hung in Peacock Alley in the Fitzwilliam Hotel.
In 2003, Gallagher was arrested in his own restaurant and extradited to Dublin to stand trial for his alleged theft of the paintings. Prior to his extradition, he was held for some weeks at the Brooklyn Detention Centre, where he was attacked by a Colombian drug lord, ending up with two cracked ribs and a split lip. Cooking kept him sane in prison. He went back to doing what he’d been doing when he was nine – chopping vegetables. “I would take the blade from my razor and very carefully chop up pieces of broccoli, garlic, potato, cauliflower, carrots,” he later said. “Maybe I’d get an Oxo cube from somebody, or somebody would smuggle a spice from the kitchen. I’d spend as long as I could chopping vegetables as it would kill the time. You can do a lot with a microwave. If you absolutely have to.”
During the court proceedings in Ireland, the court heard from his former personal assistant, Sophie Flynn Rogers, that “We had a rule that when I rang him in the morning on the way to work I couldn’t give him bad news first, nothing about money, I had to tell him something happy first.”
During that time, the court also heard that Gallagher employed 250 people but had no audited accounts, and had not sought any legal or financial advice when he relocated Peacock Alley to the Fitzwilliam Hotel. At the end of the six-day trial, Gallagher was found not guilty of theft. The paintings were later sold and the proceeds donated to charity.
SINCE THEN, GALLAGHER has divorced from Harrison, remarried and moved to South Africa, where he has been running a series of businesses for the last six years. His second wife, Candice Coetzee, is South African, and they have two children.
In 2003, Gallagher told the Observer, "I don't think you need to be a great businessman to run two restaurants. With four or five, it's completely different. You have to be a genius at business and I am patently not. In fact I am, as I know now, simply a terrible businessman."
At present, his website declares that “Conrad Gallagher Consulting Pty Ltd is a unique food and beverage consultancy group specialising in building restaurant concepts for five- and six-star hotel and resort companies around the globe. Currently with projects in six different countries with over 40 restaurant, cafe, bar and lounge concepts under construction.”
Gallagher has been trying to wrap up his affairs in South Africa for more than a year, but the worldwide recession and property crash has also hit that part of the world. Among the businesses he has been running there is a Cape Town restaurant called the Geisha Wok and Noodle Bar, and four cafes. He now has until September 5th to pay off his debts or a bankruptcy order will be granted.
He told this newspaper on Thursday, “I am going to South Africa next week and my attorney and I will try to negotiate an arrangement. The problem is, even if we can, it doesn’t solve the problem that the properties are worth half what they were.”
Gallagher, who is currently in Ireland with his family, wants to move back here permanently and hopes to put his children in school this September, depending on how his wife “acclimatises”, as he put it.
There had been rumours that he was in talks with Louis Murray, the owner of La Stampa on Dawson Street, about Gallagher taking over the restaurant there. He told an Irish Sunday newspaper last month that “sometimes, in a tough economic climate, come great opportunities” and “if the right opportunity comes up I’ll be spending a lot more time in Dublin”.
Maybe Murray’s opportunity isn’t the right one for Gallagher – or at least, not right now, since this week he said it was not “the right time” to get into the restaurant business here.
Well, that was this week. Given Gallagher’s history of compulsively starting up new businesses, it could be another story next week.
CV CONRAD GALLAGHER
Who is heA chef, formerly with Michelin stars
Why is he in the newsHe was declared bankrupt this week by the western Cape High Court in South Africa
Most likely to say"I never give up."
Least likely to say"I've been to Harvard Business School."
Most appealing characteristicHis ability to cook Michelin-starred food
Least appealing characteristicHis inability to balance the books
