AN art auction report in The Irish Timesalerted me. "Jammet Surprise", the headline read, and the news was that at a sale in Sheppard's in Durrow, Co Laois, the visitors' book which had been in Dublin's Jammet's restaurant from 1945 until it closed in 1967 had been bought for €12,000, thankfully by another Dublin restaurant, Peploe's on St Stephen's Green.
Saved for the nation! Saved, a volume of signatures from people who went in and out of a restaurant, paid the bill and, depending on how they enjoyed it, might have gone back again.That is, however, but half the story.
Where might I get an insight into what Jammet's was like in, say, the 1960s when it was at its height as a Dublin restaurant, with added oyster bar and grill room when the world's great and good sat down for lunch or dinner? The answer was a few hundred yards away from where I live in London's Hampstead. Around the corner, across the road and no more than 200 yards away lives my dear friend Patrick Anthony, sometime television chef, actor and stand-up comedian who has appeared in Ready Steady Cookand was my Saturday morning chef on TV-am in the 1980s, writer, broadcaster and, as a 15-year-old boy just out of the Christian Brothers in Donore Avenue . . . a junior waiter at Jammet's.
As we sat over a quiet drink in our local pub – handily equidistant between our two houses – I let Patrick tell his own story. “I was on a bus which turned past Trinity College and was starting to head up Nassau Street when I saw Jammet’s. I remembered that a pal of mine had worked there so I got off the bus, went in, asked for a job and was taken on as the lowest of the low waiters on, I think 23 shillings a week. That was holiday work but as it turned out it actually changed my young life.”
In those days there were few restaurants in Dublin where it was more important to be, to eat, to drink and be seen. With Jammet's there would have been the Red Bank, the Hibernian Hotel, the Russell Hotel and the Shelbourne Hotel. Jammet's, however, as Patrick recalls, was theplace. And he recalls the characters he met with his own superbly turned phrases, legacy to a lifetime as a literate, thoughtful and engaging performer in public and in private: "Well, there was Madame Yvonne Jammet, a figure one rarely saw and only at a revered distance, a patron of the arts, and it was always believed she subsidised Micheál MacLíammóir and Hilton Edwards's food and drink. They were wonderful and so entertaining. Micheál could make the act of pouring a cup of coffee into a theatrical moment all of its own. He would stand up, shooting a be-jewelled cuff and pouring accurately from a considerable height. And Hilton I particularly remember from the day I offered him spinach and he looked up and said 'oh yes please, I must keep my school-girl complexion'."
Patrick spent a few years in Jammet’s and enjoyed the parade of names that came to eat and drink. “Apart from the main restaurant there was the grill room upstairs and the oyster bar which was entered from a lane, Adam Court I think it is, at the back of the main building. It was not unusual mid-way through an afternoon for us to hear coming from there the wonderful singing of the great Josef Locke. He was a regular.”
As a young man Patrick was quick to pick up the social geography of Jammet’s. “Just inside the door there was a table on the right known as the Royal Box. I was working one lunchtime when word spread around the kitchen . . . Peter Ustinov is in the Royal Box! I didn’t actually serve him but one day I was told to take a double fillet steak cooked bleu, that is hardly cooked at all, to a table and I discovered I was serving Orson Welles. The Royal Dublin Society Horse Show every year was a time for the best of British and Irish society to come. I wouldn’t, at age 15, have known many of them, but I always wanted to be an actor, to be on the stage, so I would have recognised Sir Donald and Lady Wolfit when they came in for lunch, though, funnily enough, that was the most embarrassing moment of my young career.
“Sir Donald asked for just a pear for his dessert, so I brought it on a plate, complete with fruit knife and fork. I kept an eye on them and after about 10 minutes I saw the pear was still in position on the plate, so I asked if there was anything wrong. Sir Donald then lifted the stalk of the pear and to my amazement I discovered that he had taken the skin off expertly, eaten the pear and replaced the skin to make it look just as I had served it!”
After a while at Jammet’s Patrick Anthony decided he wanted to learn about cooking, restaurants and the food industry and its business, so he enrolled at the catering college in Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin, graduating after three years.
“By then London was calling. It had always been my dream, so I took the boat to England in 1963 and joined the J Lyons group – famous for its Corner Houses and its ‘nippys’, waitresses in black and white uniforms with clipped-on smiles – but all the time I wanted to go on the stage”.
Determination carried him to Sheffield where he did stand-up comedy routines in working men's clubs and managed to get a job in local repertory where his first role was as the butler in a production of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
By now he had his eyes on television. “I auditioned for a job as a newsreader on Harlech television, HTV. Got the job and became the first Irishman to read the Welsh news in English.”
Next it was Anglia television where again as a newsreader he was part of a small team. Come Christmas the editor asked for ideas. "I suggested I should show viewers how to make a proper Irish coffee. It worked and for the next 20 years I presented Patrick's Pantry, worked on TV-am, where you and I first met, and programmes like Ready, Steady, Cook. Great fun!"
These days Patrick Anthony writes for the Guild of Food Writers’ web site magazine, travels around Europe lecturing and writing about the food that matters and never forgets his roots in Dublin, where his mother still lives. I wonder if he has a pang of nostalgia when he passes what used to be Jammet’s? “Not really, Henry, the restaurant’s a bar now and upstairs it’s a terribly posh night-club called Lillie’s Bordello and I don’t think either of us would be allowed in!”
Great friend, lovely man, keeping alive the memory of a great restaurant in a memorable time.