JP McMAHON
career; in Ireland in the late 1990s being a chef was still seen as a lesser profession. “Te older chefs in the kitchens were saying to me ‘don’t be a chef ’, so I think I felt that a little bit.” All the same, the kitchen
and events abroad and wondered why there was nothing like it in his country. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do these things in Ireland? We have great food’,” he recalls. “But people said, ‘oh, they wouldn’t come, we don’t have anything’. Tey said I would be crazy to invite people, but we have loads of things; we have beef, oysters, we have great fish.”
JOURNEY TO THE KITCHEN
In 2015, he hosted the first edition of FOTE in his city on the west coast of Ireland. Te mission was to try to promote Irish food. “Not to say it is the best in the world; just to say we have some really great things in Ireland and we should be proud of them and not always wait for external gratification,” he says. “What I hoped to achieve
was to introduce people from outside Ireland to Irish food culture and on the other hand I hoped that people who came would learn things to make their own culture better.” In the years since launch, he has hosted around 400 chefs and food professionals along
Above: The Aniar dining room. Right: Savory macaroon from the menu
with 300 people in the audience every year. It has turned into a vital community of people who work in the food sector and has explored food from all perspectives: social, cultural, financial, political, scientific and human. He didn’t grow up in a
foodie household, but he learnt to love food, so “I understand that everyone can appreciate it in any capacity,” he says. “When you write a lot about food or you are involved in food, people assume that you are only interested in high end, but I love a really great sandwich or a bowl of soup as much as I love a Michelin-starred meal.” As if to prove his point,
he says that his own starred restaurant, Aniar, offers a kid’s menu – it is half the size of the adult tasting menu of 24 courses but includes the same food. “People worry their kids might make a mess or go crazy or throw things, but I have only had adults do those things, never a child,” he says. His first restaurant job came when he was 15 and joined an Italian restaurant outside Dublin. Here he grew to love making pizzas, bread and pasta. He wasn’t sold on a kitchen
felt like home. “If you were a chef, you were like a pirate. It was almost like you went away, you weren’t seen on weekends anymore, you weren’t seen at family occasions. I thought ‘this is what I want to be’.” He had always been
interested in writing and in art and drama and eventually went to college and did an English and art history degree, but never stopped cooking. It turned into something of a double life; at one point he combined cooking with teaching an art history class at Cork University once a week.
“People thought Aniar was
radical because we didn’t have ingredients that weren’t grown in Ireland”
“I used to drive down and back, and I’d tell nobody about these separate lives,” he says. He learnt “on the fly”,
cooking at home, did stages in restaurants, read food books and associated himself with people he saw as being better or more experienced chefs.
He opened his first own
restaurant in 2008 – Cava Bodega, serving Spanish tapas. “I really wanted to have a restaurant where everyone could come together, sharing food, and the Spanish model was perfect,” he says.
ON THE PATH OF NORDIC CUISINE
Aniar, meaning ‘from the west’ in Irish, followed in 2011. Head chef Enda McEvoy had worked at Noma, which pioneered New Nordic cuisine by cooking with ingredients from the Nordic countries. It was a big influence. “We were very inspired by
that movement and we decided to do something that focused purely on ingredients from Ireland,” he recalls. “People thought it was very radical, just because we didn’t have any spices or other ingredients that weren’t grown in Ireland.” Today Aniar remains the
only restaurant that limits itself to Irish ingredients. Having opened Aniar with humble ambitions, it was a big surprise when the Michelin star came after 14 months. “It was like an avalanche hit the place, we couldn’t cope,” he recalls. Te Michelin effect meant that suddenly the small struggling restaurant was overwhelmed by reservation requests. Along with his partner, he went on to open a third
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