An Irish Chef in France

Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, much missed in Ireland since he and his wife Sile sold their eponymous restaurant in Waterford and moved to France, describes how they came to find Le Presbytère, which became the centre of their new life in the Languedoc

As a restaurateur in Ireland it often happened that a customer would shyly come up to one and confide that they “Always had an ambition to run a restaurant”. This was always a moment which required supreme tact. Without somehow giving the idea that one was a total martyr to the cause I always felt obliged to deliver the message that the restaurant business is not at all the glamorous one that people imagine. It requires large measures of stamina, tact, stoicism as well as the more expected flair for entertaining and genius in the kitchen.

It is a bit the same out here in France, everyone seems to have bought into the “Year in Provence” dream and to be confident that with a small down payment and a few hours absorbing the culture they will be sipping pastis in the local café with the locals - there is in fact rather more to it than that.

We had a couple of advantages starting out in our late career change out here. My trump card was without doubt my wife Sile. As a teenager she had gone on several exchanges to a family in Brittany and learned the language, she had afterwards done a degree in French and, just after our marriage in the early seventies, we had both worked together in a Relais Chateau in Anjou - where we had determined that at some stage in our lives we would return to work and live in France.

We never quite lost sight of this goal through all our years of restaurant life in Ireland. Holidays only ever happened in France and, despite appearances to the contrary, we always had half an eye on the area we were holidaying in, checking it out to see if it would one day be graced with our presence.

My language skills, while not equal to Sile’s are passable, my experiences in Anjou gave me good kitchen French and an ability to swear with a certain amount of fluency and, for the last 7 or 8 years before we actually retired I was a weekly attendee at my local Alliance Francais classes in Waterford.

To put it in a nutshell, moving to France is more about honing your language skills that anything else. Of course having spent many years of holidays/research we were far from decided where we would eventually end up so, the summer after we sold the restaurant, we moved to La Belle France for a whole six weeks determined to make the decision as to where we would settle.

Our preferred regions were, The Loire, Burgundy, The Auvergne and The Languedoc. Normandy and Brittany we had already ruled out because they didn’t have enough sun. The Dordogne was, we decided, too British, Provence was too expensive. So we spent a most pleasant six weeks researching.

Both The Loire and Burgundy turned to be also too far north to provide the standards of sun we demanded, so were reluctantly abandoned. The Auvergne, although very appealing and very French was, we felt too inaccessible for Irish clients for a chambre d’hote. This left us with the Languedoc.

As Sile was still teaching at this stage and I was extremely involved in being commissioner general of Euro-Toques we then abandoned the search until the following summer. The summer of 2006 found us in a campsite in Trebes, on the river Aude just outside the city of Carcassonne, preparing to spend the next six weeks searching for the dream home.

We had a list of boxes to tick, it had to have at least six bedrooms, be in the centre of a village, have a certain age (modern French houses are, we soon discovered, as charmless as their counterparts in Ireland) and have a garden capable of fitting a Piscine. It also had to be within a hundred kilometres of Carcassonne which has direct flights to Ireland - this to facilitate our guests and also ourselves on visits home to see our daughters and our grandsons.

We soon discovered that French Estate Agents did not listen to our demands and would show us wildly inappropriate properties which ticked none of our boxes. After a month of discouraging viewings we came across an estate agent in the village of St. Genies de Fontadet who seemed to be listening with some attention to our demands.

Charles had gone to college in England so spoke perfect English, I think that was the reason why we actually showed him our check list. Once he had seen this Charles gathered up all the papers of the properties he was going to show us and put all but two to one side.

“This one” he said holding up one paper, “I will show you for comparison only. This one” holding up the second “Is the one you will buy”. Then he brought us to the first one which seemed to tick the boxes but had no appeal to either of us. The second was in the village of Thezan Les Beziers, an old presbytery which had been unoccupied for several years. He brought us in, it was dark (the shutters being closed) and smelly.

“But this house” he said “has something not on your list which I think you will want after you have seen it”. He went down to the end of the old kitchen and threw open the shutters there. Behind was a large terrace and a garden with a huge tree, the doors faced due south so the sun streamed in and from the terrace there was a beautiful view down the valley of the Orb.

Charles was right, we had found our Chambre d’Hote.

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Martin Dwyer started cooking professionally over 40 years ago in the legendary “Snaffles Restaurant” in Dublin. After a time in a Relais Chateau in Anjou and in “The Wife of Bath” in Kent he opened his own much acclaimed restaurant, “Dwyers”, in Waterford in 1989. In 2004 he sold this and moved south to France where he and his wife Síle bought and restored an old presbytery in a village in the Languedoc. They now run Le Presbytère as a French style Chambre d’Hôte. Martin however is far too passionate about food to give up cooking so they now enjoy serving dinner to their customers on the terrace of Le Presbytère on warm summer evenings. Martin runs occasional cookery courses in Le Presbytère and Síle’s brother Colm does week long Nature Strolls discovering the Flora and Fauna of the Languedoc.

Le Presbytère can be seen at: www.lepresbytere.net;
email: martin@lepresbytere.net