An Irish Chef in France

Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, is much missed in Ireland since he and his wife Sile sold their eponymous restaurant in Waterford and moved to France. They now live in the Languedoc, where they take guests - and feed them very well.

This month Martin extols the virtues of an under-rated region, The Languedoc.

The Languedoc is not a region of France which has instant recognition from people outside the area. When I say I’m now living here I have to back it up with saying that we are just 100km from the Spanish borders and about 20km north of the Mediterranean.

There are various regions of France which immediately conjure up pictures in the minds of strangers, the yachts and beaches of the Cote d’Azur, the timbered barns of Normandy, the castles of the Loire but the Languedoc doesn’t really have an image which it projects abroad.

This has possibly something to do with its history and its farming tradition, the Languedoc has for a long time been the largest producer of wine in France and has only got around to developing its tourist potential in the last fifty years or so, or roughly about the time when the competition for the quantity over quality policies of the wine growers of the area started to have serious competition from wine producers in Africa, South America and Australia.

Languedoc has got its act together in both of these areas since then. As a wine growing area there was, with some exceptions, not a great history of quality wine making; but now, less shackled by tradition than the better known areas, they are able to use modern scientific methods and materials to produce wines of true quality and at a fraction of the cost compared to those areas relying on Terroir and a more rigid regime of classification.

It is not unknown for, instance, for wines from the Languedoc to actually name the grapes used on the label, a fact not always visible on the labels of other wines from France. But, as their reliance of large productions of cheap wines became undermined, so have the people of the Languedoc turned, late in the day, to tourism to bolster their incomes.

This fact is, of course, of great advantage to us as our Chambre d’Hote is right in the middle of an area previously unknown to visitors from Ireland and England - and indeed Scandanavian visitors, people from Holland and Belgium and even, not exceptionally, French visitors from the North of the country.

One of our daily jobs here, after breakfast, is to advise and guide people on holiday with us on ways to enjoy their stay. We can send them on tours of the beautiful and unspoilt villages in the Haute Languedoc, villages like Roquebrun and Olargues, or slightly further afield to St. Guilhem le Desert, which was founded by Charlemagne, or to Minerve which was a Cathar stronghold and able to withstand for some time the assault of the crusade against them.

For those who like cities, Montpellier and Carcassonne are both beautiful and completely different, and within an hour away, as indeed are Perpignan and Beziers.

A half hour drive to the south of us leads to a dazzling array of sandy beaches comparable to those of the Riviera but without the same amount of close packed bodies. On the Mediterranean also are beautiful little ports like Collioure and Agde, and the larger port of Sete.

As you can see we are spoiled for choices here in the Languedoc and our visitors constant refrain is “Why have we never heard of these places before ?”

Inevitably people staying with us don’t manage to see all the wonders of the area before they leave. This of course gives us an excuse to suggest that a return visit might be in order.
 

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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