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.

You couldn’t make it up! This month Martin tells us an extraordinary story about the way an English couple discovered this Languedoc retreat

People find us here in the Languedoc for the strangest of reasons but the following story of a couple who arrived this autumn is probably the most unlikely.

An English couple arrived in the door to us one afternoon, English but with properties in France and in the West of Ireland, I will call them the Johnsons. They accepted our offer of Barry’s tea gratefully and we sat down on the terrace to introduce ourselves.

Then having asked us the usual questions, “What’s an Irish couple doing in France etc.” I then asked them how they had heard of us and what had persuaded them to book in for a few days out of the blue. Mr. Johnson then cleared his throat and proceeded to tell us the saga of The Camper Van.

In England they had invested in a second hand Ford camper van which they had thought to use to explore France. No sooner had they brought the vehicle down to their French abode but she seized up and would only travel in first gear, the local French garage confessed themselves flummoxed and sent it on to the Ford dealer in the nearest town.

They announced that it needs a new gearbox, €4,500 worth of new gear box. Our friends were surprised but decided to proceed as otherwise their entire investment would have been wasted. However there was more news a few days later from the French garage. Having tried all the usual avenues he regretted but he could not source a new gearbox for the van.

The Johnsons then rang their local garage in Ireland’s west and the mechanic told them that he felt he could manage something, if they could get the van back to him. After much negotiation with their travel insurance the Johnsons discovered that they were covered to be repatriated back to a ferry with the van and so hired a car and watched their precious van put on to an ambulance and driven to Cherbourg.

They were able to drive the van on to the ferry (“first gear was working fine”) and had made arrangements to be met at the other side with another ambulance to bring them up west, Mr. Johnson in the ambulance Mrs. in the hired car.

The driver explained early on to Mr. Johnson that they were going to have to detour to Waterford (my old home town) and change drivers as the time in his taco graph was up. So down they headed to Waterford and changed drivers and they headed off on the long road west.

Mr. Johnson and the new driver fell into conversation on the way and he told him about his life and his house in France. The driver in his turn told him about a man who “was a brilliant chef” and a client of his father’s garage who had a restaurant in Waterford but had sold up and headed to the wilds of France to make his fortune fairly late in his life. “He had the best restaurant in Waterford” the driver lamented “and we miss it since he went”.

Mr. Johnson was intrigued and asked the driver the name of this prodigy. “Martin Dwyer” he was told. So when they got back to the west Mr. Johnson determined to find out more of this man, googled him, found him, and on their next trip down south in France (this one) determined to stay with us. At this stage I interrupted him and asked him was the garage owner able to get a new gear box for the van.

“I rang him a few days after we got back” he told me, "and asked him just that."
“Ah the van is all fixed” he said, “it just needed a fill of oil in the gear box - they have a cut out mechanism when the oil gets low there, that’s why it was stuck.” Mr. Johnson only had to pay for the oil.
“Well,” I said,”It was just as well you were so misdiagnosed in France and had to travel back to Ireland”
“Why” said Mr Johnson
“Otherwise you would never have found your way here”

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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