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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: On being an Irishman in France

It is very difficult to discover what the French people really think of us - they have a lot of different notions about Ireland.

Their first reaction often, is to describe us as English, when we inevitably bridle at that they say blithely - “Well but you are Anglo-Saxon aren’t you?” I usually explain - with some venom - that if I am Anglo Saxon then they are Belgian - not something that they aspire to.

There is another reaction which amazes us, we who think that the sun sets and rises on the Emerald Isle. This is that some do not have a single notion about what Ireland is or where it might be. One visitor looking at a watercolour in our living room of the beach in Dunmore East said in puzzlement “But do you have the sea in Ireland?” We think she imagined that Ireland was a landlocked Baltic state.

I do think it is fair to say that as a nation the French haven’t spent a long time worrying about the “Irish Question” and how - with a few exceptions (which I will come back to) - they have but a shadowy picture of Ireland as a wet green rocky placed attached on to a holiday park called Le Connemara.

I should perhaps here say that this is not an attitude generally held throughout France but here in the Languedoc. In Brittany for example they have a very close knowledge of their Celtic cousins and there is a lot of intercommunication in terms of culture, music and indeed fishing. (In our local fishing village of Dunmore East in Waterford there are at least three Breton/Dunmore marriages).

But to get back to the exceptions, there are in fact, here in the Languedoc two outstanding factors about Ireland with which the natives are fully conversant.

One is the music, Irish music is thought of extremely highly and much performed by choirs and musical groups. Our local village in Thezan this year celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with an excellent concert of Irish songs and tunes. They even managed to dance a passable version of the Walls of Limerick and the Stack of Barley.

But the second, and the most important reason that the people from Languedoc know about Ireland is, of course, Le Rugby. When we tell rugby fans that we are Irish their first question is from which part. The answer of Cork, or Waterford or Dublin leaves them impatient. “No, no, they say, is it Munster, Leinster or Connaught?”

It is a delight to be able to claim Munster but it does leave me with a bit of a dilemma. As the seventh child in a hugely sporty family I always ignored all games, particularly Rugby which was compulsory in my Cork school.

Now I find that I am trying to brush up on my limited knowledge of the game, especially before I visit the chemist who has never missed France playing away in Dublin.

I did get a little sweet revenge last week when, just after Ireland won the championship, I had a set of five “Rugbymen” staying; they were having a reunion of their college team in the village.

Half way through their breakfast I brought them a basket of my own Irish Brown Bread, a bit of an acquired taste in France. “Now,” I said “eat this all up and you too might get to win like Ireland”. They had the grace to laugh, but they ate all the bread.

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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