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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, Martin shares some of the changes for the better that he found in Ireland’s food and drink sector when back visiting family this Christmas - and dares to suggest that we may even be ahead of France in some ways at the moment...

It is now six years since we moved out, lock stock and barrel, to France, and nearly nine years since we started the process. We still come back for the odd holiday but it always is that: a holiday.

Somewhere along the line your centre of gravity shifts from one country to another and, even though we could never feel like strangers in Ireland, France has become home.

This gives us a different perspective on Ireland when we arrive on our holiday and, of course we start comparing the two countries- this can be a very interesting exercise because Ireland has done a lot of improving since 2006.

A major change in Ireland has been with the food, food available in the supermarkets, the shops and the markets in Ireland. Ireland is awash with new products, interesting new products, products which have been properly researched and packaged, are well presented and nearly all soundly based on vernacular ingredients.

Wander in the breakfast cereal lane in a supermarket, by the freezers which hold the ice-creams, the chill cabinets with the ready prepared foodstuffs and especially into the drinks section and you will be overwhelmed by the Irish produced goods on offer.

This trend was, in fairness beginning to appear in the early days of the century before we left. Thanks to great work put in by the Slow Food organisation and then individuals like Myrtle Allen, small artisan producers began to come into their own.

Their products began to creep onto the shelves of the smaller shops and the market stalls but then the Celtic Tiger declined and times got tough for everyone. I must confess that my feeling in France was that this could signal the demise of the young artisan industry in Ireland - this was a heavy blow to receive when the industry was just starting.

I am very glad to say that I have been proved quite wrong. The people of Ireland, once they began to taste wonderful Irish hand made cheeses like Milleens and then hundreds of others, have embraced them and I am endlessly grateful that the shelves of processed cheeses have disappeared. Well I thinks so, I saw no Calvita for sale this Christmas.

Strangely it seems to be that the boom and bust which has been Ireland’s economic reality for the last ten or twelve years has fostered this re-birth.

The boom not only created a taste for the finer things in life (not always the more expensive) but also a skilled and educated savvy worker who instead of creeping abroad decided to put their skills to the burgeoning food industry in Ireland and survive. This is nowhere more evident than in the amazing amounts of craft beers now available in the off licences and the more recent arrival of new Irish Gins and Irish Whiskey.

Strangely, France, the home of good food has experienced none of this renaissance in the past years. Partly this is due to the French being already very aware of the quality and variety of their local products.

The French housewife is a very canny shopper and will squeeze and smell several melons before she decides to part with any money. But it is also due to the French being deeply conservative (not always a bad thing) and also just a little complacent (not so good).

It is not an accident that French farmers are an unhappy lot at the moment and complain bitterly about the amount of produce which France imports from abroad. Perhaps, just perhaps, a little innovation, a little added value might attract their customers back? Maybe they should glance at Ireland and see how they are faring?

I have noticed that my local city, Beziers, has just produced a craft beer - my village butcher, who runs a marvellous shop, has it for sale and it is an excellent product. I went to enquire about this in a specialist beer shop in Beziers which had beers from all over the world (including Ireland) but they had not heard of it. Maybe the French Food Revolution hasn’t quite started yet?

As for the picture at the top, well when we got back to our house in the Languedoc having endured the storms of Ireland over Christmas we found that our Mimosa tree was in early blossom- a reminder that there is one thing that France always does better - the weather - Bon Année à Tous!

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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