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: La Cuisine d’ Été (‘Summer Kitchen’)

It began, as all good mystery tales do, with a lost staircase.

A couple of the locals had said that there used to be a staircase from our old Presbytere perched high in the centre of the village of Thezan, down to the street below. We couldn’t find any trace of this.

Then our neighbours bought the property directly in front of, and beneath us, to turn this into a garage. In the very back of this building they found a very old doorway. When they asked the seller where this led he said he had absolutely no idea and had never noticed it before.

They, being from Normandy and naturally curious , opened the door. There they discovered an ancient stone staircase which ran underneath our property climbing to the corner of our garden where it would have met our stone steps, leading down from our terrace, had this not been sealed off some time in the past.

This underground staircase was roofed by some stone arches and also by some iron girders which supported our garden above. Now these girders had rusted away to cobwebs since the years they had been installed so we had to replace them with concrete.

While we were employing a builder to do this, I got him to check out our terrace because it occurred to me that this was of a similar age to the roofing of the staircase. Unfortunately for us, the very same rusty cobwebs were the main support of our terrace so we had to replace the whole structure.

Our canny builder sweetened the pill for us by explaining that while he was replacing the terrace it would cost very little extra to increase its size by about twenty percent. As our terrace is the most important room in our house and the place we feed our guests for about six months out of twelve, this gave us a lot more space there.

There was also an extra bonus because the courtyard underneath the terrace was also increased in size and this space, which had previously been used as a garden shed for our little Jardin de Curé, now became a most attractive space and this was the moment when I got the notion of turning this space into a Cuisine d’ Été.

Because I had a restaurant for so long in Ireland, where I was the cook, I had gathered over the years a loyal clientele who are still enjoy my cooking here in the Languedoc in my Chambre d’Hôte. This often led me to cooking seven nights in a row, and even though I am still a chef who loves feeding people, I would prefer, in my old age, a few nights off in the week.

Now a lot of Chambre d’Hôtes in France boast a Coin Cuisine, which is a kitchen where the guests can cook for themselves - we had often sought out these when we were driving through France on our summer holidays when the children were young. It was amazingly handy, and cheap, to stay overnight in a place where our children could be fed a familiar meal before continuing on our journey. If you were lucky enough to have a garden these Coins Cuisines became a cuisine d’été or summer kitchen.

Our courtyard was a perfect space for this, it is completely protected from the elements by the terrace and yet one side of it opens out to the garden so it becomes a lovely space to eat out in the summer months.

So since Christmas this year we have been busying ourselves, searching Vide Greniers and Brocantes, looking for bits and pieces to furnish our second kitchen, and finally, just last week, we were able to let our first set of guests, a party of four from Ireland and Germany, enjoy the charms of the Coin Cuisine.

They pronounced it a great success, but the real test was yet to come. This week I had my two grandsons to stay and we decided to treat them to a barbecue in the cuisine d’été. We gathered together a simple meal of local sausages, some with ceps and some with paprika, and made some garlic bread from the abundant patch of wild garlic which springs up every year in the garden.

My eldest grandson Fionn, who at seven years old is a bit of a gourmet, told me at the end that it was “the best meal ever”. I reckon we can call it a success.

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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

Twitter: www.twitter.com/DwyerThezan