When Paul and Máire Flynn opened The Tannery restaurant in Dungarvan , Co Waterford, in July 1997, it was the first time Máire had worked in a restaurant. Well, not quite, if you count the two nights she spent in Kevin Thornton’s eponymous Michelin-star restaurant in Dublin. “Paul thought it would be very good training for me,” she says sardonically. “I learned one very valuable thing there. There was a really glamorous waitress working there, and she used to pick up a knife and check her lipstick, and I just thought, God, that’s a really good tip. So that’s what I learned in Kevin Thornton’s.”
The Flynns, both from Dungarvan, met on a blind date in Dublin in May 1991. The date had been set up by a friend, Declan Maxwell , who many will know as the manager of Dublin 8 restaurant Spitalfields. It was a match, and Máire moved to London, where Paul was living, six months later.
Paul is the youngest of eight, and his father had hoped that he would study to be a pharmacist and take over the family business. His lack of interest in school made it obvious that this was unlikely, however. “I never gave him much trouble, but I never gave him much hope either,” says Paul, recalling how his career inspiration came from elsewhere.
“[A]ctually, this is really timely,” he says, “because last night my very first mentor came to the restaurant to eat for only the second time, and maybe the last time I saw him was 20 years ago. His name is Paul McCloskey.”
McCloskey had been the chef at Merry’s pub on the opposite corner in Dungarvan. It was a highly rated restaurant, McCloskey having staged at Paul Bocuse in France and worked in the Savoy in London. Paul had finished a Fás course and a stint in the Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil (FSA) kitchen, but Merry’s was the first serious kitchen environment he had encountered.
“He made me want to cook, and he made me be ambitious,” says Paul. “So, a day after my 18th birthday, I went to London.”
Like any young chef, he took whatever jobs he could get, working for a year in two hotels, all the time furiously writing to Michelin star restaurants. A short, unhappy stint at one of the Roux brothers’ restaurants was quickly consigned to history when he landed a job where he felt he would have the opportunity to grow.
“I had written to Nico Ladennis, who had a two-star at the time, only one of four two-stars in the UK, I did the interview, and he gave me a job,” says Paul. “It was very much a different scene, it was very familial – there was a mammy, and there was a daddy, and we were the babies, except we were the babies that had to get everything right. But I stayed with him through five restaurants over nine years, and I became his head chef at Chez Nico when I was 23. I really was too young. There was too much responsibility. I used to get out of bed and get nosebleeds; I didn’t have enough experience to take that job, but that’s the way it happened.”
[ Chefs at home: Paul Flynn, The Tannery Restaurant Opens in new window ]
Having a well-paid job meant that he could enjoy the buzzing London scene whenever he had time off. For most of his time there, he shared flats with future cupid, Maxwell, who worked front of house in one of Ladennis’s restaurants. At one stage, they lived at the top of Baker Street overlooking Regent’s Park, where they hosted some legendary parties.
The return to Ireland came when Paul was head-hunted for the head-chef role at La Stampa in Dublin, with he and Máire moving back to Dublin in Octo...