The popular TV chef and restaurateur on changing tastes in home dining and how innovative Irish cuisine is thriving
Neven Maguire on recipes, restaurants and working out to dance records at 6am: ‘The only Michelin I want are the tyres on my car’
“Why would I rush? I’m enjoying this,” he says. “You have to be organised. That’s one thing, and the fact I love it, is the other thing. I love food, I love my job, and I love the many different elements to it, but I’m not afraid to delegate, which is important. Like in MacNean’s, I have a great head chef, Carmel McGirr; I have another lady, Claire, who helps me in the cookery school and she is fantastic too, and then I have Andrea Doherty, my PA.
Back then, home entertaining in Ireland was beginning to entertain “notions”. As the Celtic Tiger strained for take-off, books such as Wining and Dining at Home In Ireland by Sandy O’Byrne and Jacinta Delahaye were teaching a generation how to be urban sophisticates, impressing guests with restaurant-quality dinners made from exotic ingredients sourced in fine food emporiums, with wines to match.Entertaining at home is a different beast these days.
Some of the recipes are as simple as chips, but in this version, the chips are soaked for two hours to wash out starch, then cooked once at 140 degrees for six minutes and then again at 180 for a further three. While the book is in no way “cheffy”, it is this chef-like exactitude and simplicity that renders it practical.
Homeliness shines through as the other dominant flavour in the book – fish pie, beef lasagne, spatchcock chicken – no accidents, but the fruits of research. Maguire quotes a statistic that 70 per cent of us are dining out less as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. “I have never cooked at home as much since Covid,” he says. “And I love cooking for the family, because they enjoy food and eating things in a way I didn’t when I was their age.
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