Dublin exposure
In March Dublin was coping, albeit nervously, with the threat of foot-and-mouth. Taxis were about 25% down on routine business. Hotels, normally full, had empty rooms. Thornton's restaurant, just awarded its second Michelin star, had several tables going spare. In an agricultural country like Ireland, the capital sneezes when the rural economy catches a cold.
For Kevin Thornton, there's a uniquely Irish relationship between the produce he relies on and the way he cooks. Forget, he says, any ideas of cuisine du marché. The market doesn't exist. Instead, a chef has to develop a network of small, often unreliable suppliers: the sportsman who has just bagged some snipe or wild duck, the trawlerman from West Cork with a large turbot, the farmer rearing suckling pigs for him.
It has taken him five years to transform an upstairs room in an unfashionable quarter of the city into a restaurant with an international reputation. He succeeded thanks to an initial investment of £15,000 and in spite of a bank manager who didn't want to listen: "I asked him for a £5,000 overdraft and he told me to jump in the river."
The bulk of his cash went to buy crockery, cutlery and glasses. He had nothing to spare for a new carpet. Nobody, he recalled, guessed the extent of his ambition. "People thought I was opening a bistro because, at the time, that was where the money was - not in the top end. If I'd done that, though, I'd only have been interested for a day or two and got fed up."
At the age of 42, Thornton balances the enthusiasm of a younger man with the settled pragmatism of an old campaigner. Unlike many of his peers, he has drifted in and out of professional kitchens. He's worked on farms, in a French vineyard, at an abattoir, as a photographer. Between times, he managed to fit in a spell at Paul Bocuse in Collonges, France, where, he believes, he learnt more about what a restaurant should be than about cooking. Whenever he's tried to break with the kitchen, it's always come back to haunt him. "When I wasn't cooking I missed it, like a heartache," he says.
Before committing himself to Thornton's he spent four years setting up a degree course for chefs at a Dublin college. There he noticed how students on managerial courses often coped better than those who planned a cooking career. "If the chefs had a problem they went right on, hoping it would sort itself out, which of course it never did. The managers stopped and asked questions."
Once in a job, he feels, the commis working their way up through the ranks tend not to understand what they are doing. They haven't the patience to learn their craft properly. They're in a hurry to graduate to a £600-a-week wage without realising the level of skill they need to justify it. Putting in long hours isn't enough. "I have to be in the kitchen all the time, because my chefs don't notice the little details which make a difference." Finding and keeping staff who appear promising is much harder even than in England. There's no local freemasonry of star chefs willing to pass on competent commis who are looking to develop their experience. The cream of the young talent has to leave the country in order to progress.
Currently, Thornton has a brigade of five, about to expand to six. Working at close quarters in a cramped space, it's essential, he feels, that it operates as a team without losing concentration for the three-to-four hours of service. "They have to leave their personal feelings, girlfriend problems or whatever outside the door," he says. His part of the deal involves keeping cool: "We don't scream and shout and nag, because it upsets me. Of course, if someone gets something wrong, I kill them and that's the end of it."
Thornton's earned its first Michelin star in nine months, its second in five years. Thornton views the accolade as a reward for consistency, but not something to lose his head over. Chefs who think they can manufacture success with the food guides are missing the point, he maintains: "The only criterion that matters is what you are doing, not what they want you to do." It's why, he insists, there are so many distinctive styles of cooking at the highest level. Michel Bras doesn't cook like Pierre Gagnaire. Gordon Ramsay's approach has little in common with Ferran Adrià's.
His understated menu tells customers what's on the plate while managing to keep a surprise in reserve. Loin of venison with puréed potatoes, root vegetable and truffle sauce, for instance, disguises the fact that the potatoes are quenelles of Purple Congo flavoured with white truffle oil, which is made in-house from tartufi bianchi that he bought directly from Asti in Piedmont.
Flexible menu
The menu changes not so much seasonally, or even monthly, but according to his mood, his imagination or his response to produce becoming available. For a month it may be static, then change twice in one week. In March, there were some conspicuous absentees: no beef, lamb, pork, veal, chicken or farmed duck. Instead, he opted for snipe, mallard, venison, rabbit and Bresse pigeon.
Thornton describes the conception of any dish as a process of working backwards. "I don't like sitting down with a piece of paper. I have a taste in my mind, then I go to the stove and bring it to life," he says. It is, he admits, a very personal process. Primarily, he's cooking for himself, and if he's satisfied with a dish he believes it will be good enough for his customers. Money takes a back seat. Of course, he has to make his gross margins as any other business does, but he would never sacrifice the integrity of a recipe to squeeze an extra pound's profit from it.
This philosophy applies as much to the preparation as to the raw materials. For instance, he offers a demitasse of concentrated mushroom soup as an appetiser. It's made from trompettes de mort, pieds de mouton and truffle juice, because he thinks they combine to achieve a perfect depth of colour and flavour. Alternatively, in spring he may switch to a pea soup, prepared like Irish coffee with a hot, creamy foam resting on a chilled purée base.
When he owns up to liking intricate food, he isn't making a plea for fussy or overelaborate cuisine. What he enjoys is extracting as much taste as he can from an ingredient, or injecting flavour into a potentially bland one. If he's cooking girolles, for instance, which can be watery, he'll cook them once to extract the surplus moisture, a second time to sauté them, and possibly a third time to add back the saved liquor and reduce it.
The key to à la minute cookery is, he argues, about doing the preparation right: "It's like building a house. It only takes a second to put in a window, but everything has to be there and in the right place for it to fit."
Dublin has only one other two-Michelin-starred restaurant, Patrick Guilbaud in the Merrion hotel. Thornton finds the lack of competition at the top level frustrating. In cities with a strong eating-out culture, standards improve. Chefs feed off each others' ideas. Here, he doesn't expect to push back his own frontiers by going to other restaurants. Running his own 45-seater gives him neither the time nor the money to experience the cutting edge of modern cuisine by travelling abroad. "I can't have holidays. I haven't been to the three [Michelin] stars. I've just done my own thing."
A side effect of the local scene is that his kitchen staff have become prime targets for poachers. It's understandable that a sous chef should want to move on to a job with more responsibility linked to better pay. However, if he's head-hunted ahead of his ability, before he's ready, neither his future nor his new employer benefit.
Constraints apart, Thornton is already looking ahead. He talks of "sharpening things up", "going to the next level", "progressing", "making food more exciting", "adding more depth of flavours". He's not ready to cash in on his newly acquired status, because his chief ambition is to be a better chef, to run a better restaurant. Offers have started coming in, nevertheless. He turned down the opportunity to move to a £200,000 rent-free property, because he didn't like the strings attached. Anything that threatens his independence gets short shrift.
His spiritual home would probably be a French provincial town where his cuisine was loved and respected by a knowledgeable bourgeois community. Dubliners, with their instinctive good taste and ability to see through flannel, make a good second best.
It suits the romantic in him: "I suppose cooking is like music or writing. It's a way of coping with things. I express myself through my food. I don't know how it happens. It just does."
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 31 May-6 June 2001
