Paul Flynn

Butter Boy

Paul and Maire Flynn (Credit McKennas Guides)

For the cohort of cooks who frog-marched British food towards some sort of modernity three decades ago – Simon Hopkinson; Marco Pierre White, Rowley Leigh, Angela Hartnett, Nico Ladenis, Gordon Ramsay, Jeremy Lee, Raymond Blanc – there was only one Irish chef who mattered, and that Irish chef was Paul Flynn.

As these hungry chefs chased stars, Flynn was steadily hauling them in: aged 23 he was sous chef of Nico Ladenis’ London restaurants. When he left nine years later, Chez Nico had 2 stars. 

Six months after Flynn returned to Ireland, Nico bagged the third star. 

Who really earned that coveted gong? Paul Flynn: three-star chef? Well, yes.

But Flynn had different fish to fry, in a different world: Dungarvan, home to 8,000 people, a food scene that had never troubled the culinary Richter scale, and Flynn’s home town. 

This was a truly radical thing to do in 1997. But Flynn’s madcap, reckless decision was properly rewarded – a mere 25 years later – when as part of the 2023 West Waterford Food Festival, the festival held a tribute dinner for Paul and Maire Flynn in Lismore Castle. 

Flynn’s former chefs lined up to cook. The packed room gave the couple a standing ovation. 

A chef with honour in his own land? What a quaint, neighbourly, and wholly unprecedented thing for a town to arrange for its luminary residents. 

The tribute shows another side to Paul and Maire Flynn: they are relatable. People can identify with the ups and downs of their working life. They can empathise with Paul’s “disastrous” Leaving Cert, and smile to themselves when they turn on the telly and there he is, cracking jokes, enjoying the vibe, being the t.v. personality. The Flynns may be food world stars, but in Dungarvan they are Paul and Maire.

Maire Flynn recalled for the Lismore audience how the first diners in The Tannery came down the stairs after dinner, told her that they “knew food” and that the Flynns hadn’t a clue what they were doing.

Of course, the Flynns did know what they were doing. Paul Flynn was cooking the food people wanted to eat on a Wednesday evening, or a Friday night splash-out: early menus offered a lovely reworking of bouillabaisse tricked out with Thai spices, lime and coconut milk; a saffron risotto with aubergine and chorizo; baked cod Nicoise; crab linguini with tomato, garlic and ginger; chocolate soufflé pudding with orange custard. 

The food was sharply executed, and profoundly delicious, and in 1997 it was seriously ahead of the curve. It took people a while to catch up, and the Flynns had to graft to keep the show on the road, but catch up the people did.

Paul Flynn’s culinary navigation through the years is worthy of a master’s thesis. Here was a cook who understood that the way to a town’s heart was through its stomach.

The lunch menu in August 1999 offers a quesadilla of salmon with tomato and avocado cream, and roast lamb salad with raita, chutney and naan bread. But it also offers boiled bacon with colcannon, black pudding and parsley sauce. 

Six years later, in 2005, the iconic crab creme brulée is already enjoying its marquee billing on Tannery menus, served with pickled cucumber and Melba toast (!!). But you might also have chosen crayfish in chermoula sauce, or the wild mash-up that was corned beef and colcannon with carrots a la Greque. 

If you were bringing Granny for Sunday lunch, she would be happy out enjoying Charentais melon with mint sorbet to begin, then some roast chicken with creamed leeks and thyme jus, and a wrap-up pavlova of summer berries. “As smart a cook as they come” we scribbled on the back of a menu in April 2005.

The Tannery, after that shaky start, prospered. Paul Flynn became friendly with Patsey Murphy, then the Weekend editor of The Irish Times. He contributed a few cookery pieces to the Saturday newspaper. Next thing, he was the cookery writer for the ‘Times. He wrote one fine book, the superbly witty An Irish Adventure With Food, and then another. He was on the telly. The Flynns expanded, opening a suite of accommodation rooms in an adjacent townhouse. They expanded some more, buying an old convent and creating a cookery school.

Then, they almost lost their shirt.

In 2008, after Ireland’s banks had looted the country, the Flynns were suddenly under severe pressure, like so many others who had money showered on them by the banksters. How did they get back on their feet? 

They grafted, of course. They pivoted, changing the ground floor of the restaurant into a more accessible Wine Bar. When the chef Ray McArdle told them that he made 12 grand a year selling chips, they started selling chips. They kept the wolf from the door and then, finally, Waterford got its day in the tourism sunshine when the Waterford Greenway opened, and the walkers and cyclists decided that an overnight stay in the Tannery Townhouse and dinner in The Tannery was an integral part of the Greenway.

Paul Flynn’s first tenure in The Irish Times boomeranged when, in 2019, he got a call from Marie-Claire Digby asking if he fancied another three years on the rack of weekly journalism. He agreed, and the work is collected in Butter Boy, a typically elegant and finessed Nine Bean Row book.

Flynn had no more than 350 words each week to preface his trio of recipes, and that concision has served him well: Butter Boy is direct and laser-focused, with the recipes telling you what you need to know to get that perfect result, and no more.

The style is reminiscent of Flynn the Tannery Cookery Teacher: confident, assuring, helpful, witty, and the book has something of the capacious Joy of Cooking/Boston Cooking School culinary bible in its 700-odd pages. With BB on the shelf, you really don’t need anything else, and many food lovers will be leaping to the elegant index time after time.

Paul’s first cookery book was called An Irish Adventure With Food. No other couple have had such a dramatic adventure with Irish food as Paul and Maire Flynn. 

thetannery.ie

Butter Boy is published by Nine Bean Row books.