Declan Ryan

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Declan Ryan is good for the public culture in a simple, elegant way: he makes it better.

Not only does he make it better, he has made it better not just once, but twice. Back in the 1970's, he was the county's leading restaurateur, in Cork's Arbutus Lodge, his food a modern, contemporary cuisine that nevertheless reached back into Cork's culinary history for inspiration. He had a Michelin star as long ago now as 1974, the first in Ireland, awarded at a time when Michelin didn't reckon much on the country. His success was greeted with deafening silence from the media. When the late Egon Ronay gave him 3 stars, Ryan's local newspaper, The Cork Examiner, bestowed a single page 5 column of coverage. (Meanwhile it was front page in the London Times).

Ryan's secret was to make Arbutus a totality: food, service and wine were taken to elegant new heights up the hill at Montenotte, and Ryan showed the aesthetic side of his culture, an aesthetic side which is happy with anything, just so long as it is the best. There is a striving in him, but it is counterpointed by an ability to enjoy the moment: that's a quality we used to describe as “cultured”.

And then, having sold Arbutus and moved on, Ryan came back to take the pinnacle one more time, this time as the baker of Arbutus breads. The original bakery was modest beyond belief – a jumped-up garage, in effect – but the diamond-bright ambition and diamond-hard creativity meant that the reputation of the breads spread like a forest fire started by an industrial oven. If the culture is lucky, Mr Ryan will produce not just his superb breads but also a host of superbly-skilled young bakers as well.
He worked with the Troisgros brothers in Roanne at the height of nouvelle cuisine, and the sensibility of those great chefs, their sprezzatura knowingness, has never left him. Elizabeth David was another formative influence and, fittingly, another bread obsessive. He is autodidactic, with a compass that spans the culture: he learnt his bread skills in Aurilac, and is a member of the American Bread Bakers Guild. In a country cursed by parochialism, he looks outward, and he has always looked outward. And then, he brings what he has learnt and discovered back home, and enriches the culture.

Arbutus Bread, Montenotte, Cork, County Cork
021 450 5820