When Garrett Byrne opened Campagne in Kilkenny in the last days of August 2008, he must have wanted to set himself the sort of challenge that his mentor, Ross Lewis of Chapter One, had to face when he opened in Dublin: stack all the odds against you right at the beginning, then take it from there. Amazingly, the global recession and domestic economic meltdown barely halted Campagne's progress: Mr Byrne had opened just the right room with just the right food in the right town, which just happened to be his birthplace. Kilkenny was welcoming back one of their own, and lucky for the city that one of their own happened to be one of the best.
Campagne is his first spell as owner, but several years before he had shown the sort of food he was capable of when heading up the team at Dublin's Bruno's Restaurant, in the early years of the new millenium. In Campagne the polish of the cooking has grown ever more precise, anchored by a love of savouryness that we might trace back to the influence of that prototypical professional chef, Stephen Bull: Mr Byrne praises Bull's “great sense of taste in food and wine”, and it's a sense he has learnt well, along with the knowledge, culled from Chapter One, that running a restaurant also means running great room. He returns to his old school, CBS Kilkenny, to do cookery demonstrations each year.