The thing about John McKenna is that, in his own mind's eye, he is eighteen years old. A teenage Peter Pan, which sounds sad, were it not for the fact that McKenna also hangs onto the confusing and cacophonous brain of a teenager, so he is too busy and deluded to feel sad about never growing up.
He was at work aged six, in his father's pub in Belfast, standing on a wooden crate washing glasses by hand in cold water, and it was the sort of place where gentlemen customers would expectorate loudly and frequently straight onto the floor: spit and sawdust it was, and not an easy way to learn independence, but then you take independence whatever way it comes. He played golf well as a teenager, which embarasses him today, along with the memory of playing alongside circus performers like David Feherty.
He studied law in U.C.D., but more realistically he studied going to gigs and writing about punk music for Hot Press magazine, where he stuck a foot in the door at the same time as his fellow student, the great Declan Lynch. He favoured the “experimental” style of journalistic writing then in vogue in the late 1970's, and no one should be in any doubt but that the experiment was a failure – to this day McKenna has an expectation that he will be given a professorship in DCU to teach a module entitled: “How not to write journalism”.
He wrote a fortnightly books column for In Dublin magazine, and his mug shot featured him wearing a fedora, yet he escaped being assaulted in the street, surprisingly. His epiphanous moment came when he received a review copy of Richard Olney's masterpiece, Simple French Food, which remains his all-time favoured book on food, and he had the luck to meet with Olney in the latter's home in Sollies-Toucas, in Provence. He took a sabbatical from legal work at the Dublin Bar in 1989 to write his first Irish Food Guide, and since 1991 he has written a lot of Bridgestone Guides. He lives in West Cork and is convinced that this remote region is, in actual fact, the very centre not just of the world, but of the entire universe as we know it. Teenagers believe things like that.