It is 1961, more than half a century ago, and an elfin-sized woman called Maura Foley has opened a tea room in Kenmare. Despite not having a mixer, Mrs Foley bakes cakes and tea is 2d per cup. And she already knows how to run a business – her granny was a grocer, and a woman who knew how to say to some local nabob who wanted to jump the queue when she was attending to a customer: “There is a crown on this man's shilling too!”.
So, a stubborn pride – a Kerry pride – is part of the Foley family DNA, never better articulated than by Maura Foley, who has been articulating it for fifty years, first in her tea rooms, then in The Lime Tree restaurant, then in Packie's restaurant, then in her outstanding house, Shelburne Lodge, a place where she shows that her eye for art and design is every bit as sharp as her eye for good cooking.
“Rent, Sweat and Perform”, she once wrote to us, is how you get going in the restaurant game. “It is a performance every night, a new performance”, she wrote. “The restaurant business is a mad business for mad people, who sweat, worry, get carried away with themselves, but all is lost if they cannot laugh and retain a sense of humour”.
Fifty years on, and that laughter, that sense of humour, are as firmly fixated as ever, and the madness is still in full flourish, the madness of a great creative cook, a great creative artist. “The only people for me are the mad ones”, Jack Kerouac wrote in “On The Road“: “...the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”. A fabulous yellow roman candle, exploding across the skies over Kenmare, that's who Maura Foley is.