Eugene Callaghan was always going to get to the top. Right from the day he won the Roux brothers' scholarship when working alongside Paul Rankin in Belfast's Roscoff restaurant, when that restaurant was at its zenith, Mr Callaghan's unique style was always going to get him the gig that suited him best.
In the middle of his journey, however, he took one of the most unlikely detours. For a time in the mid 1990's, he cooked from a portakabin, beside a pub and a chipper, in Ballyedmond, in County Wexford. His unpropitious circumstances didn't make a jot of difference to his cooking: his food was serene, and so was he, and he was the hottest ticket in Wexford for a year or more, until he moved on. He cooked from the portakabin room, and he made it The Savoy. That is his genius: when the food arrives, you only have eyes for what is on the plate. As you eat, your circumstances change, such is the pleasure his food delivers. A portakabin? Excellent. You might be in the gutter, but you are eating food for the stars.
He moved on to La Marine, in Kelly's hotel, and now has succeeded Jim Ahearne and also runs the dining room, Beaches, of the hotel itself. He has always had the gift of being able to make every dish he cooks seem definitive, authoritative, complete. He knows food, he knows cooking, and he knows it in a way that is different to any other Irish chef. His food is about food, in the way Maurice Ravel's music, for example, is about music: it is knowing, but so supremely controlled that you don't see the back-story. But his cooking ushers in the whole history of contemporary cooking. He guards the canon, he is keeper of the secrets, he knows what his responsibilities are.