Fiona Teehan

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“I like people, and love working with people.”, says Fiona Teehan. It shows. Ms Teehan, boss of Dublin's fine Pembroke Townhouse, has the innate gift of handling people, coping with people, pleasing people, and accommodating people, in the grand sense, as well as the particular sense, of making a place where you want to lay your hat.

And people, in their turn, respond to her, in the most immediate, unmediated fashion. One morning, as we were enjoying breakfast at Pembroke, the dining room got hammered when a huge troupe of marathon competitors all arrived for breakfast at exactly the same moment. Ms Teehan, calm as Gandhi, coped with the potential crisis with the cool of a bomb disposal veteran: everyone was looked after, the staff accelerated their game, everyone was made happy and the imminent crisis became – instead – a delightful morning for everyone. You need some sort of sixth-sense genius to do that. You need a seventh sense, and Fiona Teehan has that seventh sense. She knows how to push that button, that people button.

Aged 14, she asked if her birthday present could be lunch at Guilbaud's. She wanted to cook, but the career guidance folk told her she was too smart for the kitchen – they used to do that all the time, back in the day – so she studied hotel management in Cathal Brugha Street. And then she started at the bottom, as a housekeeper in London's Connaught Hotel, where she began to understand systems and, vitally, people skills. Cooking was put on the back burner, as she worked through the hotel ranks, and on returning to Ireland she worked at Caragh Lodge, and with those great chefs, Neil McFadden and Thomas Haughton, in Dublin's Luttrelstown Castle.

In Pembroke Townhouse, however, she has found a way to return to her love of food. She has fashioned a breakfast offer that is as fine as any in the city, but it is the little treats for guests that make Pembroke stand out, and which show the sort of bespoke care at which Ms Teehan excels. A little glass of homemade cordial when you arrive, delicious biscuits with tea, fabulous handmade preserves with breakfast. These are her people-pleasing potions, they are part of her spell. And you can't resist.

90 Pembroke Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4