Michael Quinn

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Like many of the fortunate chefs who learnt their kitchen wherewithal from Myrtle Allen in Ballymaloe House, Michael Quinn seems to have absorbed not just techniques of cooking, but also ways of thinking about food and cooking, and what it represents, and what it can achieve in a place and a time. He is the most self-effacing chef, unknown by all save those who travel to Waterford Castle to eat his food.

We met him first in the early 1990's when he had a little place near to the Quays in Waterford city, Opus 1, where he cooked beautiful food, and it was beautiful for a simple reason: “I cook the food I like cooking” he told us, and you could hear Myrtle Allen say the same thing, and also guys like Shaun Hill and Simon Hopkinson with whom Quinn also studied and worked. He has a lightness of taste and texture as a signature style, and he had it right from the early days, back when most Irish restaurant food wanted to assail you with butter, booze and cream. For fourteen years now he has led the kitchen at Waterford Castle, and insiders know him as one of the best Irish cooks, not just for that lightness of touch, but largely because each dish seems to enjoy such consideration, such contemplation, before he decides finally what it should include, and before he finally sends it out of the kitchen. His food has also gotten better on a year by year basis over the last several years, so maturity suits him, and he is a calmer cook now than the tentative young man he once was, but he is still just as hungry.

Waterford Castle, The Island, Ballinakill, Waterford, County Waterford
051 878203
www.waterfordcastle.com