Paul Flynn

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It is late on Saturday night and Emily Green of London's “The Independent” is in Dublin to review La Stampa. We are her guests, and Ms Green wants to see how the former head chef in Nico Ladenis' London restaurant empire, Paul Flynn, is getting on now that he has returned to Ireland. It is 1994.
We meet and shake hands at the end of service on a hectic Saturday night. Flynn is funny, supremely stressed, and has a handsome wife, Maire. You can tell that La Stampa is just a biding-post: he is already thinking ahead and, anyway, Dublin isn't his town.
"He is a purist, not an innovator" we write in the 1995 100 Best Restaurants, reviewing his cooking in La Stampa. Wrong again. Over the next decade, Flynn will prove himself not just a superb chef and restaurateur, but also a gifted innovator, a guy who has the smarts to take things apart. He is also one of the first Irish chefs to understand that communicating is as important as cooking, and within a few years of opening The Tannery in his home town of Dungarvan in County Waterford, he is the cookery correspondent of “The Irish Times" and writes a sublime book, 'An Irish Adventure with food', one of the greatest books by a working chef.
His empire has grown - today there are rooms, and a cookery school, and a fine vegetable garden in the centre of town - but Flynn hasn't changed, save to have become more self-deprecating, and funnier. He is one of the great figures in Irish food, and one of the most respected. Hard work is engraved in him, the branding from years at the London restaurant coal face, the scar of being a head chef aged 23. He is still young, but he is from a different stock of Irish, those who had to go overseas for work, those who would be called "Irish" in the kitchens they worked in. But whilst it made Flynn tough, it didn't make him hard. He is too wise to allow himself to be cool, never mind cold. He can always see the joke, he can always see the folly of our endeavours. He savours everything.

The Tannery, 10 Quay Street, Dungarvan, County Waterford
058 45420