Even though he has a foot in both of the best know family food brands in Ireland – the O'Connells of Cullahill in County Laois, and the Allens of Ballymaloe House in Shanagarry, east Cork – Rory O'Connell doesn't seem to be part of either brand.
If he doesn't have a brand, he likely has something altogether more valuable: he has an aesthetic. There is a very distinct Rory O'Connell style to his cooking – Clodagh McKenna uses terms such as “elegant”, “clean”, and even “pure”, to describe how he sees and executes a dish, and Ms McKenna worked alongside him in the kitchen, so she knows his style, she knows that he knows how to get what he wants.
The aesthetic isn't entirely surprising, for he learnt at Ballymaloe and with the Ryan brothers in Cork's Arbutus Lodge, along with taskmaster Nico Ladenis in London. He even worked with Raymond Blanc, so he has a sense of humour, and a sense of irony. And he is dauntless; he took over from Myrtle Allen at the Ballymaloe kitchens, the toughest succession in Irish food, and he breezed through it for a decade, before moving on, his food always pleasing people and, one suspects, also having to please himself.
But the aesthetic is married to a very political way of thinking about food, and he is not afraid to be a controversialist. He insists that the right to good food could and should be legislated for, and when he talks like this he becomes lawerly, practical, with an eye on the big picture, the summation before the bench, the final ruling. It's no surprise that he has become a teacher in his own right, or that he has an elegant 18th century farmhouse in which to host his classes. He is almost 50, but seems way, way younger, acting and thinking like a young guy.