Westmeath's top chef

Working as a chef is something people either love or hate, according to Feargal O’Donnell of The Fatted Calf in Athlone.

“You are working in a very dangerous environment under an awful lot of pressure and it’s not always a pleasant experience, but that’s the nature of it,” he says.

“You either love it or hate it. If you love it, it’s the best job in the world. I certainly wouldn’t change it. Not in a million years. I wouldn’t do anything else.”

Feargal was recently named Westmeath chef of the year for 2017 at the Irish Restaurant Awards. While delighted to receive the accolade, he gives most of the credit to Glasson’s Dee Adamson, who is the restaurant’s head chef.

“The award is fantastic,” he smiles. “It’s something I was honoured with four times (previously). Dee is our head chef here and it really belongs to her. I’m the owner but she’s the one who runs the kitchen.”

A native of Goatstown in Dublin, Feargal operates The Fatted Calf with his wife Fiona, who is from Mullingar. It started as a gastropub in Glasson in 2010 before moving into a restaurant premises, adjacent to Athlone’s John Count McCormack Square, in August 2015.

Feargal says one of the advantages of the move was that it made the business smaller and easier to manage.

“It was a very pleasant change. Because we downsized, we know there’s a maximum we can do, and we don’t have the space to do any more.

“We’re a 42-seater restaurant, so on a busy Saturday night we would do 80 (customers). On a busy Saturday lunch, you would do 60. So, in terms of staffing, you can keep it very tight. You’re able to run a much tighter operation.”

He and Fiona live in Glasson and have two children, Molly (12) and Jack (11). The new incarnation of The Fatted Calf has given them a chance to spend more time together as a family.

“Because we don’t open on Sundays and Mondays we have a weekend day with the kids, which is important,” says Feargal.

“To have Sundays off - having always worked on Sundays for years - took a while to get used to. Because we don’t have a pub element (to the business), we finish much earlier. In Glasson, at the weekend, you wouldn’t finish until 2 or 3am.

“Now on a Saturday night you might be finished at 11.30, which is incredible when you’re not used to it! It’s a huge difference - but in a positive way - for ourselves and our staff.”

Feargal’s interest in a cooking began at an early age. “I’m of that generation where my parents and my granny would have done a lot of cooking and home baking.

“We had chickens when I was a kid. My father would have planted spuds and cabbages in the back garden. A lot of people had to be self-sufficient, because they didn’t have the money back then. We would have eaten rabbit and all sorts of bits and pieces.

“So yeah, there would have been a history of making at home – of baking and cooking. And I had just had a grá for it. I liked it.”

In the 1980s, after studying in Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin, he went to London to start working in a hotel there around the time he turned 18.

“I moved from a small hotel on Iona Road – with two of us in the kitchen – to an 800-bedroom hotel in the centre of London. So that was a bit of an eye-opener.”

After spending nearly eight years in London, he worked for a short spell in Belfast before moving back to Dublin and taking up jobs in acclaimed restaurants such as Roly’s Bistro and La Stampa.

Having met his future wife from Westmeath, Feargal moved to the Midlands in 1998 and began working at the Wineport Lodge, a restaurant which had not yet expanded to become a hotel.

More than a decade later, he and Fiona took over the Village Inn in Glasson to create The Fatted Calf.

Did he always have an ambition to open his own place?

“It was always in the back of my mind,” he replies. “I had seen the rise of the gastropub in the US and England, and I did a lot of research on it. I have a sister in New York so I did a lot of travelling back and forth to see her and go to different places.

“I saw that the future - in Ireland - of the pub was going to be food. You could see the drinkers dwindling and the food element becoming more important. It was a good (business) to open during the recession because people were looking for simplified, and reasonably priced, good food.”

The Fatted Calf earned glowing reviews over the years from critics such as Catherine Cleary of The Irish Times, the late Paolo Tullio, and many others.

Feargal explains that the ethos of the restaurant is to work with small, high-quality, Irish suppliers such as John Stone Beef in Ballymahon, organic dairy producers Mossfield Farm in Offaly, and Mullingar-based Wines Direct.

Business has been “very steady” in recent months and Feargal says last Christmas was much busier than in 2015, when reports about the flooding in Athlone had a detrimental effect on trade.

Asked about his hobbies and interests outside of work, he says: “I would do a little bit of shooting, and walking. I read quite a bit.

“I enjoy cooking: when I’m at home I love making dinner for my family. I do that quite regularly and it’s nice to sit down and have dinner with everybody. So nothing too outrageous. No skydiving or anything like that!”

There have been media reports about a shortage of chefs and Feargal confirms this is a major problem.

“It’s a huge issue and it’s one of the main reasons we downsized from Glasson. We could not get (enough) reliable staff, and that impacted on the good staff we had.

“This is a worldwide issue – it’s not just in Ireland. It’s part of a bigger problem of people valuing what you do. When you’re doing it right, it costs a lot of money to buy good Irish ingredients, to pay staff well, to make things from scratch.

“To provide good food costs money, and it’s being under-priced at the moment. I think if people were willing to pay a little bit more, it would allow us to pay staff more.

“But I think there’s also a realisation from younger people that to learn what you need to learn to be a chef it takes time, patience and commitment. It’s not like an IT job, it’s not Monday to Friday.

“People want to eat when you want to be out socialising, so you are going to have to work weekends. It has never been a very social business to work in.

“It can be great fun, but you have to understand it and embrace it for what it is. It’s a different culture, a different way of life.”

Despite the challenges it’s clear that his own enthusiasm for the restaurant trade is as strong as ever.

“Absolutely - otherwise I wouldn’t do it!” he concludes. “I love it.”