An Irish Chef in France

Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, much missed in Ireland since he and his wife Sile sold their eponymous restaurant in Waterford and moved to France. They now live in the Languedoc, where they take guests - and feed them very well. Here’s his Day in the Life of a Maison d’Hote...

I suppose the best way to give you an idea of our new life is to give you a typical day in the life.

Morning sees us out of bed usually by about 7.30, this for a 9.00 breakfast. We had made the decision before we opened that our breakfast was going to be a French one.

Many years before on our way south on holiday we had stopped in a restaurant with rooms near Bourges which had a Michelin star. Our breakfast there had to us been perfection, we had been offered two kinds of fruit, fresh and cooked, some vanilla flavoured fromage frais to eat with it, and plenty of fresh bread, brioche and croissants to eat with our tea (for Sile) and coffee (for me) accompanied by a good range of home made jams and jellies.

A cooked breakfast, in the Irish tradition was something we decided would be both inappropriate and totally unsuitable to the climate. I make two different types of bread myself but we do realise that in integral part of the French breakfast experience is the fresh crisp baguette and croissant.

Therefore our first job each morning (we take this in turns) was to go down to the village baker for these. Then we set the table (usually on the terrace) with the fruits which are in season and my own jams (I am a compulsive jam maker so we always have at least 6 varieties on the go). In deference to our experience in the Michelin starred restaurant we also serve a bowl of vanilla flavoured fromage frais to eat with the fruit.

The French as a nation we found, even in hotels where we had eaten an excellent dinner, do not set a lot of store by breakfast. Somewhat to our surprise our French customers are often taken aback by the lavishness of our breakfast spread – “Ah you do breakfast in the English fashion “, an early French family said to us, and this without a rasher or sausage in sight.

My one concession to our background is that I usually manage to offer some homemade brown bread (I bring the flour in from Ireland) and always offer my own home made marmalade made from Bigarades (the French for a Seville orange) which we eventually tracked down in a village in Minerve.

Breakfast on the terrace, we discovered, is capable of becoming quite a social occasion and we have seen it stretch on to 11.00, a good two hours after the customers sat down first. It is just as well we decided early on that lunch was not going to be offered; else I would have found it difficult to ever get out of the kitchen.

Usually after breakfast I shop for the day, we have a small market which runs two days in the village, a superb butcher, an excellent supermarket also in the village and just down the road is a large co-operative farm shop called La Ferme Bitteroise.

Shopping, as is nearly always the case in France is pain free. Normally I spend the rest of the morning preparing for the dinner while Sile is in charge of the bedrooms. The afternoon is our time off, this means we can choose to head to the coast for a swim, to the mountains for a stroll or a swim in the river or even have a few hours siesta.

Dinner starts on the terrace usually about 7.00 with an aperitif of some of the sparkling wine from Limoux, just south of us, this we usually flavour with some one of the excellent local liqueurs, blackcurrant cassis is the classic but Peche and even chestnut are my current favourites.

Before anyone arrives I will have asked them, as they make their booking, if there are any foods they have a problem with, either an allergy or a dislike. With this much information under my belt I can then always be sure that my customers will eat what I have prepared.

The dinner is not really in any way like one which one would eat in a restaurant. The service is altogether more relaxed and, of course as Sile and I eat (and indeed drink) with the customers the night always takes on the air of a dinner party rather than a restaurant meal.

As is the custom in Maison d’Hotes who serve evening meals the cost of the drinks are included in the costs of the meal. To our relief we have discovered that the more abstemious French customers do tend to compensate for the more profligate Irish.

The meal (after the cheese and dessert and coffee) usually finishes with one of my homemade liqueurs – the making of which is another passion of mine. Living in the centre of a French village, in very close proximity to our neighbours, means that we have (during the working week at any rate) to be careful of our neighbours sleep times so we have a self-imposed curfew for terrace entertainments of 11.00. (Mind you we can always withdraw into the living room and shut the doors) and considering the early start in the morning this is probably just as well - and also explains to some extent why we sometimes make use of that marvellous southern custom: the siesta.

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Martin Dwyer started cooking professionally over 40 years ago in the legendary “Snaffles Restaurant” in Dublin. After a time in a Relais Chateau in Anjou and in “The Wife of Bath” in Kent he opened his own much acclaimed restaurant, “Dwyers”, in Waterford in 1989. In 2004 he sold this and moved south to France where he and his wife Síle bought and restored an old presbytery in a village in the Languedoc. They now run Le Presbytère as a French style Chambre d’Hôte. Martin however is far too passionate about food to give up cooking so they now enjoy serving dinner to their customers on the terrace of Le Presbytère on warm summer evenings. Martin runs occasional cookery courses in Le Presbytère and Síle’s brother Colm does week long Nature Strolls discovering the Flora and Fauna of the Languedoc.

Le Presbytère can be seen at: www.lepresbytere.net;
email: martin@lepresbytere.net