An Irish Chef in France

Euro-Toques chef Martin Dwyer, is 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.

This month: Snaffles

The picture shows some of the staff in Snaffles in 1972, chefs Jack Williams and myself, waiters Hugo, Danny and John.

In the sixties and the seventies there was no doubt that the smartest restaurant in Dublin was Snaffles of Leeson Street. I have a Good Food Guide from those years which calls it the place where “Guinness, Rome and beauty met”. I was lucky enough to get a job there in the early seventies and spent my first years of cooking there in Snaffles kitchen.

Snaffles was run by Nick and Rosie Tinne, he an excellent amateur cook, she a graduate of the Cordon Bleu school in London. They were decades ahead of their time in Dublin and certainly hit a note with Dublin gourmets as the small basement was always full, Saturday nights often booked a month in advance, and not just full but, as the Good Food Guide insinuated, full of the beautiful people of Dublin of that age.

The food in Snaffles was a fascinating mixture of Irish Country House cooking with its emphasis on game and offal and great varieties of old fashioned vegetables (the Guinness family used to grow Seakale for us in their house in Castleknock) and also a healthy selection of new - for Ireland - European dishes which were becoming fashionable at that time - Lasagne, Moussaka, Gazpacho and classic French dishes like Bourguignon and Coq au Vin were, I am quite sure, first tasted by a lot of Irish people there. Snaffles also had its signature dishes - Snaffles Mousse and Grape Pud were two - and the recipes for these were jealously guarded.

Snaffles was of course rather more than just a kitchen, the waiters, John, Danny and Hugh were superb professionals. Nick had been lucky enough to start the business just when the legendary Red Bank was closing and he just scooped up the waiters from there. They were a united team and even had a language all of their own with which they could communicate with skill while they smoothly went about their business.

The author Ben Kiely used to tell a story about arriving into the Red Bank having been on a bender and looking very much the worse for wear. John whooshed him into the gents with instructions to wait there until he came back. He arrived back with a razor and a clean shirt from Dunne’s Stores and John would then stand over him until he made himself presentable.

Just as the waiters in Snaffles were legendary so also were the customers. It was an obligatory port of call for visiting film stars, while Stanley Kubrick was making Barry Lyndon it became a sort of unofficial staff canteen and Ryan O’Neill (with his daughter Tatum in tow) and Marisa Berenson were frequently to be seen having dinner. John Huston often brought his daughter Angelica and I remember one occasion - while making “Macintosh Man” in Galway - he rang to book a table for a late lunch. Strangely he never arrived. At 2.30 the phone rang, it was Mr. Huston full of apologies. “I sent Paul Newman down to keep the table, he came back and said you were closed, I’ve just realised that I forgot to tell the idiot that you had to ring the bell to get in.”

Irish politicians were also frequent visitors and, as the restaurant had a discreet private back room, we were often visited by Mr Haughey.

That he was a master of political skill should never be underestimated. First thing Charlie did on entering the restaurant was to stick his head around the kitchen door and greet all the staff by name “Ah, still here Martin !” he’d say with a smile.

This always did wonders for my ego until one day John, the Maitre d’ told me that as soon as Charlie entered John was instructed to run down a list of all staff names, with all relevant details and it was with this information fresh in his mind that he stuck his head around the kitchen door.  

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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

Twitter: www.twitter.com/DwyerThezan