Obsessed with making people happy

Matt Fuller (41) is a chef and one of the owners of Bart’s, a bar and restaurant in the centre of Dublin. He lives in Co Meath with his partner, Ailis. Between them, they have three children — Laia (16) and twins Dylan and Daniel (13)

Iget up at 8am. My partner, Ailis, drives me part of the way into work. She’s a mathematician. Breakfast is coffee in the car. I don’t finish my working day until 10.30pm, so it’s important to have that half-hour with her in the morning. We chat about our previous days. If I don’t have that time with her, then it’s a real disconnect until the weekend.

Then I get on the bus. I put on my headphones and have half an hour of music. It just gives me that little bit of headspace.

I get into Bart’s on South William Street for 9.30am. Bart’s is trying to be something new. It’s a bar and a restaurant that turns into a dance venue. I’m just back from Barcelona, and those things would be very on-point all throughout Europe. I don’t think we’ve ever achieved that here in Ireland. We’ve tried, but I think we have tried to be foreign about it.

This project is very Irish driven. We are bringing it back to the old Irish pub welcome, where you come in, sit down and hang out. We wanted to do the next evolution of that, where the drinks are better and the food is better. People are so much more demanding now than they used to be, so you have to keep up with that. I love cooking, and the guys in the bar are quite passionate about their drinks, so I think we’re on the road to something really interesting. We opened last December.

The suppliers will start coming in from 9.30am. I go over the recipes that I’ve changed from the day before. We are constantly tweaking things. The chefs that I have in the kitchen have been with me for five years, and in different businesses too, including Boqueria in Stoneybatter, and, later, Howth. They like working with me because there is an atmosphere of constantly investigating dishes.

I consolidate the recipes that I did the day before, and make any tweaks needed. If you don’t keep these things strict, you’ve no freedom to be creative.

This restaurant has connections to Spain with tapas, but it’s Irish. We do small dishes, intense dinners. Yes, we have lamb shank, but it gets braised down, so you might get 100g. It’s a sharing idea. I think sharing food is a lovely, intimate way to have a night out. We make all the stocks and sauces fresh every day, and we do a lot of seafood. We all sit down and eat together before we open at 5pm.

I love cooking, and I get a lot back from it. If you put care and attention into something, it shines, and it tastes beautiful. You’re always looking for the emotional response to food. Products are my biggest inspiration. Someone will tell me about a farmer doing a breed of duck on an organic farm, or some other farmer producing Irish goose.

I was classically trained here in Dublin — Peacock Alley, l’Ecrivain and Guilbaud’s — all of the high-end Michelin places at the time. Then I moved to Spain when I was 24. While there, I fell in love with eating out, which is very different to cooking as a profession.

In Valencia, it dawned on me that people my age weren’t going out drinking. They were going to little tapas bars, standing at the bar and eating nibbles. It was very sociable. I remember sitting in one place on a terrace with plastic chairs and a paper tablecloth. I was thinking that it was going to be awful, but it was incredible. There was an almost nonchalant approach to the food. When it comes out of the ground, do as little to it as possible to it, throw it on the grill and stick it on the plate.

I love the challenge of opening a restaurant. It doesn’t feel difficult. It feels like an adventure each time. I suppose I get this from my mother. When she was 20, she bought an ice-cream van. It was a very hot summer, and by the end of the season, she had six ice-cream vans. The following year she bought her first house, and paid for it in cash. Every year, we would move house — to somewhere slightly bigger and better.

She was a single mother with three kids, and also a trained nurse. When I was nine, she left nursing and bought a restaurant. She loved cooking. It didn’t work out, but that didn’t matter. Looking back, I’m most impressed that I never felt worried or insecure about any of it. She is a great cook and an honest critic.

I can still remember the first time bringing her up tea and toast in bed for Mother’s Day. She told me that she couldn’t eat it, because I’d left the toast for too long before putting the butter on, so it hadn’t melted. I still remember the sensation that I didn’t cook it right.

I got my first summer job in the Kenmare Bay Hotel at 14. I was washing dishes, and I told the chef that I wanted to cook. That was the beginning of my career. I left school at 16 and came to Dublin. It was a fun career. At the time in Dublin, some of the chefs were walking around like they were rock stars. There was huge admiration for them. I enjoyed the hardship of it, the 15-hour days.

The essence of my business is to look after people and make sure they have a good time. My thing has always been: if we get them in, I’ll get them back. You have to make sure that they leave happy, and you have to obsess about it.

When I get home, I might have a glass of wine and wind down before bed. Service winds you up. It’s quite physical, and stressful on the mind. I eat quite late. Usually it would be something plain, like a toastie, because you’ve been tasting all day.

“I love cooking. If you put care and attention into something, it shines and tastes beautiful”