Dylan McGrath cooks up a different life in his kitchen at home
‘I said that’s it and took a few days to chill out, the body has got to heal’
OH to be quarantined with one of Ireland’s greatest chefs. Dylan McGrath is back cooking in his own kitchen. Braised lamb, beef shin, smoked haddock with mange tout, roast chicken with rosemary and garlic with fat roasted potatoes and char-grilled long-stem broccoli. It’s all on the menu.
There are worse ways to spend a lockdown. The nightly feasts — “healthy comfort food”, he says — are small consolations for the havoc Covid-19 has wreaked on his life: his restaurant empire silent, long days at home with his brother, and the uncertain future.
“No one knows how we’re going to recover,” he says. “I try to have a positive outlook all the time as a person and as an employer. I try to keep my head when all around are losing theirs.
“The knock-on effect is going to be much longer than the kids coming back to school. If you have a restaurant with tables that have to be two metres from each other that just doesn’t add up any more.
“Can we stand in a bar any more crammed together laughing and joking, is that over? I have chefs who’ve never signed on the dole in their lives, really hard-working guys, all of a sudden gone — it’s just shocking.”
It’s been said Covid-19 will test parts of society that were already struggling. McGrath says the restaurant trade was one of these.
“Even before this happened a lot of the industry were finding it really difficult. In those difficult times resources have been spread very thin. So this was just a terrible thing to come along at that moment,” he says.
Amid a blaze of publicity McGrath opened Shelbourne Social in Ballsbridge at the beginning of last year in an investment of around €2m for him and business partner Vincent Melinn. Since opening it wasn’t making the money McGrath had anticipated, owing in part to ongoing construction in the so-called Embassy belt and scant footfall in a fairly sleepy part of the city.
“Whatever was going on in Ballsbridge it was going to take time to build it.”
The rest of his restaurants, including
Rustic Stone, Taste at
Rustic, the Bonsai Bar and Fade Street Social, all in or around South Great George’s Street, have been doing great business, he says.
In a sense he has been here before. When the Michelin-starred Mint, in Ranelagh, closed in 2009 it was one of the highest profile victims of the economic crash and it left the then 31-year-old chef wondering what was next.
“As an entrepreneur you have to get used to the fact that sometimes things are going to get a bit uncomfortable. The music stops and everyone runs to find their chair. It’s no different right now.”
And while he reinvented himself over the last decade, pivoting out of fine dining into more accessible cooking, there were personal tribulations too: a lifechanging back injury, and a court case involving First Dates Ireland contestant Daphney Sanasie who admitted harassing him between September and November in 2015.
The same year he had surgery to fix disintegrating discs — a legacy of long days spent working in kitchens — and his body did not react well. The pain was debilitating.
He lost feeling down one side, and for a time he did not know if he would walk again. He became heavily reliant on painkillers and for a while it became a problem.
“I naturally took the medication that is prescribed for me and, you know, you do become reliant on this stuff. It was no joke. Some of the pills that were prescribed to me on a regular basis were kept in a safe. They were opioids, I was living on that stuff.”
He made getting off the medication a priority. “Two years after the operation I made a decision I had to stop. I f ***ed off for a week with a girlfriend I had at the time and some family members and I just got off it. I said that’s it and took a few days to chill out, the body has got to heal, the mind has got to heal. Years ago if you’d have told me that I should do pilates I’d have laughed at you.”
The harassment case was another blow.
Three years ago Ms Sanasie pleaded guilty to bombarding the awardwinning chef with nuisance phone calls and disturbing text messages. McGrath declined to give a victim impact statement, but says it affected him deeply.
“I didn’t take the case to court, the DPP did that. It was very uncomfortable, it went on for way too long,” he says. He speaks compassionately about the young woman at the centre of the case.
“I did feel sorry for her. If I could have dealt with it privately of course I would have, but when something is invading your personal space, and turning up at the restaurants and phone calls, that wasn’t on.”
He has mellowed from the demanding, edgy individual we saw when he burst on the scene. “When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail”, he says.
“Now I have different tools for different jobs. In the old days only the really tough survived. Whether that creates a macho sort of breed of chefs that we frown on now, you could debate. But, honestly those were the kinds of character traits that you needed to succeed.”