URI BENDS AN SOS TO JOSE...
URI Geller wants Jose Mourinho to manage a football team he started for his ‘micronation’ – and hopes to see them play Spurs.
The spoonbending psychic splashed out on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland in 2009 for €35,000.
Now zany Uri (75) has started a ‘national’ soccer side named North Berwick Lamb Football Club – and he wants Jose as manager.
ON THE BALL: Uri
IT’S a gloriously sunny morning in the plush exterior of The Courtyard restaurant.
The place – in Dublin’s leafy Donnybrook – is already a hive of activity, but the crowd isn’t here for the food.
Filming of the latest instalment of the Virgin Media show The Restaurant has just finished and its host, legendary chef Marco Pierre White, is holding court for the media.
After being on RTE in the mid-2000s, the show was dropped from the national broadcaster and later picked up by Virgin in 2015.
It has become one of the network’s most popular shows and it’s not hard to see why.
A fiendishly simple format of getting a wellknown personality into a professional restaurant kitchen and trying to impress guests and celebrity judges, it’s half cooking show, half reality TV. But with its garrulous host, it’s really all about Marco.
White is one of the most famous chefs in the world, not merely because he was the youngest cook to receive three Michelin stars – he got those at the tender age of 33 and then handed them back – but because his personality can be a bit, well, difficult.
At one stage during his pomp in London, it became almost a badge of honour to be personally thrown of out of his restaurant.
Any man who could make a young make Gordon Ramsay cry is never going to be a shrinking violet.
Yet, as he sits at his table in The Courtyard, the infamously short-tempered bad boy of cooking is the picture of politeness.
He’s even courteous about the standard of this year’s season of The Restaurant, which will return to our screens next month.
Amazed
As he puts it: “The standard can be mixed, but I was amazed at how accomplished this year’s guests were.
“To be honest, I just had a meal prepared by one of the celebrities that could easily have come from a top class restaurant. I was genuinely impressed.”
He reckons everyone has become a better cook since the first lockdown.
“People were stuck at home and they had nothing to do,” he said. “So in times like that, people turn to food for comfort and I really believe that’s the reason why the standard has been so high this year.”
And who was the celebrity who served him a restaurant-quality dish? Ah, he smiles with a look that’s half-menace, half-mischief, “all names are firmly secret, you’ll just have to watch it for yourself ”.
He has a point about lockdowns — it wasn’t all about banana bread and the other fads. Many of us simply fell in love with being in the kitchen and he reckons that’s at least one good thing to come from Covid.
He says he’s seen a huge improvement in the quality of Irish food in the years he has been coming here.
In a surprise admission, he says his current favourite dish is, of all things, coddle.
Coddle? That horrible watery stew with boiled sausages that look like a dead man’s fingers?
“It’s glorious, have you never tried it?” he asks, aghast that someone from Dublin doesn’t like the city’s most famous dish.
“I had a coddle in the Gravediggers in Glasnevin the other night and it was the best thing I’ve eaten in a long, long time,” he insisted. fo la so
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