Chef Anna Masters her dining debut
ACCLAIMED Irish chef Anna Haugh is to open a finedining restaurant in Dublin this week ahead of her debut as a judge on Masterchef. Her eponymously named restaurant at Conrad Dublin, which opens on Tuesday at the city-centre hotel, promises ‘warm sincere service’ paired with a modern twist on Irish cuisine.
It will be Anna’s first venture in her hometown, having left these shores for London two decades ago after cutting her teeth in Derry Clarke’s L’Écrivain on Dublin’s Baggot Street.
The chef said she ‘left Dublin thinking French food was the cuisine I wanted to cook… I return to Ireland knowing that Irish cuisine is the food I want to cook’.
Now 41, she says she is ‘so proud that a little girl from Tallaght is collaborating with an iconic luxury hotel off St Stephen’s Green’.
The five-star Conrad says the restaurant will use the finest Irish produce in ‘honest, refined and
uncomplicated dishes that evoke memories and tell the story of Ireland’.
And a week after it opens, Anna will make her debut as a judge on BBC’s Masterchef: The Professionals, alongside Michelin-starred celebrity chef Marcus Wareing and Gregg Wallace.
She takes the place of Monica Galetti, who is taking leave.
Anna says it is ‘a privilege to be keeping her seat warm’, and that she has ‘long-admired Monica as an incredible chef’, who has ‘paved the way for female chefs’.
‘I’ll be judging the same way I judge my own chefs in my kitchen,’ she assures. ‘I’ll be firm but fair and my expectations are high.’
The mother-of-one worked under world-renowned chefs in London and Paris, including Gordon Ramsey, before opening her own London restaurant in 2019 – Myrtle, a nod to Myrtle Allen, who died a year earlier.
Simultaneously, she has established a TV career, appearing as a regular on BBC One’s Morning Live and Saturday Kitchen and on Ready Steady Cook.