How Rankin’s restaurant dream went up in flames
He has survived bankruptcy and divorce, but now our first celeb chef has closed his flagship…
IT WAS with great sadness that I read Paul Rankin, left, closed his wonderful restaurant Cayenne in Belfast last week. I was there last November with my family — all 18 of us, aged from 16 to 88, had a night to remember. We had gone to the races at Down Royal and the only restaurant that I would consider booking was Paul’s. His food is amazing; he is a wonderful host and the service was very attentive, especially considering we were a large and varied group with all sorts of requests. Like us, Paul’s daughter worked with him as part of the front-of-house team. Belfast is a beautiful city and we try to get there at least once a year. It will be at a loss without a great chef like Paul and I do hope he opens another restaurant soon — he deserves to do well. The hospitality industry in the whole island of Ireland is on its knees and I hope the tide turns for all of us very soon. IS this the end for Ireland’s first celeb chef?
WHEN Paul Rankin and his wife Jeanne opened Roscoff in Belfast i n 1989, they changed the face of fine dining in the North by becoming the first restaurant there to receive a Michelin star.
They revolutionised Belfast’s culinary offering and even brought a semblance of normality to a city still torn apart by terror. However, nearly a quarter century and a name change later, the city is again terrorised by protests so violent that they contributed to the chef’s decision to close his Cayenne kitchen last week.
‘Location is key in the restaurant business, particularly at a time of economic downturn, and our current setting is no longer sustainable,’ Paul said last week. ‘The disturbances around the flag protest, particularly during the Christmas period, also confirmed our decision.’
At 53, Paul Rankin faces a hard slog to bounce back. However, it would be wrong to write him off, because he has battled so many problems, both personal and professional, before.
It’s a far cry from the carefree Irish man who, more than 30 years ago, was too shy to talk to two beautiful Canadian women he met while travelling the Greek islands, one of whom would become his wife.
Though there was a clear mutual attraction and Jeanne fell in love with him, if not at first sight then ‘certainly within the first week’, nothing happened.
Drastic action was needed. ‘He was shy and innocent and I seduced him,’ she said years later.
It was the start of a partnership that eventually resulted in the 1989 opening of Roscoff, which became the preferred haunt of local business and media people, and visiting celebrities.
The Rankins’ BBC TV show Gourmet Ireland was a ratings success and made celebrities of both, and their empire expanded to 16 restaurants and cafés, including one in Dundrum Town Centre in Dublin, and a range of branded foods. When Roscoff shut in the late Nineties and was replaced in the same premises by Cayenne, signalling a move to more casual dining, the restaurant prospered.
BUT over- expansion led to near-bankruptcy when the credit crunch hit in 2009. A fall from a horse left Jeanne with so much spinal pain she became addicted to morphine and had to check into the Priory to beat her dependency.
Two years ago, the couple quietly and amicably separated. Last week, Cayenne closed, a victim, Paul said, of flag protests outside the nearby City Hall that put people off coming into the city at night.
Food is his life, though it wasn’t always so. When he was a boy in Ballywalter, Co. Down, fish and chips or sweet and sour from the local Chinese were his favourite treats. The trip to Greece and Jeanne (who he calls Jeannie) altered everything.
Paul had got a job painting a boat for a tour operator. ‘One day, these two beautiful Canadian girls arrived to work, and the guy in charge asked if either of them could cook,’ he later told The
Times. ‘ Jeannie had grown up in a large family so she could do all this great family cooking: porridge, eggs, bacon. We started to go out after about two weeks. I am a slow mover, incredibly shy at that sort of thing, so eventually Jeannie picked me up.
‘Our first romantic meal was in a little taverna. I remember having Greek salad and thick fish off the bone. It’s a little blurred, because we were happy, falling in love, and probably had far too much retsina.’
They went back to Canada, where Jeanne, now 51, had a summer job as a lifeguard in Winnipeg, then moved on to Vancouver and Australia. They paid for their travels working in restaurants and soon, food became a shared passion and potential career.
In Australia, a French chef friend told them: ‘If you want to learn, go back to Europe and find the best restaurant you can.’ Paul had read of the Roux brothers, who owned Le Gavroche in London, and got a job there in 1984 as dishwasher. Jeannie got work in the kitchen and they married soon after but owning a place of their own always was the plan.
‘We had the same goals, dedication, passion; so when we came to do Roscoff we were very focused,’ Paul said. ‘We wanted a big, funky, relaxed innovative brasserie, with great i ngredients. Then along came Michelin and gave us a star, which pushed us to make it a bit posher, but that was never the intention.’
Roscoff was an i mmediate sensation and brought the couple to the attention of TV producers who commissioned t hree series of Gourmet Ireland; both later also became regular fixtures on daytime shows such as Ready Steady Cook.
As their business empire expanded, so did their family — they have adult daughters Claire and Emily, and a teenage son, Jamie.
Though the hours were long and tough, Paul wasn’t temperamental. ‘He’s not a shouting, screaming chef,’ Jeanne said. ‘When he was first setting up Roscoff, there were some Fawlty Towers scenes where Paul would j ump up and down but instead of instilling fear, most of the other chefs could hardly suppress their giggles.
‘We both think Ramsay-esque temper tantrums are PR stuff for good TV — why would an employee stay with someone who is incessantly shouting you down and humiliating you? It seems fairly primitive.’
That said, someone had to take charge. ‘Though we started as equals, it became clear that he was definitely the boss,’ Jeanne said. ‘I was pastry chef, and worked on the restaurant floor 4am to 4pm. We saw each other at the restaurant but at home it was all about squeezing in naps at odd times of day and night.
‘When the TV shows began in the early Nineties, filming required that I defer to him as head chef. For those years, we hardly saw each other.’ Jeanne’s health also was about to take a turn for the worse. In 2000, she had surgery for a prolapsed neck disc and, two years later, broke her back in a riding accident.
‘I had repeated surgery, was bedbound for months and then had to rely on a Zimmer frame,’ she later explained. ‘ Paul had to take over everything while running all the restaurants. He looked after me and the children and was a real angel — I know marriage vows include “in sickness and in health” but I think a lot of husbands might have walked in such a time. ‘I was out of my mind with pain and medication for months and remember little, but I know he went well beyond the call of duty and the team at the restaurants pulled together to allow Paul to spend more time at home with me.’ But the medication for her pain led to the biggest challenge the couple had faced — Jeanne’s addiction to painkillers and a spell in the Priory. ‘For the first week at the clinic, I was experiencing severe delirium tremens while I went cold turkey,’ she recalled. ‘I was thrashing about the bed like a mad woman, sweating, with my pupils dilated and eyes rolling. My body felt like it was crawling with ants and my i nsides were fighting with each other and ripping each other apart.
‘ I was delirious and ready for a straitjacket. It was horrendous.’
As well as being addicted to morphine, Jeanne also was drinking too much. ‘I would have a couple of glasses of wine with my dinner in the evening to help me numb the pain just that little bit more,’ she said at the time. ‘Since I got clean, I have to have complete sobriety in my life. I can’t risk becoming addicted to something else, like alcohol.’
In another i nterview, she was even more blunt, saying: ‘ My addiction may be to legal, prescribed medication, but I am no better than the heroin junkie on the street or the celebrity crack addict.’
The hardest part was admitting she had neglected her children. ‘I haven’t been there for my children over the years and that kills me, but I am learning to forgive myself and getting help means that I will be there for them in the future,’ she told the Belfast Telegraph in 2005.
‘One of the toughest things for me was when I told the kids that I was going away for a while to get help to make me better. Clare said, “That’s OK, Mum, you haven’t been here for a long time anyway”. Imagine hearing those things as a mother. I knew what she meant, but it broke my heart and made me even more determined to get better for them.’ Poignantly, she also paid tribute to her husband. ‘Paul has been my rock through all of this,’ she said. ‘It has been horrendous on him — he’s been trying to look after the kids and run the business and be a nurse to me.
‘But he is strong and I know we will get through what lies ahead. He is my best friend and I want to make it up to him and everyone else. But it’s one day, one step at a time.
‘It is almost like coming out of a bubble and, at the moment, nothing feels real. I’m as scared as hell.’
SADLY, though, the couple’s problems were not to end there. In 2009, they were served with a petition for bankruptcy, though it didn’t proceed. ‘Our problems weren’t about the recession,’ Paul told the News Of The World. ‘It came down to us making errors, running out of cash and expanding too quickly. The credit crunch has been the last straw.
‘We had 16 units and 500 staff and there was a stage where it was going so well. But we tried to do it and hang on to all the equity. We made a few big mistakes and had to pull it back.
‘As we were desperately trying to save jobs we ended up financing it through not paying the taxman, which was a mistake.’
Jeanne left the business soon after and trained as a yoga instructor and then, in 2011, the couple sadly went their separate ways.
Now, Cayenne is gone too, with the loss of 18 full-time and part-time jobs. He insisted there are offers on the table. ‘I am committed to establishing a new kitchen inspired by both Cayenne and Roscoff,’ he said.
He has, of course, bounced back before and a lot of goodwill exists to see him do so again. At a time when it was seen as near madness, he and Jeanne gave a vote of confidence to Belfast when it was on its knees and brought attention to the North for a positive rather than a negative reason. Now the roles are reversed, it may be time Belfast returned the favour.