CHAR: Clanbrassil House

Photo by George Voronov

No Wallflowers

The food at Clanbrassil House showcases serious skills while retaining an unfussy integrity. It’s one of a newish gang of modern Irish restaurants in the city making inventive, real food with respect for suppliers and the environment, all while using seasonal, Irish ingredients. I’m thinking also of Clanbrassil’s sister restaurant Bastible, plus Delahunt, Forest and Marcy, Lock’s, Craft, the Legal Eagle. And there are more.

There’s something easy about these places, even those that lean towards fine dining. They are relaxed in their hospitality, non-purist in their styles and assuredly on-point when it comes to the cooking itself. They’re just getting on with it. The pleasure of enjoying food as you like it, rather than eating to show off how sophisticated you are, seems to be back on the menu in Dublin.

Photo by George Voronov

Gráinne O’Keefe is the head chef at Clanbrassil House, a small, neat and modern restaurant owned by Bastible’s Barry Fitzgerald and Claire-Marie Thomas. The menu is simple and the mains are based around the restaurant’s unique, charcoal grill. We were wowed by the perfect snack — spherical ham croquettes, crispy on the outside, hot and creamy on the inside. Elsewhere on the menu there are pitch perfect pairings, like delicate crab meat topped with Gubbeen guanciale, a melt-in-the-mouth, thin, fatty, pork cheek.

Photo by George Voronov

I chatted to Gráinne about how she cooks and her thoughts on food.

Did you always want to be a chef?

I didn’t know what foie gras was until I went to college. But when I was younger I remember I used to watch cooking shows at home. I remember when I was watching chefs on TV thinking, ‘I want to do that. I want to learn how to do that’. I have three older brothers and an older sister and I used to try and cook for them when I was younger. I did my Leaving Cert and I actually did quite well in school, but I didn’t do the CAO. I said I’m going to get into culinary school in DIT. That was a two-year course, but I knew if I didn’t do that course I just would have gone to work in a kitchen somewhere.

What about food influences?

When I was younger I used to go down to my grandparents a lot, they live on a farm in Leitrim. My nan would always cook dinner at the same time every day. That was the best food I had ever eaten. Looking back now, I know that’s because everything that they cooked was fresh. It was from around them, it was local. The milk was from the cows up the road. The beef and the cheese, everything was local. There was one shop in the village. You couldn’t get anything in it. They had their own well.

I suppose I never really thought about why the food tasted so good until I was older. I didn’t eat in a proper restaurant until I went to college. I literally knew nothing. I didn’t know any chefs. I think it’s a lot different nowadays. I think people who go into cooking now, by the time they are 17 they have a world of experience at their fingertips, on the internet, in books. A lot of chefs are self-taught anyway, a lot of good chefs. It’s different now.

Is it a tough gig?

You have to have the right attitude. When you’re starting out at that age, when you’re young, you’re still going out with your mates who are not chefs. They’re out weekends. You have to realise that it’s going to be no weekends off; you’re going to be working until 1am. I think for the first year or so you get that shock that this is what your life is going to be from now on if you continue in this career. And then, you know, you start to make friends who are mostly chefs, you start going out Monday nights.

It sounds a bit like a cult! Does it attract a certain type of personality?

Every good chef I know seems to share similar qualities. Extremely driven, always quite intelligent, but also chefs just seem to have, not all, but some, a different humour than you would get with other people. If I’m outside my work, with my family, you’d almost be stopping yourself from saying things. Anywhere else it sounds ridiculous. In the kitchen it’s totally normal. There is a sense of camaraderie. Everyone who works in a kitchen is little bit weird.

How would you describe your style of cooking?

Gráinne O’Keefe

Photo by George Voronov

My style is simple and focused on seasonal cooking, as local as we can. What’s unique about here is the charcoal grill. We base the menu around what’s in season, what works, what we like, what tastes good.

What does food mean to you?

I think since I’ve been 17, all I’ve really done is cook food, learn about food. If I was to go into detail about it, I’d be more likely to talk about farmers, producers and the way it’s produced, what you get in the supermarket, why it’s the prices that it is compared to in a butchers. When you think, you think of the farmers – even my grandad – working 365 days a year. Even at Christmas time the cows need to be fed.

When you look at a carrot and you go into one of the big brands they are selling them for three cent each. I would just look at that and think, ‘The farmer spent however many months growing that, put however much water into the soil and they probably made minus profit on that carrot’. I’m always conscious of where it comes from, where it’s grown.

clanbrassilhouse.com