Richard Corrigan was 12 when he had his first meal out at the local hotel. Two years later he was back there scrubbing down walls, cookers and washing up, with the encouragement of his father ringing in his ears, "You'll be made into a chef or mincemeat".
Last year he was voted Chef of the Year by the Guardian newspaper, described by their food critic Matthew Fort as "one of the most outstanding culinary talents of a generation". This month he publishes his first book, as near to poetry as a cookery book can get. His themes are the seasons, the scents and tastes of a country childhood: turnips, swede and potatoes; rabbit and hare, onions, cabbage, goats cheese; pheasant and mallard, apples, pumpkin and pig.
Fourteen years after arriving in London, he now owns his own restaurant, Lindsay House, a Georgian townhouse in Soho where we meet in an upstairs room. The pale walls, he explains proudly, are not just paint, but a mixture of paint, plaster and wax. The chairs - pale blue leather - are new this summer and cost £17,000 - all profits are ploughed back into the restaurant. For the first two years customers had to sit on old wooden chairs covered with calico. "Jesus Christ," he explodes, "I was glad to get rid of them." He was after something simple, he explains. "Not an over-opulent look. It can make people a bit snooty, but when they come in here and see it's very plain Jane-ish, there's no attitude problem. What I wanted was Irish charm without the `Oirish'. And I wanted a bit of French charm in front of house without the snooty bloody service which I hate and loathe."
Corrigan's forthright approach would make him a natural for television. But he's not interested. "Unlike a lot of chefs, I do spend a lot of time in my kitchen and I'm always around the restaurant. I've stayed away from this Ready, Steady Cook lark, all this TV, all this waving your hands, to make you stand out from the rest. It's all bullshit , and I don't do it and I've no time for it. They don't ring me any more because I'm so rude to them."
Richard Corrigan is a big man who, although a good six foot, four inches, and with the build of a front row forward, has all the devilment and exuberance of the 12-year-old boy who loved nothing so much as a night's poaching with his da. His love and respect for food is a direct legacy of his country childhood. "We had a very privileged upbringing in the food that we had on the table. We were brought up in a unique environment. When the rest of Ireland was eating mince and boiled spuds, we had pork and hams and duck and pheasant and venison. We shot and poached our way around the whole of Leinster. Wild salmon was so plentiful we had a big slab of it for breakfast with brown bread and home-churned butter. If you have a family to feed, anything that walks, crawls, swims or flies is fair game."
The 25-acre farm at Maumeen, Co Meath was home to seven little Corrigans. With so many children, there was no room for democracy, he says. "I was brought up in the ideal environment to run a kitchen. Everyone knew their chores, some bringing in the turf, stocking up on wood, getting the cattle in, bringing the ducks in every evening, everyone had a job to do. It acclimatised me for life in my given profession as chef and restaurateur."
Corrigan's success at Lindsay House - he was awarded a Michelin star in his first year - has been hard won. After an apprenticeship in hotels in the Netherlands and London, in 1988 he became head chef at Stephen Bull's cutting edge restaurant in Blandford Street. He was 22. "People say I learnt from Stephen and I say, `yeah, yeah, sure'. But I had my own ideas about what good food was before I went to Stephen. He employed me as head chef because it was a disaster of a restaurant when he opened. He was going down big style, so I was brought in as a heavyweight hitter to sort the thing out." Next came Mulligans, an Irish bar and basement restaurant in London's Cork Street.
"Heading down the Mulligans angle was really about reinventing myself, frankly, and reinventing what kind of food I really want to cook. And leaving a very trendy restaurant and going to a bar was brave. It took about seven or eight months to get Mulligans off the ground. We had some very hard times at the beginning, because it was expensive to run. It came very slowly , but it all became incredibly successful."
It was then that I first met Richard Corrigan, a fresh-faced 26-year-old who would pass away the afternoons in Mulligans's upstairs bar drinking with art students from the Royal Academy over the road. It had just been named Time Out restaurant of the year as a result of Corrigan's unique-for-London menu of beef braised in Guinness, ox-tongue, black pudding, crubeens, soda bread and Irish cheese.
But Mulligans was only ever to be a short respite. It was soon back to the cliff face at Stephen Bull's next restaurant in Fulham Road. "Going to Mulligans was just about an experience. But going to Fulham Road, it was getting back into a very serious area of cooking: you are talking Michelin stars and you are on the line, totally. We used to start at 7.30 every morning and finish at 1.30 every night. And after two years, I'd had enough. Three weeks' notice and I just left. Pretty shocking, but I couldn't give it another day. We had created a huge, monumental pressure for ourselves by being so ambitious." They received a Michelin star in their first year, "and Michelin gave out that star on the basis of consistency."
Another spot of trouble-shooting followed, then came Lindsay House, entirely his own operation, and he believes his last. His company may open other restaurants (and indeed he has two in the pipeline) but they'll be run by other chef-patrons. "My attitude is my company can expand but Richard Corrigan stays where he is. My company needs to grow because it's growing with talent that I have inside it. Why let someone leave and go to work for the competition, in competition with me? Why not take the risk and do it with him? I don't think it's an Einstein of a business attitude. It's just sense."
Corrigan's tough entrepreneurial shell disguises a generous-spirited man, reflected in the easy way he acknowledges other chefs and sources of inspiration in the book. Although he's a hard task-master and a penny-pincher where it counts, he believes in paying his suppliers on time and his kitchen staff well. The chefs who will run the two new restaurants in the Richard Corrigan stable will be given shares, something that never was offered to him. "I was an employee at Fulham Road, but I gave it my heart and my soul and it nearly destroyed me. And that is why it was so successful. Because that is what it takes."
Simple though the food at Lindsay House might be - based on the seasons and no truck with trendiness - it's nonetheless Michelin-starred restaurant food, which is why the book is called The Richard Corrigan Cookbook. "What I didn't want," he explains "was the Lindsay House cookbook: take 12 chefs, go into a little kitchen and come out with one little dish." Some are scaled-down recipes from the restaurant (sea bass with asparagus and clam vinaigrette); some are simple recipes with masterly twists: (rack of lamb with sweetbreads and spiced aubergines). Familiar vegetables are given new life (turnips in sherry; pea and scallop soup); puddings are rediscovered (baked semolina with honeyed dates); some are just pure genius (pumpkin gnocchi with langoustines). The recipes are all within easy reach of a home cook, with step-by-step instructions.
"I stayed away from a lot of labour-intensive dishes. I even say in the book, if you don't want to make your own stock, use a stock cube. It's pointless being a purist. Time is at such a minimum for most families today, and I wanted to include cheese notes and wine notes to show there's more to enjoy than Chardonnay and Pinot noir. If anything, it's a book of knowledge, a very personal book of knowledge."
Lindsay House was recently awarded 24 out of 25 for its cooking by the influential American food guide, Zaget, which described it as "a restaurant where everything is genuinely done with love". The way of life that Richard Corrigan remembers with such affection may have all but disappeared but, as he ably demonstrates, the food and the cultural heritage remain.
The Richard Corrigan Cookbook by Richard Corrigan, published by Hodder & Stoughton, £25 in the UK