Despite the recent controversy over a plate of chips, Kevin Thornton is enjoying himself more than ever, and losing a Michelin star has resulted in better food at his restaurant, he tells Shane Hegarty.
It's a nippy Friday morning, and a couple of sluggish lobsters are being wheeled through the Stephen's Green traffic for a photoshoot. For the delectation of the photographers, Kevin Thornton dangles one of the creatures above the mock-horrified face of a TV3 presenter, while his fellow chef, Ross Lewis of Chapter One, watches on. Perhaps stunned by the surreal turn that his life has taken, the lobster does not take the opportunity to attack.
Having done his bit to publicise June's Taste of Dublin festival, back across the road in the Shelbourne Hotel, his hands cleaned of lobster effluent, Kevin Thornton sits down to talk. And it's hard not wonder if he'll snap a little for the press.
In February, a row erupted, via Liveline, when a group of diners accused the Michelin-starred chef of swearing at them and then chucking them out for the simple crime of asking for chips but not eating them. Joe Duffy got a good scrap. The press got a great "crazy chef" story. The public got to update its stereotype of Michelin chefs having egos far bigger than their portions. And Kevin Thornton got a pain in the neck. Plus, a few more things he could have done without.
"It was nothing to do with the chips," he says. "That was just the excuse, everybody jumped on the bandwagon. I mean, I was flabbergasted really. I was scared, by the reaction it got. Maybe scared isn't the right word to use, but it was very weird. A lot of s**t happened. People writing graffiti on the walls on the toilets downstairs. S**t on the Internet. People ringing the radio to say that a fire happened in Thornton's restaurant on Friday morning. You wake on Friday morning and the news says there's a fire at Thornton's, and you think what the f***? And then the news says there's three brigades of fire trucks on the way to the restaurant, and that the fire's under control and all this s**t. What the f***'s going on? Excuse my language."
THAT'S ALRIGHT. ACTUALLY, it's a quite a genial polemic. His words rattle along, with his enthusiasm sometimes pushing them into little dead ends so that he ends his sentences with a "whoah" or a "whoo". His language is scattered not just with jolly expletives but also gnomic statements about his raw materials. Knowing "what that lobster is going through" as he cooks it or the origins of food informing its journey into the pot, that sort of thing.
He lives, he says, on "positive energy". Even if he must occasionally battle with what he perceives as some people's "focus on the negative stuff". This means the focus on the price of his food, the nature of the service, the size of the portions, the loss of a Michelin star and problems with his restaurant that have recently led to a redesign.
Let's start with price. Expensive, surely? "The word expensive is the wrong word. What does the word expensive mean? Yes, if I want to use a sh**ty chicken and a sh**ty salmon and sh**ty beef and sh**ty this and that, then of course I can do food for €2. At the moment, to break that psychological thing where people think that we are out of their price range we've done a canapé bar. You tell me where you can get a quality product for €3.50. So that's bulls**t, to say it's expensive.
"What do you value? Do you value the s**t that you're putting into your body? Do you value that if you're paying €1.99 for a chicken. The chicken has a serious problem. What the f**k did the chicken eat?" Once again, it's worth pointing out that this tirade is pretty much as free of aggression as a tirade can get.
"The wild salmon is €20 a kilo, the farmed salmon is €1.99 a kilo. So what happens, people think 'I'll go for the farmed, because why should I pay that?' But the wild salmon is caught by somebody who truly hunts in the wild. Okay, they've got radars and whatever else, but they take their life in their hands, they go out there and it's their livelihood. There is no other profession like that. None. So you're paying for the fact that the fish swam 3,500 miles, got the best quality food on its way, ate really well and then it's on your plate. So, if €20 is too expensive for you, that's your problem."
Onto the Michelin star, then, which has been singular since the beginning of 2006. "I lost my star. So what? It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. I could have lost my star and gone 'whoah, I lost my star'." He mimes falling backwards in shock. "The thing is, I learned so much by going backwards that I have moved, I think, 20 paces forward. And I think we cook far better food than we did when we had the second star. It's a far better restaurant than we had then. And we have far better energy." Still, it was a headline maker that he could surely do without. "I don't look at it as negative attention, because that's their problem. We don't focus on it, they [ the press/critics] focus on it. Okay, Michelin is a good thing because it's a very well-contrived, organised PR machine. That's what it is," he says.
"And sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes they get it right, but like everybody they're human and they won't admit if they've made a mistake. And we all make mistakes. The thing is you can't get annoyed with Michelin or with anybody because then it means that I'm not doing what I want to do, I'm doing it for them."
Following a self-published book, he's now making a TV programme, which has included an eye-opening trip to the tribes of northern Thailand.
"The problem is, I'm not very good at talking to the camera," he chuckles. He's no Gordon Ramsay either, on screen at least. Not that he has a problem with the London chef and how he's transformed the image of the kitchen into one of a cauldron spitting out hot testosterone. "The food is your responsibility," says Thornton. "People are starving. You can't misuse it, because it's been living. You need that energy going, but you don't need abuse. Of course not. I wouldn't abuse people, I hope. I'm certainly no saint. But I was pretty badly abused, if you want to say that sort of s**t. But so what?"
He's enjoying himself more than ever, he insists. "It's like sex, you know. It's like . . . whoo! It sounds weird, but I get high from it. And that's why I think we're really, really lucky. And what we're doing at the moment is really exciting. It's like I'm 16 and getting out of a cage. I don't know what it is, I really don't. It's like it's not even me, like the energies are coming from elsewhere. That sounds weird too. But it's like the raw materials, like the lobster. It's about holding that lobster, understanding what that lobster is going through and controlling it. And that's what I enjoy about going back to basics. And there are costs in whatever you do, but it's about taking those costs and learning from it."
