When Paul and Máire Flynn opened The Tannery restaurant in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, in July 1997, it was the first time Máire had worked in a restaurant. Well, not quite, if you count the two nights she spent in Kevin Thornton’s eponymous Michelin-star restaurant in Dublin. “Paul thought it would be very good training for me,” she says sardonically. “I learned one very valuable thing there. There was a really glamorous waitress working there, and she used to pick up a knife and check her lipstick, and I just thought, God, that’s a really good tip. So that’s what I learned in Kevin Thornton’s.”
The Flynns, both from Dungarvan, met on a blind date in Dublin in May 1991. The date had been set up by a friend, Declan Maxwell, who many will know as the manager of Dublin 8 restaurant Spitalfields. It was a match, and Máire moved to London, where Paul was living, six months later.
Paul is the youngest of eight, and his father had hoped that he would study to be a pharmacist and take over the family business. His lack of interest in school made it obvious that this was unlikely, however. “I never gave him much trouble, but I never gave him much hope either,” says Paul, recalling how his career inspiration came from elsewhere.
“[A]ctually, this is really timely,” he says, “because last night my very first mentor came to the restaurant to eat for only the second time, and maybe the last time I saw him was 20 years ago. His name is Paul McCloskey.”
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McCloskey had been the chef at Merry’s pub on the opposite corner in Dungarvan. It was a highly rated restaurant, McCloskey having staged at Paul Bocuse in France and worked in the Savoy in London. Paul had finished a Fás course and a stint in the Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil (FCA) kitchen, but Merry’s was the first serious kitchen environment he had encountered.
“He made me want to cook, and he made me be ambitious,” says Paul. “So, a day after my 18th birthday, I went to London.”
Like any young chef, he took whatever jobs he could get, working for a year in two hotels, all the time furiously writing to Michelin star restaurants. A short, unhappy stint at one of the Roux brothers’ restaurants was quickly consigned to history when he landed a job where he felt he would have the opportunity to grow.
“I had written to Nico Ladennis, who had a two-star at the time, only one of four two-stars in the UK, I did the interview, and he gave me a job,” says Paul. “It was very much a different scene, it was very familial – there was a mammy, and there was a daddy, and we were the babies, except we were the babies that had to get everything right. But I stayed with him through five restaurants over nine years, and I became his head chef at Chez Nico when I was 23. I really was too young. There was too much responsibility. I used to get out of bed and get nosebleeds; I didn’t have enough experience to take that job, but that’s the way it happened.”
[ Chefs at home: Paul Flynn, The Tannery RestaurantOpens in new window ]
Having a well-paid job meant that he could enjoy the buzzing London scene whenever he had time off. For most of his time there, he shared flats with future cupid, Maxwell, who worked front of house in one of Ladennis’s restaurants. At one stage, they lived at the top of Baker Street overlooking Regent’s Park, where they hosted some legendary parties.
The return to Ireland came when Paul was head-hunted for the head-chef role at La Stampa in Dublin, with he and Máire moving back to Dublin in October 1993. They got married on December 27th that year.
“Chez Nico got the three stars in January of ‘94, and after all my years of work, I wasn’t there for the third star,” says Paul ruefully. “It absolutely killed me, you know. And the judging and all that, they would have been in all that year, and all the numerous years before that, so my timing was particularly bad.”
The Flynns arrived in a newly confident Dublin, awash with international celebrities who had taken up residence in Ireland for tax purposes. Paul was “agog” when he first saw La Stampa. “I remember walking in and it was completely different to anything I’d ever worked in, because it was so big, so boisterous. It was so beautiful, actually. And everybody in it was beautiful.”
“It was just at the time when Dublin was changing, so it was a really exciting time to be there,” says Máire. “And it was also at the time when the Late Late had superstar guests, and whoever was on the Late Late that night would be in for dinner at La Stampa later.”
With 160-180 diners a night, Paul credits La Stampa as being the place that taught him how to run a restaurant as a business. But after 3½ years, he decided it was time to move on and do his own thing. “I was informed that now we’re moving to Dungarvan, which was never part of my plan,” says Máire, who had built a successful property career in both London and Dublin.
After architect Denis Looby transformed the former warehouse that houses it still, the Flynns opened The Tannery on July 1st, 1997. Paul was in the kitchen and Máire front of house.
“It was in at the deep end. I don’t recommend that,” says Máire. “I did it the really hard way. It was really, really tough. It’s tough to start as a waiter, a junior as a part-time job, never mind being thrust into things – this is your business, you know nothing about it, you’ve never done it, but you’re going to do it now.”
Máire says that realistically, it took her 10 years to understand the full workings of the restaurant business. “I was just too reactive. I was really young,” she says. “I had no idea what to do if people complained. I just thought, they’re ridiculous for complaining. I’d think, there’s nothing wrong with it. What’s wrong with you? So, I ran into a lot of trouble.
“Quite quickly I learned to keep my mouth shut, but not quickly enough. Now, I did get very good advice from someone who said there’s only one way to go, and that is stony silence, say as little as you possibly can when you’re running into difficulty. I mean, I couldn’t carry three plates, taking orders, calling tables back, like the very basics of service. I really didn’t know that, but I had to learn all of those. And I am quite tough, so I just rolled with the punches.”
The restaurant was perhaps a bit before its time, with its strong architectural vibe and more modern approach. The beech natural wood tables, imported from Spain, were designed to show off the quality of the wood, so didn’t have tablecloths. The menu was sometimes at odds with what was popular at the time, where a glass of orange juice or half a grapefruit was often a preferred starter.
“I did too much jumping around, I would say. I was always curious about food, and I think I could have kept myself steadier in a way. Like if we went to Thailand, I’d come back and there would be a Thai fish dish, or if we went to Morocco, it would be Moroccan,” says Paul. “I just get bored really easily, being curious and wanting to do new dishes all the time. But, we are a local restaurant and I never want the locals to be bored coming in. I want them to see that we are thinking about things, and we always keep it fresh, but I probably did that too much, to be honest.”
[ Chef Paul Flynn: ‘I fancied myself as Rick Stein’Opens in new window ]
The Flynns don’t dwell on the impact the recession had on their business. Ironically, the thing that nearly pulled them under – buying two buildings for The Tannery Townhouse to offer rooms to diners – was ultimately what helped them to battle through it. “I don’t think The Tannery on its own would have withstood the recession,” says Máire.
Meanwhile, turning the downstairs part of the restaurant into a wine bar changed the business. “It made The Tannery a very lively, casual place to go for a glass of wine and maybe just a main course. It made it really accessible to people and opened us up to a completely new audience,” says Máire.
The couple said at the start of this year that The Tannery restaurant is set to close after nearly 30 years on January 1st, 2027. The Tannery Townhouse and the couple’s cookery school will evolve into a new business, opening eight months of the year for dinner, bed and breakfast.
“The Tannery feel will still be here, but it will be on a smaller scale, because it will be 28 people max for dinner, whereas The Tannery could be 90 in the diningroom,” says Máire.
Looby, their architect, has agreed to come out of retirement to make the structural changes necessary at the cookery school to create a dining room that echoes The Tannery space. Paul and Máire will be there too, Máire running front of house and Paul in the kitchen, ideally, he says, as an assistant, rather than the chef. “We’re just going to have a really simple pared-back menu, no choice, but with vegetarian options,” he says.
“People have become really emotional with us because they’ve celebrated so much here. Weddings, christenings, birthdays, twenty-firsts. We had a lady who had her 18th, 30th and 40th birthdays in The Tannery,” says Máire. “It’s great to go out like this, to see all the generations of families, and the Dublin families who spend their summers in the mobile homes in Clonea. We couldn’t have asked for more.”
