Learning about hospitality from one of the masters

A conversation reveals how the Clancy brothers liked an egg on their steaks, and other secrets of the stars

MY MOTHER arrived to me for Christmas without her Padre Pio prayers, so I had to download them from the internet. On Christmas morning I went to Mass alone, but just as I was taking my place, a button popped off my overcoat and rolled under the pew and I couldn’t retrieve it.

Later, sitting in the jeep in the cathedral car park I turned on the heater fan but the fuse blew, and I was perished by the time I arrived home. And I got a pain in the head from the stress of cooking a duck and a lump of spiced beef for eight people on Christmas afternoon. So it wasn’t all fun.

But that evening, I watched my mother beside the fire, foraging for the last sweet in a box and it made me smile.

“I was in the Metropole Hotel in Cork before Christmas,” I told her. “I had tea with Noel Bridgeman, the head chef.” Between sips of tea, Noel had pointed at the stairs in the foyer, and said, “That stairs is where the hotel manager, Mr Vance used to stand, in the old days, to lecture the new staff. Always make the guests feel at home he would say; and we did.”

One morning, a guest found a waitress standing at the foot of his bed with a breakfast tray. “Your usual prunes, sir,” she declared, though the guest’s previous visit had been 10 years earlier. Noel cooked for Walt Disney, Gregory Peck, Vivian Lee, and many other famous guests at the Metropole, down the years.

Most of them had simple tastes, except for Dawn Adams, an actress from Hollywood who asked for milk to be delivered to her room. Noel thought it was just a glass of milk she meant, but she wanted buckets of it, to fill the bath.

The request was refused.

“The Jazz Festival started under those stairs,” Noel said. “Myself and Jim Mountjoy and Mr Vance were sitting in there, wondering what we could dream up for the end of October, to bring in a few extra guests. And Jim suggested a jazz festival, and sure we all thought he was daft.

“I’ll never forget the first night Ella Fitzgerald arrived. I was on standby to cook her anything she wanted. But all she asked for was a bowl of chicken soup; a lovely woman with simple taste. All the stars had simple tastes; although mind you, the Clancy Brothers always liked a fried egg on top of their steaks.”

Noel worked for almost 50 years at the Metropole and he never missed a day, except for once, as a boy, when he got blown off his feet by gas exploding from an oven.

“A big ball of fire came at me and burned my face; there wasn’t even an eyelash left. And Mr Vance said I should go home. So I did. But I came back the following morning, with dark glasses and no eyebrows.”

Noel was wearing a double-breasted white jacket, his chef’s hat, and a red neckerchief, when I met him. He had been working all day, but when he went home for Christmas he intended folding his uniform and putting it away forever.

“I’ve decided to retire,” he said.

I asked him did he remember the famous sweetshop beside the Metropole, the Hadji Bey. It was run by an Armenian who fled Turkey at the turn of the 20th century and ended up in Cork selling sweets.

I told him that my mother once worked in the Metropole, and that she often recalled the fragrance of exotic confectionary wafting into the foyer, as guests arrived and sniffed the air. And I told my mother all this on Christmas evening. But she didn’t pay much attention. She happened to be savouring the last sweet nugget of Turkish Delight in the box.

“Well we all had a lovely day,” she declared, contentedly, “so you can leave me home tomorrow.” I did.

In the two freezing weeks that followed, I have been sitting at my window looking out at the white and foggy fields of Westmeath. My mother sits in Cavan at her window. And I suppose the head chef of the Metropole Hotel has plenty of time to sit at his window in Cork; all of us, quietly waiting for another year to begin.

• mharding@irishtimes.com