True characters

Maire Flynn, restaurateur

When I was growing up . . .I wanted to be a teacher, probably because my mother was a teacher – and so many belonging to me come from a primary teaching background in west Kerry.

My job description is . . .receptionist, admin person, mammy of the staff, the boss when things are going badly, waitress (very bad one), firefighter, therapist.

If I wasn't doing this job I'd be . . .at this stage, I can't imagine myself doing anything else, although if I won the Lotto, I can tell you I wouldn't be up and down the stairs in the Tannery with bowls of soup.

I met my husband Paul . . .on a blind date in Dublin in 1992. He asked me to marry him on the second date. We got married the following year.

Working with him is . . .a bloody nightmare.

There are good points to running your own business . . .I can fit my hours around my children. So I can do school runs and organise my day around them. The drawback, of course, is that you are never, ever off duty. Middle of the night phone calls from work are a regular feature in our house, whether its guests losing their keys or alarms going off.

Front of house managers must . . .be warm, generous, efficient, interested in the customers, up to date with current affairs – and that means being able to have a small chat with them about anything from local hurling matches to the Eurovision. And have a very thick skin.

After a hard night at work there's nothing I like more than to . . .go home and watch the food channel with Paul, have a glass of wine and do a bit of tweeting.

I do the family cooking . . .but if we have guests or are entertaining, I leave it to himself. And why wouldn't I?

My dream dinner party guests would be . . .Francis Brennan from the Park Hotel, Kenmare, Tom Dunne (Newstalk), Michel Roux jnr, Queen Elizabeth, my husband Paul, Graham Norton, Simon Hopkinson and my cousin Katherine Lynch. The table plan here poses problems. I might seat Katherine beside the queen.

I'd serve them . . .A feast of local Helvic seafood, crab, lobster and oysters and wild garlic mayonnaise, followed by an aged roast rib of beef with Béarnaise sauce made by Garrett Byrne of Campagne restaurant. And for dessert, strawberries, shortbread and clotted cream.

My ideal day is . . .for all of us (Paul, myself and the girls) to visit somewhere new, whether its Fota Wildlife Park or the Natural History Museum. There has to be a nice lunch involved somewhere, to keep the husband happy, and a bit of shopping somewhere along the line for me.

I'm passionate about . . .my children Ruth (6) and Anna (5).

I'm really good at . . .whistling.

I wish I was better at . . .not taking criticism of our business so personally. My husband says I'm like an armadillo, crunchy on the outside, soft in the middle.

I often imagine myself . . .thinner – I spend a lot of time thinking about that.

Not many people know this about me, but . . .I have an exceptional memory.

My guilty pleasure is . . .Doritos.

Máire Flynn runs the Tannery restaurant, cookery school and townhouse with her husband Paul. See tannery.ie

In conversation with Marie-Claire Digby