This is an edited and shortened version of the transcript from my conversation with chef, author, restaurateur AND playwright JP McMahon.
JP McMahon the Renaissance Man
PB: I was doing my research and I listened to one of your interviews with RTÉ Countrywide and the term Renaissance man came to mind because you are a multifaceted person.
I was actually quite fascinated amongst all your achievements that you also wrote a play.
Shall we start with that?
JP (00:00:38):
I did a PhD in drama and it was based on looking at food in the theatre and the difference between food in the theatre and food in a restaurant. So I wrote a play around that and put it on … I think it was in the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2019 and we served food during it.
It was kind of like a fun and surreal exploration of Irish food and the things we think about.
It was based around a lot of conversations and I also did a survey with a lot of different people about their thoughts on food and I kind of like folded it all into a kind of play.
So yeah, it was a bit of fun.
PB (00:01:29):
How many actors were on stage for that?
JP (00:01:32):
Three. It's like three voices. Rather than trying to make characters, because I'd collected so much interviews that I made … three voices that kind of embodied all of the different views.
And so they kind of talk to each other sometimes.
Sometimes they go off on a monologue and … yeah it's about Irish food about the kind of people's personal memories about history, religion, politics, just but it's also humorous and it's a bit of fun and as I said we served food was served at the beginning, at the middle, at the end and yeah so it was it was due to be on again but then COVID kind of put a put a stop to it.
No, it's not the only play I've written.
I've written quite a few plays and I have a radio play coming out in the autumn RTÉ made it.
It's something I've always done.
It kind of occurred at the same time as I got into food when I was in my late teens.
It's something I've always done and it's always been in the background ... as a pastime, you know.
JP McMahon the author
PB (00:03:06):
I was thinking maybe we can talk about your latest book about the Irish Food Story because of all these conversations about food and the fact that you've done a lot of research.
You condensed about a thousand recipes into, I think, 500 for the book.
JP (00:03:25):
About 400, yeah, 400 or 500, yeah.
PB (00:03:31):
How long did that take in total to actually write and research the book?
JP (00:03:36):
It took about four years in total.
I think I started around 2016 and it kind of came out, I think 2020, … just before COVID.
(…) When you're writing a book, ... you're not only kind of sitting down in isolation, particularly like a big recipe book, you've got a lot of editors to work with and you have a lot of, I wouldn't say competing voices, but the book is very much a kind of, … I wouldn't say a collaboration, but when you're writing a big book for a big publishing company, … I always characterise it like, being in a band and you might write the song, but then, someone might add more guitar to it, or then there's a producer and then there's the record company.
When I wrote the book, it began as a kind of very different book (…) a mixture of traditional, contemporary and historic recipes but also with sections on wild food and seaweed.
I suppose I wanted to try and make a statement about Irish food in the 21st century about where it was and that it wasn't just traditional, but it wasn't also a historical thing.
And it's also what's happening in Ireland in terms of the contemporary food offering.
So, yeah, it was an interesting book to write.
I'm working on a bread book for next year.
(...)
I had so many recipes left over that didn't make it into the Irish cookbook that we're doing a bread book and then hopefully a fish book and a meat book.
So hopefully there'll be a series of recipes that will kind of encapsulate, I suppose, what Irish food is at the moment, you know.
JP (00:06:17):
Yeah, trying to define Irish food. I think it's not a singular thing, Irish food. I think any food is not singular.
Whether you want to talk about French or Spanish or Italian, they have their own problems.
I think it's just that we often look to other food cultures and we imagine that they have a coherent food offering.
We look to the Italians, and we imagine that Italian food is one thing, but when you go to Italy and if you're in the north or the south or you're in the mountains, you're by the sea, there's very different regional offerings.
And I think that's the way that we also, even though it's a much smaller island, but we have to think about Irish food in that way because we, as an island, we've had many visitors and migrants for centuries and many have left their stamp on food in different ways and like in the contemporary and also in the past so like national food is an ever evolving kind of thing and I think that Irish food has different elements like I mentioned in the book like it has a traditional element of course like French traditional food. It has a contemporary element and you can examine that, but then it also has a historic element.
And if you want to look back at the food offering, what did Irish food look like when the Vikings arrived?
Or what did Irish food look like when the Normans arrived?
So there's many different ways to look at Irish food.
And it depends on your starting point and also talking about the the actual landscape and what's on offer.
PB (00:08:18):
Looking at the research that I've done about previous interviews that you've done, it's about the fact that Ireland can be inhospitable in terms of growing food, so it's more about wild foods, what you can forage, what you can hunt or fish.
JP (00:08:37):
Yeah, absolutely. And for me, like that's it, it's a kind of under-acknowledged element in Irish food because, I suppose, of our past history and access to whether it was land or access to seafood or wild food, this element of Irish food that I suppose that we look at in a near particular is kind of underdeveloped because we came out of I suppose, famine and colonisation into the 20th century.
And then in the 20th century, you have the kind of industrial food revolution, you have food processing, you have global food.
And so that kind of element gets forgotten in Irish food and it is a very strong element in terms of its presence over the 10,000 years that people have been here in terms of seaweed or foraging or wild food or seafood and so for me it's a very it's a very interesting element to investigate.
JP (00:09:56):
I didn't grow up foraging either and people often think that you have to grow up in this kind of environment, but it is something that can be learned and it's something that is very interesting and it's something that connects us to our local landscape and learning the names of different plants that grow wild and utilising some of them in food is, for me, a really interesting way of crafting a cuisine.
JP (00:10:51):
So many plants, whether it's the elder tree, where you get elder flowers and elder berries, and you get green capers, or wild garlic is a very useful one because you get leaves and flowers and then you get seeds that you can pickle or salt.
So there's a number of plants that you can utilize over the season as they grow.
Blackcurrant is a really good one because you can use the leaves, you can use the berries, then you can use the excess branches to make oil and stuff, capture flavour, you know, and trying to transmit the flavour of the landscape that you're in.
Food festivals in Ireland
PB (00:11:38):
Because I saw your talk and demonstration at Taste of Dublin,
I just wanted to find out from you how that experience was for you.
Was it useful as a platform, as an event?
JP (00:11:52):
Yeah, I think all festivals that are associated with food are useful.
I think that they're a useful way to meet and talk to people, to showcase food.
And I think anything that shines a light on food, on the culture experience of food, whether I'm doing it in Dublin or up in Mayo on the side of a street and opening oysters, I think it's very useful to talk to people about food, to get them to think about food in ways that sometimes we don't get to think about it in our daily lives.
I mean, for most of us, food is like an ancillary thing that we eat when we're hungry.
So we don't get to think about food an awful lot.
It's usually something we do on the way to something else.
It's like we eat something and then we go somewhere else, unless you're going out for a meal.
But that's the same if you go to a food event, you're going to an event that accentuates food.
And I think it's useful in that context to meet and to talk to people about food.
PB (00:13:07):
And how does Taste of Dublin compare to, say, the Galway Food Festival?
JP (00:13:14):
Taste of Dublin is a commercial event. And, unfortunately, the space for traditional food festivals is becoming smaller and smaller due to a lack of funding.
And it really depends on the county that you find yourself in, like Waterford have a great food festival, Cork have one at the moment, Dingle.
It very much depends on the kind of local government on the ground and where their interests lie.
And so it's incredibly difficult to find consistency.
And that's one benefit of having commercial food festivals.
And whether it's the Taste of Dublin or it's like Madrid Fusion, which is a gigantic one, it does offer a space for people to come together.
But I think we need both types of festivals because Like the Taste of Dublin, I think for me only works because it's in Dublin, because you have a population of nearly 2 million people.
You know, it's not possible to do a very big food festival that's commercial in a smaller place.
You need to do it in the capital city.
You need to do it in London, Madrid, Paris, where you have a lot of people.
So the smaller food festivals, like whether it's Derry or Dingle or Castlebar, they're dependent on local funding because there aren’t as many resources and it's important that we continue to support them and it's important that we still have a grassroots movement of food taking place and that's probably the most important thing.
JP (00:15:25):
Unfortunately, when you try and put on a festival and you're looking for public funding, you're trying to compete with other public festivals like the St. Patrick's Day Festival.
And it's not possible to put on a festival in Galway and then hopefully apply for funding in the same league as St. Patrick's Day or the Halloween festivals that have been recent enough.
So, I mean, unfortunately, it's not a level playing field.
And it's probably the same in the food sector. If you're an artisan food baker and you're making bread or you're a commercial baker producing bread industrially, you both have to play by the same rules, even though the playing field isn't the same.
And that's one of the risks of food in Ireland, that all of the rules that are made are made for the big players. And so it's not possible for a local coffee shop to compete with Starbucks because they're an international company. multinational.
And it's not a question of what's better or what's worse, it's a question of having a playing field that supports the local food environment.
And if we don't support that, or if all the decisions that we keep making at a government level or local level are made in a kind of rational and efficient way, then we're constantly kind of eroding the local food base because you can't expect someone who's baking bread at home to produce 50 loaves of bread to sell at a market on a weekend.
You can't expect them to have to claim by the same rules that an industrial baker
in Dublin, in an industrial site with a lot of facilities, you can't expect them to play by the same rules.
So it's something that we have to think about.
It is something that I do talk to local politicians about and they're aware of. But unfortunately, it's a much greater challenge because we're part of the EU and we follow EU laws but we don't all interpret the laws in the same way.
I find France and Italy mind their kind of artisanal producers a lot better than we mind ours.
(…) The food sector is treated like fairy dust, like it's just there to be sprinkled over Ireland.
And so people can come along and go, “oh, that's wonderful”. And we have all these cheese makers but at the same time, most of the cheese in Ireland that is made is made in an industrial way and it's exported.
And so we're not we're not having a like an honest conversation with ourselves.
Food and its relationship to sport and culture
PB (00:18:31):
I was thinking, also related to the food and culture topic: Bloomsday combines both food and culture.
JP (00:18:43):
Very, very much so.
(…) It's very small but the Galway Arts Festival has one food talk at it this year which is good, it's about food policy and I just like to see more of that. It would be great if our festival makers and directors thought about like if you have a festival, whether it's a theatre festival, an opera festival, a sports festival.
Food is almost non-existent in sport. It's only there as an element of nutrition, whether you're a sports person or it's there as a vehicle for hunger at halftime.
If you go to Croke Park and there's 100,000 people in Croke Park or 80k or 90k, all the food offering is very much tailored to hungry people – it's burgers and pizza and whatever else it is and that there's a lot of opportunity there to to give that food experience culture because there's lots of cultured burgers around Ireland in terms of that have Providence that have families behind them, Handsome Burger in Galway, you have Dough Bros, Reggie's Pizza in Dublin.
You could say, let's take food with a personality and let's take food with people and then put that in Croke Park.
And then let's get people to talk about food while they're at the sports event, as opposed to, “I'm just going to have a burger now. It's halftime”.
It doesn't really matter where the burger's from. It's just a burger.
And that's where we're failing.
And I'm not saying it has to happen differently, like overnight and it's black or white: you can begin slowly and start to say “how do we do this?” and you know, Dublin Airport have made some small changes in the last number of years. Hansenberger is up at Dublin Airport now, so they're listening because a lot of customers go to the airport and say, “we had really bad food” because it's food between a point of A and B, and it doesn't really matter because you're just flying out of the airport.
Most airports around the world have bad food because you don't really have an opportunity to complain because you're gone.
And so there are airports around the world that are starting to craft a more cultured food offering.
Heathrow is a good example. They have Heston Blumenthal there.
I'm not saying it has to be at that celebrity level, but it's just something that is different to just a bog standard “Oh, here's your food. Go and get it.”
You can have Chinese, Italian, or British. It doesn't really matter.
It's all coming out of the same background anyway.
And I was amazed when I was in Istanbul and I drew a little drawing after, and I talked to people about it, but they had an Istanbul food market in the airport.
And you kind of wandered around with your tray, you got a taste of Turkey.
And I was like: “why don't we have this?” Or “why do other countries do this?”
It seems like such an easy thing to do.
You have millions of people passing through a space and you want them to get a sense of food: why not just put a fun thing you have to walk through and you could build this thing and have different aspects of Irish food.
You can have the contemporary, you can have your burgers, you can have your traditional, and people can get a sense of what is there, as opposed to just a commercial and industrial offering that gives people, okay, they want breakfast, let's give them croissants and scrambled eggs.
Okay, they want lunch, let's give them sandwiches, they want dinner.
Let's get to this, to really try and think about it. For me, that's the future of food.
But again, it's a long and slow kind of journey that we have to take.
PB (00:23:16):
I was thinking: the connection of sport and food.
The British and cricket, they have to have their cup of tea and their sandwiches at halftime.
JP (00:23:38):
I suppose it's a bit like the way they have the music at the Super Bowl: it's a massive event now.
And in the past, it was literally just like in the time until the match started again.
And then someone got the idea of, well, let's make it an event in and of itself, and so there's plenty of places that we can make food an event around the country and then slowly build on that.
And I think that it needs to happen both at grassroots level and at the national level.
PB (00:24:25):
The conversation of food and drama from earlier on. (…) I’m one of the organisers of a drama festival and most of the conversation is about food.
JP (00:25:10):
Yeah, and I think it's really important. Food is often only seen in its partial life, but (...) festivals bring a lot even indirectly to food. The Galway Arts Festival is probably the two busiest weeks of the year: the restaurants have a lot of people coming and eating going to shows, sometimes you end up feeding some of the performers or you send food to the show or you send food to the backstage, and that's always been an exciting element for that as well.
So there's ways in which that we can fund food without directly getting funding for food.
For example, you're part of a theatre festival.
There's ways in which you can apply for funding to help a local caterer. So you can say, “oh, we need food for our event.” Then we need to put that into our budget because everyone has to eat.
So it's not only about the food people or they have to apply for funding or often, (…) all the performers come to town: “Is there any chance we can get some free food?” to give to the performers.
Sometimes the arts uses food as a way to get up.
It's unfortunate. It happens as well in the media.
Say when you do food programs for TV. I've done food shows for that: I've been on for Amazon and whatever else; and the funny thing is, (...) for the food operator, the payment is always exposure, you know?
But, like, artists don't get paid in exposure.
And now you have a kind of living wage for artists and this discussion, and that is a good thing, but at the same time, at some point, the arts industry need to start paying for the food that they utilise, whether it's in shows or whether it's on screen, in meaningful ways other than exposure.
And it's a big issue because, you're in a double blind because you always have to do it because if you don't do it, somebody else will do it. Because if a show comes to your door and says, “can we fill in your restaurant and put you on Amazon Prime?” Of course you say yes, because you're a restaurant and restaurants are difficult spaces to operate.
But we don't go to, say, we don't treat solicitors in the same way.
A TV show wouldn't go to a solicitor and say, “okay, we need all this legal advice.
We'll pay you in exposure. We'll put your name at the bottom of the show” and it's not the same thing so all of this money is kind of travelling in the media system and a lot of it is being eaten up by many other sectors except food.
I think that it's important that when we're doing things and when people are creating shows that the food is paid for. And if it's a lunch of that, you know, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but most of the time, all of these shows are built on exposure and food is just a little, a kind of entertainment offering, just something in the middle.
It's until we kind of flick the switch and say, well, we have to stop treating food in this way, then we can't change it because if you keep underfunding food and just utilising restaurants for exposure, for tourism or to make a place look beautiful, well then eventually it will all be there.
And then if they close, then we can't say, “that's a pity that restaurant is gone now” because it wasn't supported in a meaningful way. And that's what's happening a lot outside the major cities.
Even in the major cities it's difficult, but particularly in rural Ireland, there's no point in making videos about rural Ireland and making it look beautiful and finding little cafes to kind of showcase when most of the cafes, the smaller cafes are the ones that are closing and they're being replaced with more multinational ones, and that's a problem.
If you're making a food program, and I found this when we were doing a photography for the cookbook, you're kind of almost have your papers on and of course, if you do an Irish cookbook and you do a small video about food in Ireland, they're not going to go around filming Starbucks and Cafe Nero and all of these other places. So you're kind of pretending that they're not there.
And you film the mom and pop cafe, and you go and film a little river, and then you go and film a little cottage.
You're not having an honest conversation with yourself about food because you're kind of pretending that they're not there.
“We don't need to worry about them” and I think that's the issue.
It's the kind of thing where we were taking pictures for the cookbook and they were saying, well, don't put any authorities in it. Don't put any housing estates in the photos.
This was the actual editorial comments on the photos.
We want forests, we want fields, we want lakes.
And it's not that it's not there in Ireland, but it's also not the only thing.
And if you look through the Irish cookbook, you won't see a motorway, and you won't see housing estates, and you won't see a multinational restaurant.
Plus, they are all there.
We need to have a kind of honest conversation.
JP McMahon’s food projects: symposium and restaurants
PB (00:31:11):
Related to that, can we talk about Food On The Edge as well?
JP (00:31:17):
Yeah, absolutely. Food On The Edge is in its 10th year now, and it began very much as an event or a festival 10 years ago, inviting chefs to Galway to talk about what they do and for them to experience Irish food. And it has grown in the last 10 years to be a much more multidimensional event where now we have, I would call them, food entrepreneurs.
Of course, we still have lots of chefs, but we have lots of people involved in food: sometimes it could be a winemaker; sometimes it could be a food activist; sometimes it could be a food festival director talking about what they do with food.
So every year we bring about 50 people to talk.
It usually happens in the third or fourth week in October and it's very much a kind of coming together of the food industry at the end of the year. It's like it's just about 4 in November, you know so it's a nice time for everyone to come together to meet the speakers, to meet each other, to talk.
And there's not only the talks, but there's also masterclasses, there's the lunches and it's a great kind of coming together of people to learn from both local and global experience.
And I think that it's kind of a very unique event. It's very Irish in the sense that hospitality is at a forefront. It's not a commercial event.
The speakers who come over, they don't ask for a fee.
And we very much try and bring, food education to the fore and to try and change food in a way that makes the food system better and you always hear some stories of people that have been at the edge and who have changed the way they think about food.
PB (00:33:41):
And also thinking about timeline, yes, it's happening in October and in July, something else is happening in Galway.
JP (00:33:50):
Oh, yes. I actually forgot. Yeah, I forgot that we're opening a new restaurant and in two and a half weeks.
So it's happening very quickly. And like, I suppose, like every family business, you kind of try and pull all your resources together and it is a homage to Japanese food… we have some yakitori, some tempura, very much like what we did in Cava, where we kind of bring Irish and Spanish food together. so that's our aim in in Kombu and that's why I'm not really calling it a Japanese restaurant per se.
It will bring some of the wild food from Aniar, some of the kind of salt-based ideas that we've had in Cava over the years.And so it will bring all this together and hopefully have a nice food.
It's a very casual place ... and I think that the most chances of survival for food in Ireland at the moment are in the casual sector if you're opening a restaurant or if you're opening a bakery or if you're opening a cafe and also in this casual sector I feel that you can try and stay free to yourself in terms of the food offering that you want to give and you can work with local producers and try and make it more than just a place that serves food.
All of our restaurants are a community, so to speak, because it's not only the people that work there, it's all of the people that supply them and their families and the relationships we've built.
And we have Cava over 17 years now, and Aniar is 14 years old so there are places that we try and build and to change the kind of food landscape of Galway.
And I think that's our ambition and hopefully we'll succeed. But we will know on the prospective opening date is Friday the 11th of July. So we have a bit to do before that, but that is our aim.
(...)
PB (00:37:08):
Would you say that Aniar is more of your playground where you can experiment and Cava (Cava Bodega) is more where you have the tried and tested kind of processes?
JP (00:37:23):
It's a little bit like that. It's not so black and white in the sense that... I still work in Cava on Wednesday evenings.
I still love putting on specials and going through Spanish books and saying, “oh, we can get this fish to do that.” But generally speaking, you could characterise Cava as the workhorse.
Cava is a more viable space.
(Aniar) (...) it's a 20-seater restaurant with a tasting the menu. It's expensive. It has twice as many staff as Cava for 10 times the amount of covers. And it is a labor of love, but it's also a kind of place where we can investigate Irish food, we can constantly try and explore the ingredients that are on offer in Ireland and each year we find new ways of utilising Irish ingredients. I hope that other people will learn from that. You know, everything we do, we put out into the open.
We either put it onto Instagram or we put it into the cookbooks that we do or I put it into the Substack.
And so all of these things that we uncover, whether it's something as simple as utilising rose petals in different ways or doing different things with seaweed, I think hopefully other people or the PGA can do the same thing.
Thoughts on Substack
PB (00:39:03):
You mentioned Substack. How's your experience with Substack so far? Your pieces are very well thought out, very well researched. Does it take a lot of your time to put together those articles?
JP (00:39:33):
Like, sometimes the articles come very quickly. I mean, I try and do one a week. Sometimes it doesn't work out because … my researcher's past sometimes takes me down into rabbit holes and I can't finish something and sometimes the ones I do, the very short ones, because I'm writing the baking book, I might do a little piece on Easter biscuits or something or Jaffa cakes or something that is just quite simple and you can do the kind of research in the afternoon, in an afternoon and then put it out.
But some of them take a little bit longer, like the history of baking.
Because I grew up in Maynooth, I was interested in the food history of Maynooth.
And again, because I believed when I was growing up that we didn't have food history.
So I just think it's really interesting. Wherever anyone finds themselves in Ireland, there is a massive food history of thousands of years and I think it's worthwhile to explore that.
Substack, it has pros and cons. I got onto Substack because I kind of left Twitter, or X as it's called now, and I wanted a platform to, I suppose, talk about things and engage.
And I think Substack is a very good offering in that regard. Because it's growing, it has a difficult proposition because some people make their living on Substack and you get subscribers and you get paid subscribers. And I suppose for me, because I don't need to make my living off Substack, I have another job. I just put all my articles out for free because it's not that I'm trying to devalue the article. It's just that I think that there are other writers on Substack that that's their living and so I try and subscribe to a few.
As it grows, it's becoming more and more difficult because you can't subscribe to everyone and you can't pay everyone. So I try and pick a few like the McKenna's, the Congraves, ones that i that I think: “what I can give them, a fiver?”
So I think for me it's if you're on Substack it's about it's about picking the four or five ones that I'm going to support monetarily but I'm going to support the others in terms of engagement sharing their stuff because it's also a community as well and I like that aspect of Substack, that you meet different food writers and people, and you just have a chat. It's another form of social media and I think because it's fulfilling a function that I think Twitter used to do in its very early days.
(...)
(00:42:42):
And the trick is, how do you keep it close to its message? And that's something that Substack will need to think about, because every social media platform, to date almost kind of exhausts itself and it becomes a commercial entity because then they need a revenue source and then there's ads and then there's like all sorts of things and that's why I still go on Instagram because I love photography and that visual aspect (…) It's how you keep a social media channel fresh while also trying to support it, you know? And unfortunately for many years, like Twitter had no revenue source.
So it's like, it's almost like running a restaurant. I'd say it's a difficult thing to do.
(00:43:46):
It's a passion project but I enjoy it. And this is the second live conversation I've had on Substack, it's useful. The conversation will be up there now and people can look at us and we can share it and even. people might see this conversation in a few months' time.
(...)
PB (00:44:33):
Does Substack give you more freedom of expression because you can experiment with different ideas without all the filters of having an editor and so on?
JP (00:44:47):
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, it's a very good platform to put out ideas that might be crafted in other ways later on. (…) And I think other things grow from it, you know.
And I think that's the useful thing about Substack. It's a stepping stone to other places, to other things and you can utilise it as a channel.
I mean, when you write like a book, it's a very long process. And sometimes if you want to get out ideas, it can be quite frustrating because you're writing for a couple of years.
Nobody sees your stuff.
Then you give it to the editor, it comes back, you change things, it goes to the editor again.
And then eventually it comes out and it's all this polished thing and it's in the shops.
I think that it's a different form of writing, but it's so necessary and it's so useful because it can build to other things.
(00:46:04):
I write on another platform called Scribehound, which is like 30 writers. You do one article a month and then each one comes out each day. So people who subscribe get a feed essay a day and that came out of Substack so it's a very good way in which to engage with the food community, express ideas, meet people and have talks and get ideas out and that's the most important thing because, if you're waiting for a national newspaper to publish you or if you're waiting for a monthly magazine to publish you, or you're waiting for a book deal, they can be very hard because there's a lot of people writing and there's only so many books and articles that they can make, whereas anyone can set up their own Substack and start to engage with people.
And I think that's the primary purpose of it.
JP (00:47:16):
So I try and keep up.
Sometimes I think they get too academic because I try and scale them back and try and put a bit of humor. Sometimes my brain always goes in search of origins and interesting things. And so it's trying to scale back. And that's why editors are important things as well. And when I write books I mean editors are really good and sometimes their editor's job is to bring things together and a good editor is really something that you need and I think I've learned from writing with the Irish Times for eight years that, sometimes the editor knows better than you know, and that's why as a writer I try and come at it from a very collaborative way.
I mean, I write, but I'm always open to other ideas because that's what I learned from writing that it's, you're not writing in a closed system, you're not writing in a little attic where that's no windows, you're writing and you're looking out at the world and there's people to engage with. That's why sometimes someone will come back to you and, say, oh, do you know what, that might be right, or I don't agree with that.
And that's the benefit of writing, you know, it's exchanging ideas.
Family
PB (00:48:58):
I just wanted to go back to something that you said at Taste of Dublin, which made me laugh: your children not being impressed with your celebrity status.
So what would impress your children?
JP (00:49:08):
If I gave them a $1,000 voucher to Sephora, that would impress my children: they're teenagers at the moment and they live for their appearance and their public sphere.
And they do not, they're like, just like, “whatever”, whatever about me and food, and like, “why do I have to make it so difficult?” And why do I have to talk about food and all these things?
So they're quite funny with that regard. The 16 year old is working in the restaurant at the moment, but again, I don't think she's convinced that it's a worthwhile career. I think it's, it's all about humility at the end of the day. And I think that it's good that I have my kids undermining me and telling me that maybe what I'm doing isn't as important as I think it is because there are other important things in life.
So I think that's a good thing: we still eat together occasionally, but they have very different ideas around food as many other Irish teenagers will have. And if they can get away with it, they just eat takeaways all day, that's what they live on, they just live on takeaways and so it's my job to try and keep them out of the takeaways as much as I can.
PB
(00:50:47): If you were to launch a makeup line maybe they will.
JP (00:50:53): Yeah but then they'd give out to me because I'd make it organic or something they said I'd do, I would do something in it that would annoy them, they're always like, “why do you try so hard with food?” You're not just sitting down and eat it and just say nothing.
I came from a generation that just sat down and didn't really talk about food, we talked about everything else except food. And I think that's why I, for me, I want to talk about food.
I still get excited about food. Every time I cook, every time I try a new recipe or teach a new class, it's exciting because you're engaging not only with your making food, but you're also engaging with someone else's ideas that they had in the past.
JP MacMahon’s cookery school
PB (00:52:01):
If you were to do a plug for your cookery school, what would you say?
JP (00:52:06):
I would say it's a kind of boutique cookery school where we only have, at most, eight students.
Sometimes we only have six and it's a kind of fun day. It takes place each Sunday, 10am to 5pm, and we cook in the morning, then we eat lunch, have a little bit of wine, and then we cook in the evening, and then we eat again.
And so it's a very unique kind of cookery school that brings in a lot of what we talked about.
At the same time, it's about trying to make people better cooks and to have fun.
And I think that entertainment, fun and education are really important things because, again, food is a cultural event and we sit down at lunchtime on a big long table and talk about what we've made and talk about other things so it has its practical aspect but then it also has its cultural aspect as well.
Food as work
PB (00:53:41):
So how do you feel about food as a diner yourself?
JP (00:53:56):
I'm always, whether it's when I'm in an environment where I'm not very judgmental, even though I probably am judgmental when I'm in a restaurant, but I would never be if I was sitting with someone in a friend's house and I think there's a time and a place to be judgmental about food.
I think that, it's important to distinguish between those two things, but unfortunately I can never turn off in terms of food and whether I'm eating my father's lasagna or I'm out having a croissant and a coffee, unfortunately, I'm always kind of thinking about, “Oh, how was this made?” and “could this be made better?” And “is there another way of doing this?”
So it is, it is difficult to switch off and that's why sometimes I find it really hard to watch cooking programmes or TV shows about cooking. I still haven't finished The Bear because I just get home and I suppose I want to watch something that isn't about cooking, even though I still see the food in it.
I want to watch Yellowstone, I want to watch some thriller or something, and I still see the food offering in those shows and go, “okay, that's interesting.” I want it in there. But at least I'm not completely looking at a food programme because I want to try and have a break and usually I watch like some World War II documentary if I want to really relax so I don't have to think about food at all but it does seem bizarre because a lot of people think that people in the food industry watch all of the cooking shows and watch everything but I think a lot of people sometimes want to turn their mind off and they end up watching something else.
PB (00:56:09):
Anything else that you would like to add before we finish?
JP (00:56:12):
No, I mean, for those who are on with us, I mean, thank you so much for listening.
And I suppose you can follow us both on our Substacks (JP McMahon and Life in Ireland) and you can see what I do over on Instagram as well. And I think, yeah, food is a journey and it's also a fight. So I think it's a worthwhile pursuit.
PB (00:57:08):
Thank you so much for your generosity, for sharing your ideas.
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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