At first hearing, ‘the Richard Corrigan story’ sounds like a Celtic version of The American Dream; the young lad from the poor bogland farm who, through talent and diligence, graduated to win not only the acclaim of notoriously hard-to-please food critics, but the coveted accolade of two Michelin stars. A choir and orchestra hymn John Williams’ closing theme as the camera tracks out on a Soho sunset. I may cry. My Anglo-Saxon cynicism was erased by Richard’s firm handshake; a reminder that you don’t mess, even in your mind, with country boys. Behind the man’s genial exterior there is a steely authority; muted, but there non the less. I was reminded of a certain Grand Slam rugby captain’s verdict on one of his awesome forwards – ‘if Wade says it’s Tuesday, it’s Tuesday’. Richard gives you the same impression and I wouldn’t mind betting that many a commis or sous-chef has found that out the hard way.

Of course no success story is quite that simplistic. Richard Corrigan’s is no exception. He was brought up in Meath, on the family farm where he learned a respect for the raw materials that form the constituents of a meal. He weeded (he still has nightmares about the virulent ‘midgets’), picked the fruit, watched his dad skin rabbits and witnessed the ritual slaughter of the family pig. At fourteen, he swapped home for a local hotel, the Kirwan Arms, working for a craftsman chef who made his own mayonnaise at a time when all Ireland was glad of a bottle of salad cream..

After two years he left, to be a commis at a new hotel in Cavan town.
‘I’ve not gone through the usual catering college scenario. I’ve done the day release thing, hitch-hiking up to Dublin from Cavan every Monday morning. I didn’t finish’.

After Cavan, it was off to Amsterdam, a step he describes as ‘a kickstart to acquiring knowledge’. Thence to London, to work in a succession of restaurants, culminating in a spell as chef at Stephen Bull’s Fulham Road, where he gained his first Michelin Star. ‘I remember Gordon Ramsay got his at the same time and he came round a bit disgusted’. Richard laughs, having just made what was probably the understatement of the year.

At Fulham Road he didn’t have much time for nightmares. Devoid of lunch trade, the restaurant had to make it in the evening if it was to succeed. The workload was so intense, the hours so long, that Richard slept on the floor more often than not.

Now he has his own restaurant, Lindsay House in Romilly Street, London W1, where he was awarded his second Michelin star in 1998. He is fiercely proud of his establishment, his menu and his customers. ‘They are a great bunch. People come to Lindsay House because they like to eat’ he enthuses. ‘In contrast to Fulham Road, where they came to look at each other’.
Richard is proud of the fact that he has made it to the top without making enemies. ‘I’m not a Ramsay or a Marco Pierre White. I told Marco he should have been around in Sicily in the twenties. He took it quite well’. He is amazingly relaxed in his attitude to restaurant criticism, claiming the elegantly rabid A.A.Gill as a friend, despite a recent snap at Richard’s heels. It is Gill who described Richard as ‘one of the best three or four cooks in the city (London) and, quite possibly, Europe’, sentiments echoed by Mathew Fort in The Guardian, Sophie Grigson and Fay Maschler, who has been at the hub of food criticism in London for twenty-five years.

It is when he starts to talk about food that Richard’s dark eyes burn brightest.
‘I am very loyal to the culinary traditions of these islands, cooking what’s in season. A lot of our skills have been lost, in the pursuit of ‘trendy’ cooking. For instance, brining. We brine all our own tongues.’
‘Take sole. Black Sole for me is the greatest piece of fish money can buy. So many restaurants want to bone it out, stuff it with mousse, braise it, sauce it out of existence. There is a recipe for sole in my book. Baked sole, with butter, cucumber and a few brown shrimps that’s all. Sole should be cooked on the bone and left unnmucked around with.’

The recipes in The Richard Corrigan Cookbook are totally accessible, he claims. ‘You can take any recipe in the book and re-create it at home. It’s not a restaurant style of cooking, it’s my personal style of cooking. And there’s knowledge in there, not only mine, but Randolph Hodgson’s (Neill’s Yard Dairy) and Douglas Wregg’s, who contributed the seasonal cheese and wine sections. Did you know that late October cheeses are better than spring cheeses?’
No, I didn’t. Nor did I know that lamb’s sweetbreads, in their short season, are nicer than veal sweetbreads, but come next March I will. Richard is a great admirer of offal ‘those parts of the beast that people want to throw away’. He quests after flavour like King Arthur’s knights after the holy grail. ‘I’d far prefer to cook a rump of veal than a big veal chop. I must say, I belong to the no-bullshit school of what we’re doing…’

He is eloquent in his tributes to his staff, particularly his general manager, Thierry Talebon. ‘The service we give is unbelievable’, he says. It’s a simple statement, no braggadocio in his voice.
We talked a good deal about wine. Richard is an unashamed ‘terroiriste’, opining that ‘the French have got it dead right’. He is particularly enthusiastic about small grower-producers in Languedoc and delighted to have found out only recently that the wines he has been supplied with from that region are actually organic. He needed no prompting to come back to his acquisition of knowledge theme. ‘I like to try and get people to discover little-known grape varieties, not just stick on Chardonnay, Cabernet and Pinot Noir’.

By this time we were eating lunch in the tastefully austere dining room of The Clarence Hotel. Oddly enough we’d chosen, without consultation, the identical meal. I was impressed by the whisper-light batter on the monkfish, Richard, by the accompanying bed of wild rice and grains; he thought the fish itself a trifle under-seasoned. This prompted him to impart another nugget of knowledge – the importance of seasoning fish, then allowing it to relax before cooking. We were both enthusiastic about the duck breast and about the value for money, £13.95 for two very sound, nicely presented courses.

The Richard Corrigan Cookbook, ‘I could have called it the Lindsay House cookbook but it’s too personal, even, for that’, is a sumptuous production, the text, a blend of the atmospheric and the down-to-earth practical, interlaced with superb shots of rural Ireland and challenging semi-abstract food photography. The recipes impress with their earthy simplicity. Richard is dead right, there’s little that couldn’t be replicated by an averagely competent cook, no arcane twiddles or neo-Thai trickery. I’ll end by quoting two excerpts from the opening chapter, Influences, that serve as a mission statement for the book and, presumably, for Lindsay House.

‘Nowadays you can go to a restaurant at any time of year and be served manicured baby vegetables and out-of-season berries. I think this is a lazy opt-out. Imported asparagus in March may be good, but I am a purist at heart.’ And finally, ‘Respect for food is one of the most important things to have, even if it’s for the humblest vegetables like potatoes, carrots and parsnips. With meat, for example, you need to have respect for the animal it came from and for the person who made a living from rearing it. It’s important to understand the chain of events that brought it to your kitchen’.

You better believe it. So far as I’m concerned, if this earnest, dedicated, sincere (and very companionable) maestro says ‘it’s Tuesday’, then it’s Tuesday.