Chef cooks up fresh Cavan concept

 

Award-winning chef Richard Corrigan has lifted the lid on an exciting potential investment in Cavan’s fast evolving culinary landscape.
The Michelin starred chef has committed to buying the former Chestnut Tree bar in Virginia, with grand plans to develop the site as an exclusive gastropub business in future.
Though the proposal is still in its infancy, Corrigan’s early intention is to front the townhouse-style eatery as a traditional Irish pub, complete with guest bedrooms upstairs, and a seasonal garden to the rear capable of supplying the kitchen’s wood-burning grill.
“The pub will be strictly for drinking, with maybe tapas type dishes available, but the real eating will be done in the back. It will be relaxed. I’ve enough f**king serious in my life, and I’m too serious myself,” Corrigan said, when sitting down to speaking with The Anglo-Celt last week.

Chestnut Tree
It’s ambitious, and Richard admits as much, as he sips away at a cup of dark caramel coloured filtered coffee.
To develop the Chestnut Tree, Corrigan will borrow from the blueprint of another of his soon-to-be ventures, on London’s Old Street, where he’ll open new venue ‘Daffodil Mulligans’ in November. To bring it to the pass, Corrigan has enlisted the assistance some of the best in the business, joining forces with John Nugent, founder of hospitality firm Green and Fortune, and Tony Gibney, owner of Gibney’s pub of Malahide. The focus, Corrigan says, will be on “good Irish hospitality”. Like the celebrated chef’s other dining experiences, the kitchen will utilise plenty of the produce currently being grown in the Virginia Park Lodge gardens in its carefully curated dishes.
“It’ll be a concrete hipster kind of place, nice, not overly expensive, clean eating, plenty of veggies, and basically I’m thinking much along the same lines for this new thing in Virginia as well,” Corrigan explains with a flick of his hand.
“Eating is changing,” he muses. “Maybe you don’t need big lumps of meat on every plate. I like a good steak but you might want to share a good 300g sirloin between two, carved and sent to the table. Ireland is changing, and the food is following very quickly.”
The concept for redeveloping the Chestnut Tree stems from the demands of his discerning clientele when visiting the local area. The move, Corrigan assures, is “not to cannibalise” local business, but simply to enhance what’s already on offer.
“We’re bringing a lot of business in here from America, where you’re competing against Wales, England and Scotland, and my sales team in London have put a lot Virginia’s way already.”

Park Lodge
Corrigan openly views Virginia as ripe for future investment, even more so now than when he first shelled out a reported €1.1 million for the landmark Park Lodge property and its sprawling 100 acres back in 2013.
Close to €10 million later, the Ballivor native concedes that his original five-year timeframe for realising his vision for the lodge was overly ambitious. That overall project is now more likely to be stretched out to between 10 and 12 years before reaching ultimate completion.
Still, Corrigan is comfortable with his investment there. The Park Lodge is already proving profitable, while also scooping a host of awards including being named Country House of the Year 2018 by Georgina Campbell.
If there was any further affirmation that things are continuing to move in the right direction, Corrigan sums it up by recalling how he unwittingly happened across a two-page, in-flight magazine spread on the poshest glamping in Ireland, in which the hotel’s new Shepard’s Huts were heavily featured.
He shows too emails on his phone sent from a senior government minister thanking Corrigan personally for his extensive contribution to industry in Ireland over the years, and to his Park Lodge for their impeccable hospitality.
As part of deepening his roots in the locality, Corrigan happily participated in a cookery demonstration as an aside to the other festivities at the recent Virginia Agricultural Show.
He is also looking forward to continue to work with local business and community development groups in future and would like to revive the Virginia Pumpkin Festival. It’s an event Corrigan feels has potential to be “world class” if it gets the required backing.
“Everything has to be for tomorrow. This is not West Cork or Kerry, Connemara or Clare. We need to work a bit harder up here to get ourselves seen. But there’s plenty of potential there in Virginia. There’s a lot going on. I’ve put my heart and soul into the Park Lodge already.
“The project at the minute, we’ve rebuilt the gate lodge, the boat houses, we’re at the Stables at the moment and we’re reopening the old courtyard. We’re making massive progress. In terms of near self-sufficiency, five years later we’ve got there,” he says.
Corrigan feels deeply that he is a mere a “custodian” of the property, originally build in 1610 as a hunting lodge for the Marquis of Headfort. “I hope to do a good job, and hopefully someone will come along in future, in my family, and carry on that good work, like was previously done by the McDonnells who owned it up to ‘77. They did an absolute sterling jobs there for 50 years.”

Bold Brexit views
Separate to his investments and illustrious kitchen career, Corrigan is fast becoming known for his outspoken opinions on Brexit. An ardent remainer, he has in the past remarked that he had never seen a “seen a country led so badly” in his life by “a bunch of monkeys, frankly.”
He revised that admonishment to “a load of donkeys” when asked his opinion of the British Government cabinet late last year.
Corrigan is still none the wiser as to how UK tariffs will affect his businesses post October 31, but acknowledges it may become “complicated”, even concerning the movement of produce grown in his Virginia gardens exclusively for his restaurants.
“I’m fed up telling [Brexiteers] to f**k off out of my restaurants, most of them. That includes some hard-nosed Eurosceptic MEPs,” grins Corrigan, who reserves special praise for the toughened stance taken by EU and Irish politicians to date. “We’re not being pushed around and I’m very proud of that fact. But I worry. We don’t know really [how Brexit will impact].
“I was just talking with my chefs about this. We bring in a pallet of Hereford beef from here a month. Vegetables are 15 per cent, and there’s a potential 40 per cent tariff on sirloin ahead of us. Maybe it’s all scaremongering, but f**k me they’re doing a good job of frightening us all.
“I’ll tell you if even half of it is true it’ll make it impossible to sell a steak in London in four months time.”