It’s not just the fact that Richard Corrigan seems to have been around the national and international food world for such a long time that makes him seem exceptional.
He has, for the record, been around a long time. He started working in kitchens when he was just fifteen years old and so, as he nears fifty years of age, he can count up 35 years of the rattle of forks and spoons.
No, the remarkable thing about Corrigan is that, for almost all that time, not only has Richard been there, but he has been there as a commanding figure, the towering figure of the Irish chef in London.
He made the English love and admire him and his cooking early on, and he has held onto that status. He is the personification of the successful Paddy abroad, everything achieved on his own terms, a Brendan Bracken for the restaurant age.
It’s not just that he has won stars and gongs and whatnot: what is most incredible is that he has won the respect of one of the most grudging cities on the planet. To see Corrigan in his London restaurants – Bentley’s and Corrigan’s – is to see an outsider playing the English game of class with wry brilliance and indifference – he is like a chess grandmaster toying with mere pawns and pieces. That commanding figure, again.
His distance from home – he hails from a family farm in County Meath – has made him admired in his home country, something a spell in Bentley’s in Dublin, when he had his name over the door, did nothing to dissipate. He is genial – let’s be honest, he is ridiculously genial – and he has a style of cooking that is grand yet comforting and good – the farm boy meets the laird – a style that owes a lot to his mentor, Stephen Bull, that most enigmatic of cooks.
What Corrigan may have learnt best from Stephen Bull, however, is how to be enigmatic. You can only read the man the way he wants you to read him. Let him talk about food and his work, and he is quickly back in the fields near to Bellivor. He has a gun in his hands, and he is hunting rabbits for the pot. That’s the thing: he knows hunting is the sport of kings, and farm kids.