On the rear cover of Neven Maguire’s magnum opus, “The MacNean Restaurant Cookbook”, the designer Graham Thew has chosen Joanne Murphy’s photograph of the restaurant’s dessert of Trio of Chocolate – warm fondant, delice, and opera cake.
Laid out on a fine piece of what looks like olive wood, the image is perfect: it’s the artist’s palette, the beginning and the conclusion of the work of the culinary Cezanne of Cavan, the chef who paints with food.
Neven Maguire’s restaurant has featured continually in our 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland since 1994, but it was August 1996 before we got to write a feature on his food in The Irish Times. A beautiful photograph by Matt Kavanagh showed the young Maguire juggling with flames in his kitchen, a dramatic shot that dominated the page – food and wine, and gardening, were dealt with on one single, broad-sheet page of the Weekend section in those days.
Amongst a garland of praise for what we ate, we also noted that when he had recently been awarded the Wedgewood prize for best dessert, Mr Maguire had burst into tears. Our dinner on June 6th 1996 featured six breads to start, and an incredible assiette of chocolate to finish. Throughout it all, Mr Maguire’s sister, Naomi, answered every request with a cheery “Sure, no problem at all.”
The power of the ‘Times Saturday page had a dramatic effect on the restaurant, at that point suffering mightily as Northern Ireland embroiled itself in the Drumcree fiasco. Customers turned up, despite the dangers, the customers tasted Maguire’s food – dinner cost £22, with the a la carte at £25 – the MacNean tasted success, and the modern MacNean story was born.
In a sense, that stage of the MacNean story concludes, now, with this beautiful book, and also with the recent passing of Mr Maguire’s mother, Vera, who taught him to cook when he was still a kid and to whom the book is dedicated. It was Mrs Maguire who had re-opened the restaurant back in 1989 after it had been closed for sixteen years.
The family continuum is important: Maguire notes, for example, that the recipe for Vegetable Soup with Barley “is the closest thing you’ll get to a hug in a bowl! It’s my mother’s recipe and something she always made for me as a child. I now sometimes make it for Amelda (Mr Maguire’s wife) when she’s feeling poorly”.
We have also quoted Neven saying the old African proverb that “it takes a village to rear a child”. His village is Blacklion, and it is the centre of his world, the place that reared him.
But what also reared Neven Maguire is something that is today a rarity in many young people’s lives: grit. School was tough for him. He was in big, busy, impersonal kitchens in foreign countries when still a teenager. He never talks about the tough times, but they have shaped him – shaped his skill, his hunger, his appreciation – as surely as his world has been shaped by Blacklion, and by his gifts.
Instead of “The MacNean Restaurant Cookbook”, the publishers could have called this fine book “True Grit”, and it would have been an apt title. Neven Maguire is a one-off: he finds the good, and he brings it forth.
The MacNean Resturant Cookbook, by Neven Maguire (Gill & MacMillan)
