Late to the party

Late to the party

By any standards, thirty-six-year-old Sean Harrigan’s kitchen career has been a little unusual.

The head chef and co-owner of successful Londonderry restaurant, The Sooty Olive has never received any formal culinary education. By his own admission, he “came late to the cheffing game” at the age of 30 and has learned his trade working in a variety of local kitchens.

Yet The Sooty Olive – which he owns along with his brother, Colin Harrigan – has already been recommended by John and Sally McKenna in their acclaimed Bridgestone guide to Ireland’s leading eateries. They describe Sean as “a man with a mission” and his restaurant as “clever, accessible and welcoming”.

It’s high praise for a restaurateur who hadn’t seen the inside of a restaurant kitchen before 2008. Sean’s previous career was in mobile phone repair, but as increasingly tech-savvy consumers learned to take care of many of the more common problems themselves, he found that his once vibrant trade had deteriorated to unsustainable levels:

“I was looking around for something else and I had always had this interest in cooking,” he tells LCN. “My brother, Colin [owner of Timber Quay restaurant in the city] invited me to come and work for him and see how things went. I had zero training at that stage. He took me on at 30 and I worked my way up, eventually becoming second chef at the age of 32.”

 

Sean is adamant that at no time did he ever feel that he had made a mistake:

“As soon as I got into the kitchen and began to learn how things worked, I knew I was in the right place,” he recalls. “I knew pretty quickly that this was the right profession for me.”

After a couple of years at Timber Quay, Sean felt that he needed to broaden his experience and learn more about technique so he took a position as second chef with the former Watts & Co. restaurant on Spencer Road. It was his first experience of higher end cooking and longer hours in the kitchen, but he loved the job.

At the same time, he and wife, Aisling, were eating out in restaurants everywhere in order to see some of the things that other chefs were doing.

Sean was at Watts & Co. for a year before moving to the Bently Winebar and Steakhouse on Market Street, again as second chef. When he had been there for eight months, the opportunity to take over the vacated Watts & Co. premises on Spencer Road came up.

Sean’s brother, Colin – who is widely known as ‘Harry’ – was a chef himself for many years and Sean goes to him for advice when opportunities present themselves. He immediately got behind Sean’s suggestion that they take on the Spencer Road premises themselves and they opened for business almost two years ago.

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The Sooty Olive name is taken from a famous Irish lough fly which is used to catch wild trout. Sean says that the ambition with the new restaurant was to create a contemporary venue that had an individual, lively ambience. The current format supports around 75 covers at a time in cool, modern surroundings with background music that’s mixed specifically for the venue by local dance promoters.

A three-course dinner at The Sooty Olive currently costs around £17.95 a head.

 

“I don’t have vast amounts of experience, I’m experimenting with all of this as I go along but we feel that we’re just getting better and better,” comments Sean. “And the feedback that we have been getting has been phenomenal. We thought that it might take about two years to this up into a profitable business, but Saturday night are already booked up two weeks in advance and it’s almost the same now for Friday nights.”

Sean says that the restaurant scene in Derry at present is very promising:

“Things have been getting progressively better since Ian Orr [proprietor of Browns and Browns in Town] came along. It’s really picking up. You can see that people in the trade are really taking pride in the food and the chefs are really embracing the local produce and suppliers, but the real transformation is not going to happen overnight.

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“We have a handful of decent restaurants here now. There’s more going on in Belfast, of course, with the likes of Aipic and Ox, but Derry isn’t a million miles behind any more, we’re getting there and there are lots of really talented chefs around.

“The uniqueness of our own restaurant comes from the quality of the food. It’s all local, we get our beef from Higgins, a butchers in Castlerock and our fish comes from Donegal Prime at Greencastle. We also put Broighter Gold on all the tables and our veg comes to us via a local scheme that involves volunteers with learning difficulties.”

Sean says that it’s crucial that up-and-coming cities such as Londonderry are able to offer visitors a choice, but he argues that ongoing issues such as VAT rate inequality are hampering development of the hospitality industry here:

“Give us a break, this is a growing city and it will be badly affected if restaurants are forced to close,” he says.

As for the future, Sean has no immediate plans to meddle with The Sooty Olive’s successful formula:

“I’ve seen too many businesses that have gone on to bigger premises too soon and it hasn’t worked out for them, so I’m quite content to continue to work at making what we have here better for now,” he remarks.

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