New horizons for chef Derek
The Vintage Rooms in Hillsborough are the latest large scale project on chef Derek Patterson’s agenda, but they are just the latest development in a frenetic career that reaches right back to the early 80s.
As the Patterson family’s Plough Group of bars and restaurants approaches its 36th year in business this summer, it is celebrating the launch of yet another new venture – The Vintage Rooms – which opened its door at the end of June in The Plough at Hillsborough.
The group currently comprises The Plough along with The Pheasant bar and restaurant in Annahilt and The Tannery in Moira.
For Derek Patterson – who looks after the business with brothers William and Richard – this latest launch is the next step in a varied career that’s seen him don his whites in some of the world’s finest kitchens.
Derek left Northern Ireland as soon as he’d finished with catering college in the early 1980s:
“I was unhappy with the political situation,” he tells LCN. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t stand the division in the community any longer. I decided to leave and go and look for something better.”
He found it in Zurich, where he began to work for prestige hotel brand, Movenpick.
“They were miles ahead of everyone else,” he recalls. “This was 1983 and they were doing sous vide cooking, they had fully automated coffee machines, they were slow cooking their meat for 12 hours and flying fresh lobster in from Canada and oysters from Galway Bay.
“For a young chef like me, it was very inspiring and it gave me a vision of where I wanted to go.”
Stints in Germany, London and Bermuda followed and among the most memorable of the posts he held was a period spent as chef de partie at the Longueville Manor in Jersey, one of only a handful of Michelin-starred restaurants in Britain at the time.
Feeling the call of home at the start of the 90s, however, Derek returned to Hillsborough and immediately set about helping parents Dessie and Muriel at The Plough. At that time, the venue was just a small bar with a basic food offering, but sensing the opportunity and the potential, Derek immediately began to refocus the business and brought the emerging gastropub trend to Northern Ireland. The burgeoning business grew to consume the house next door and, in time, the premises on the other side was purchased too.
As time went on, The Pheasant in Annahilt was added to the family business and then, seven years ago, The Tannery, a restaurant in Moira with a formidable reputation for its meat dishes, particularly steak.
The latest venture – The Vintage Rooms at The Plough – will make use of space that was freed up in the venue at the end of last year when the family decided to exit the nightclub business and closed the doors of its Bar Retro.
The Vintage Rooms represents a 75 per cent refit at The Plough a £500,000 investment by the family. The new venue offers a Spirit and Wine Library and a Whiskey Cellar. There’s also a sit-down lunchtime deli offering and a takeaway option that includes salads, wraps and sandwiches. Afternoon tea is on offer and casual dining in the form of sharing places in the early evenings between Wednesday and Saturday.
“In terms of our expectations, we’re feeling very confident that we’re taking the business to where it needs to be in the modern times,” added Derek, whose next project will be a redevelopment of some of the space at The Tannery in Moira. He wants to create some potential wedding venue space there and he’s planning to introduce some exciting new methods of cooking.
To that end, he’ll be spending a lot of time this summer with South American chef, Andre Lima de Luca, who is world-famous for his mastery of barbecue cooking. The pair will do The Big Grill Festival in Dublin this August and visit Meatopia in London during September as Derek learns as much as he can about cooking with meat over fire.
“I still have a real passion for this, I am still fascinated by food and everything associated with it,” he says. “It’s always challenging, there’s ever a time not to be more progressive and there are always people willing to share their professionalism with you. It’s a wonderful industry to be in and I particularly love to see young people working their up in the ranks in our business. To see them develop themselves like that is so rewarding.”
Our picture shows Derek Patterson (centre) with brothers, William (left) and Richard outside the new Vintage Rooms at The Plough in Hillsborough.
