Favourite Things – Richard Corrigan
Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.
Richard Corrigan is a Michelin starred Irish chef . He was head chef of Mulligan’s in Mayfair and Stephen Bull in Fullham. He bought and refurbished the infamous oyster and seafood restaurant BENTLEY’s in the early 2000’s and opened Corrigans Mayfair in 2008.
These are a few of Richard Corrigan’s favourite things…
Planting trees
In 2018 I bought a place called Virginia park lodge in Ireland. It is a crumbling 17th century estate that hadn’t seen a can of paint in 50 years. I started on two massive gardens and they are a real work of love. I was bought up planting trees on a farm and it is something I have always wanted to do. But at 56 I had never planted a tree anywhere else except sticking something in my north London garden, so we have planted thousands of trees here. It has filled me full of hope. I love being a chef don’t get me wrong, but we can all get caught up in our restaurants and reviews and writers. I just feel that if I get into my 70s, I will look back at this project in particular as something wholehearted and satisfying, something real.
Dark humour and cynicism in literature
My favourite is Kurt Vonnegut. I think Vonnegut was deeply compassionate, deeply funny and a deeply humorous individual, and it came through in all his books. From Slaughterhouse-Five to A Man Without a Country. The only other author that could come near Vonnegut would be an Irish author called Flann O’Brien or a book written in Gaelic which I read the translation of called The Poor Mouth (An Béal Bocht). I read and could re-read that book probably 50 times and still be surprised, there’s something quite f***ing mad in their writings, I don’t know what it is. The melancholy brings out this deep cynicism and humour I don’t really find in other authors.
Crazy cake flavours
There is a park walk from Crouch End around Highgate woods, that I would do with my children and wife on Sundays. We’d stop for a beautiful cup of tea in Crouch End and there was a tearoom that has closed down now and they used to make these cakes straight out of a crazy novel. Combinations of flavours that were just fabulous. There was one liquorish and walnut cake, it sticks with me to this day. It really was the pied piper of cake shops in North London. It was my Sunday afternoon bliss to go there and just sit there and have a big pot of loose-leaf tea and the most delicious cake. Combinations you would never find in a French cookbook, so English and so mad. You’d have to be smoking very long roll ups to come up with some of these combinations.
The Hook Penisula, South Irish sea
It is where the three rivers flow into the Barrow, the Nore and the Suir to create The Three Sisters rivers in Ireland; I’ve been going there for probably sixteen years. I go there because I never want to go to places where I meet my customers, and they’re normally the nice places. I started going to obscure little places instead, and even though I come from Ireland I was never down south, so it was new to me.
I got myself a boat and started to just take journeys out on the river, catching fish with my children. It is something I look forward to every year, watching the children growing up from small to their 20s and 30s, those rare moments you have together.
My cookbook collection
I must have thousands of cookbooks. I have been buying cookery books for probably 32 years. If a chef can find one good recipe in a book, we see it as a good buy. I lived in Rotterdam for a bit and I was walking down a side street one day and there in the window was an original copy of Mastering the Art of French Cookery by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck. I bought that book and it is still a prize possession today. I love collecting something or finding something I wasn’t going to pay through the ears for, it was about £30. There is something beyond monetary value that I hold so close. I love to find unique books for my collection.