2024 | JULY / AUGUST ISSUE
SPOTLIGHT ON
HOTEL & RESTAURANT TIMES
KNOWING YOUR
ONIONS
Rising Culinary Star, Adam Nevine, Calmly Showing How It’s Done on Home Turf!!
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dam Nevin was born 30 years ago in Maynooth into a well-established local building family. His career path was a very different one, however. Today, he is one of Ireland’s brightest culinary stars. After a stint working in some of the finest kitchens in Dublin and then the UK, he is back working in his hometown as head chef at the Morrisson Room in Carton House Fairmont. Most recently, Adam worked at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Before that, his blazing career path brought him to the 2-Michelin-star restaurant/pub The Hand and Flowers in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. From an early age, Adam displayed an attraction to kitchen and a strong aversion to the building site: “They used always bring me on site when I was around 14 or 15,” says Adam, “but I absolutely hated it. I didn’t want to be outside and I couldn’t be dealing with the cold weather aspect of it. The kitchen can be a tough environment too, but it’s a different kind of tough – more suited to me.” Growing up watching his mother and grandmother cooking in the kitchen gave him a taste for the creative side of food. In his home, the option of buying a birthday cake was never a realistic one.
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“My youngest memory is being about 8 to 10 years old,” says Adam, “cracking eggs and weighing out the floor for my grandmother… I always liked it. I’ve happy memories of food from an early age; from sharing meals and cakes with people. It was always fun and there was always a great sense of achievement when you made something.” Adam isn’t the only chef whose early memories of cooking at home with an older relative have been formative in becoming a chef. Another trait he shares with several of his professional colleagues is that of academic under-achievement:
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“I didn’t care what I was doing… I was happy to be washing up or whatever. I just wanted to get into a kitchen and see what it was like.” At school, there was very little support for his clear passion for the culinary arts, with some teachers going so far as to discourage him from the sector completely.
“A number of teachers said nasty things to me; that I’d never go on to be something because I was always quite ‘bold’ in school.”
JULY / AUGUST ISSUE | 2024
“Gavin, the chef, was very supportive and he really opened up my eyes to cooking… I didn’t like onions when I started in Twist and he was always saying that you have to have onions for flavour in cooking, so eventually I got into using onions… I love onions now!”
Cooking Skills Under Gavin’s tutelage, he gained a basic grounding in many of the elementary cooking skills – from making roux sauce to dicing vegetables. At the age of 19, Adam went to the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin as Commis Chef. Here, he experienced a steep but very worthwhile learning curve.
In contrast, his family were supportive, telling him that if this was something he was interested in, then he should do it. Adam admits that he saw little of the school doors in his final year in Secondary School, sitting his Leaving Certificate more as a box-ticking exercise than anything else.
When Adam left two years later, it was to London, to work as a Chef de Partie at the Alyn Williams’ restaurant in the Westbury Hotel.
He kept his job in Twist, working every weekend, and by the time he had finished with his Secondary education, he had progressed to preparing starters and parts of the main courses – assisting the chef while still on washing-up duty.
Adam maintains that the UK was ahead of Ireland in terms of the quality of the restaurants and the access to better produce. In fact, he believes that British restaurants still have access to better produce.
Access to Produce
“I wasn’t much good in school,” says Adam. “I was a bit of a messer! I couldn’t wait to get out of there, to be honest.” His first foray into the business was as a porter in a local café, Twist, during Transition Year. WWW.HOTELANDRESTAURANTTIMES.IE
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