It seems limiting to describe Jp McMahon as a chef. It is true that the Irishman has two restaurants, one of them boasting a Michelin star, and he made his name as a passionate proponent of his country’s food heritage and culinary culture.
However, the self-taught chef is also an author, a columnist, a playwright, a painter and the founder director of international food symposium Food on The Edge (FOTE). He’s learning to play the piano and has just published his fourth book, An Irish Food Story.
And, really, it should be Dr. Jp McMahon, after he was awarded a PhD in drama and theater two years ago.
To say there’s a lot going on in McMahon’s life would be an understatement. Anyone who wants to come along for the ride had better hold on tight.
As we meet in the Autumn of 2024, he is still in book tour mode and the ninth edition of Food on The Edge looms large. With the symposium he has almost singlehandedly put Galway, the city he has called home since 1999, on the global gastronomic map. If the tight local community of chefs in Ireland’s fourth-largest city has created a culinary buzz about the place, it is McMahon who has taken it to the world. On Instagram he is known as mistereatgalway.
As a young chef he had visited gastronomic congresses and events abroad and wondered why there was nothing like it in his country. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do these things in Ireland? We have great food’,” he recalls. “But people said, ‘oh, they wouldn’t come, we don’t have anything’. They said I would be crazy to invite people, but we have loads of things; we have beef, oysters, we have great fish.”
Journey to the kitchen
In 2015, he hosted the first edition of FOTE in his city on the west coast of Ireland. The mission was to try to promote Irish food. “Not to say it is the best in the world; just to say we have some really great things in Ireland and we should be proud of them and not always wait for external gratification,” he says.
“What I hoped to achieve was to introduce people from outside Ireland to Irish food culture and on the other hand I hoped that people who came would learn things to make their own culture better.”
In the years since launch, he has hosted around 400 chefs and food professionals along with 300 people in the audience every year. It has turned into a vital community of people who work in the food sector and has explored food from all perspectives: social, cultural, financial, political, scientific and human.
He didn’t grow up in a foodie household, but he learnt to love food, so “I understand that everyone can appreciate it in any capacity,” he says. “When you write a lot about food or you are involved in food, people assume that you are only interested in high end, but I love a really great sandwich or a bowl of soup as much as I love a Michelin-starred meal.”
As if to prove his point, he says that his own starred restaurant, Aniar, offers a kid’s menu – it is half the size of the adult tasting menu of 24 courses but includes the same food. “People worry their kids might make a mess or go crazy or throw things, but I have only had adults do those things, never a child,” he says.
His first restaurant job came when he was 15 and joined an Italian restaurant outside Dublin. Here he grew to love making pizzas, bread and pasta. He wasn’t sold on a kitchen career; in Ireland in the late 1990s being a chef was still seen as a lesser profession. “The older chefs in the kitchens were saying to me ‘don’t be a chef’, so I think I felt that a little bit.”
All the same, the kitchen felt like home. “If you were a chef, you were like a pirate. It was almost like you went away, you weren’t seen on weekends anymore, you weren’t seen at family occasions. I thought ‘this is what I want to be’.”
He had always been interested in writing and in art and drama and eventually went to college and did an English and art history degree, but never stopped cooking.
It turned into something of a double life; at one point he combined cooking with teaching an art history class at Cork University once a week. “I used to drive down and back, and I’d tell nobody about these separate lives,” he says.
He learnt “on the fly”, cooking at home, did stages in restaurants, read food books and associated himself with people he saw as being better or more experienced chefs.
He opened his first own restaurant in 2008 – Cava Bodega, serving Spanish tapas. “I really wanted to have a restaurant where everyone could come together, sharing food, and the Spanish model was perfect,” he says.
On the path of nordic cuisine
Aniar, meaning ‘from the west’ in Irish, followed in 2011. Head chef Enda McEvoy had worked at Noma, which pioneered New Nordic cuisine by cooking with ingredients from the Nordic countries. It was a big influence.
“We were very inspired by that movement and we decided to do something that focused purely on ingredients from Ireland,” he recalls. “People thought it was very radical, just because we didn’t have any spices or other ingredients that weren’t grown in Ireland.”
Today Aniar remains the only restaurant that limits itself to Irish ingredients.
Having opened Aniar with humble ambitions, it was a big surprise when the Michelin star came after 14 months. “It was like an avalanche hit the place, we couldn’t cope,” he recalls. The Michelin effect meant that suddenly the small struggling restaurant was overwhelmed by reservation requests.
Along with his partner, he went on to open a third restaurant, Tartare Café and Wine Bar, in 2017. Life was good until the pandemic hit in 2020.
While Aniar and Cava Bodega survived this difficult time, Tartare didn’t make it. “Covid and the war in Ukraine just killed us, we were losing staff and we couldn’t open, it just wasn’t sustainable and we had to close in 2022,” he says.
Covid did leave him with a sense of clarity. “It forced me to take a step back and maybe shrink [the business] a bit. We had Aniar and Cava, we had done education, we had Tartare, we had Food on The Edge. It was just an onslaught of growth.”
In fact, when Covid stopped him in his tracks, he’d planned to open a Japanese restaurant, borrowing €1m to buy a townhouse and renovate it. “It would have finished us,” says McMahon and confesses that he’d feared Aniar would have to close too. “It was closed for 18 months because there were no tourists and I seriously thought that was it.”
As it happened, when the world went back to normal Aniar had its best ever year.
Always evolving
The pandemic also taught him about the preciousness of time and his role as a parent, or as he says, “I was a father, but I learned to be a dad in Covid”.
Today, with more balance in life, he is happier. He has a new perspective on his staff too. “Covid made me realize you are nothing without your staff. When Tartare was crumbling, I couldn’t just go in and save it, I was one person and I needed a team,” he says. “You can be the best chef and have the best ideas but if you don’t have chefs and floor staff and managers, you can’t do anything.”
Most chefs define themselves by their profession but McMahon defies any labeling, as he acknowledges. “I am a chef, but I am also an art history lecturer and I am a playwright. I like painting, I started learning to play the piano when I was 40. I never learned it when I was younger and as a kid you have less confidence and maybe you get boxed in at school – you’re told, you’re not very good at art and you’re not good at music so let’s not bother. But when you are in your 40s it doesn’t matter if you are no good,” he says.
“I think sometimes as kids we’re told, ‘you’re no good at that, so don’t do it’ and then you get put in a box. I didn’t do well at school, so I wasn’t in the box that was going to university. I was in the box that was going be a chef, possibly.”
Approaching the 10th anniversary of FOTE, he is weighing up the future. Tellingly, the theme of the 2025 edition is set to be ‘evolution’. It is time for renewal, but it is also a slog with a team of two running a monumental operation. “I don’t want it to become boring or predictable. It is expensive to organize and ticket sales only cover 40% of costs,” he says. “This is a 20-year project, but we need funding, both public and private. In my darker moments I feel that Food on The Edge is taken for granted. That people think it will always just be there.”
Taking stock, a decade down the line, how do foreigners see Irish food today? “Better, I think,” he says, adding that the majority of guests at Aniar today are foreign tourists in search of the Irish food experience.
McMahon has gone beyond his original ambition, creating a global community centered in and around Irish food culture. “It started as a chef interested in other chefs and other restaurants and has now become more of a gastronomic social experience on a much wider level,” he says.
The next iteration of FOTE may be unclear, but it’s clear that it’s not going anywhere and you can be sure that neither is Jp McMahon.
Tina Nielsen
