It was the night before our photoshoot with chefs John Relihan and Jack O’Keeffe, and in typical Irish fashion the rain was beating down. In mere hours, we were due to fire up the barbecue and well, rain, hail or shine, it was going to have to happen either way. We will just have to cook under an umbrella, I reasoned. So basically, no different to a real life Irish summer barbecue.

One thing I wasn’t worried about though, was the chefs getting precious about the rain, such is the commitment of John and Jack to cooking with fire. This isn’t just some trend both have jumped on. The KSG chefs will be firing up the grill at Taste of Dublin this weekend and they come to the table with some experience under their belt. Jack tells me about skinning a deer last Christmas Eve “just to have something different for the Christmas dinner” while John regales us with stories of cooking a whole cow on a fire in Brazil. These guys are all about the charcoal and the grilling, the slow cooking and of course, the meat.

Flying the nest

For John, it has been a culinary journey working with the best of the best in sometimes, the most unlikely of places. For anyone worried about their Leaving Cert, John’s is a reassuring story about how you can progress without a plethora of As.

“I didn’t finish the Leaving Cert. At 16, I left my home in Duagh in Co Kerry for London. I hadn’t ever been in a city, not even Dublin but I wrote a letter to Jamie Oliver and it all started from there. Jamie took me under his wing, I worked at his restaurant Fifteen and did culinary college over there, and suddenly, I went from being a D-student in school to an A-student doing what I loved.”

Over the years, John secured training under some big names – Fergus Henderson in St John Restaurant in London; American celebrity chef Chris Cosentino in San Francisco and Adam Perry Lang, the barbecue master of America. This inspired John’s real love of working with fire and for seven years, he was head chef at Barbecoa, Jamie Oliver’s biggest restaurant which closed just a few weeks ago.

“I was so sad to hear that news, I had the best time there. It was a wood-fire restaurant and there were wood-fire ovens, Japanese grills, tandooris, smokers, fire pits. You name it, we cooked with it.” When it came to coming home, it was Cork that called with the opening of Holy Smoke, one of Ireland’s first authentic barbecue restaurants.

The home bird

Cork is also home to chef Jack O’Keeffe, who says compared to John, he is a bit of a home bird but his years at home have given him a deep appreciation for Irish produce. “I was a young chef in the recession, and you know I grew up in restaurants at a time when chefs were asking, ‘How can we save money? How can we use different parts of the animal more, like offal and tougher, cheaper cuts of meat?’. Slow cooking came back into fashion and it has stayed that way. Chefs stopped looking abroad and started looking inwards, and I was fortunate to work in places like Springfort Hall and Longueville House.

“Longueville House was mostly self sufficient. If it didn’t grow in the garden, it didn’t get served. The menu changed every day based on what was in the garden and I remember some dark days in January when it was pretty challenging to put a menu together,” he laughs.

“I eventually did leave Cork,” he says, “but it was up the road to Dublin where I worked as the head culinary instructor in Cook’s Academy.”

New venture

Now though John and Jack have joined forces to work in KSG, a really different departure to what they have been used to. KSG is a bespoke catering company with over 120 locations in Ireland and they serve 13m meals a year. John says: “Essentially what we now do is develop culinary concepts and deliver these solutions for clients. And it’s so varied. For example, one of our clients is a big technology company where they have 2,000 workers from lots of different cultural backgrounds and we create their restaurant solution. So we’ll work with their staff on the kind of restaurant they want. In there, we have smokers and grills, pasta, pizza for example, and a street kitchen area where the menu changes every week, and we are catering for companies like this right across the country.

“We also work with Government organisations, and this is something we’d like to do more of. We provide the patient food in one of the country’s private hospitals, and we have cafes in some of the country’s public hospitals but this is something we would like to do more of. Good hospital food for patients is definitely an area that needs to be improved upon.”

On top of that, KSG also has its own restaurants such as SOMA, which has locations on O’Connell Street and Dublin airport. SOMA is the theme that the guys are bringing to this year’s Taste of Dublin, which they said is an element of the job they also love – getting to have fun at demos and festivals around the country.

“SOMA stands for ‘South of the Market Area’ in San Francisco and is an area that really gives direction on the food trends in America, and what we can expect more of in Ireland. The whole barbecue trend in Ireland has taken off but it’s still new, and has a way to go to get the techniques right.

“Think about it though, when you look at the barbecue areas of the US – Texas and Tennessee – this is a ritual of cooking that they have perfected for generations. Barbecue is all about low and slow, and they have had that patience for years getting things just right. I’d love to see us embrace it more but also give it our own Irish slant. For example, brisket is the really popular meat they use but we should be all about the low and slow for our bacon,” says John.

At Taste of Dublin though, it will also be about the grilling, which the guys say will be great fun.

Jack says: “We’ll be up at the crack of dawn lighting those fires, butchering the meat ourselves, marinating it. Of course, we’ll be grilling some Irish Hereford steaks which we will pair with romesco sauce, Millview Farm tender stem broccoli, mint, hazelnuts and almonds. Our vegetarian option is charred Co Dublin cauliflower with baba ganoush, smoked aioli and pomegranate. And then we have our chicken tacos which are made with Blanco Niño yellow corn tortilla, made by a Clonmel man Philip Martin who went to Mexico to source his corn and makes them in the traditional way. He’ll be up on stage with us, having the craic, and telling us about his produce, as will the guys from Dawn Meats and Green Saffron, to give visitors a better idea of the quality of ingredients we use.”

“It will be a long day, but nothing that we’re not already used to,” says John. “When the sun is shining and the grills are going, you won’t find us happier.”