Chef gives kitchen the chop in favour of founding English school

WILD GEESE: Michael Gleeson, Co-founder of Cedin English Center, Irapuato, Mexico

“MICHAEL NOONAN said the other day that some of us emigrate for adventure. He’s right about me anyway,” says Michael Gleeson.

Moving to the city of Irapuato in central Mexico in 1983 when the country was still a dictatorship, the Cratloe man was the only gringo in town. “The place was very underdeveloped at the time and I think I was the only foreigner here,” he recalls. “It was a culture shock.”

A trained chef, Gleeson had started his career with Jury’s in the 1970s before being awarded a scholarship to attend Galway RTC. One of two chefs chosen to work at La Ferme Irlandais, an Irish restaurant on the Place du Marché Saint-Honoré in Paris, opened by the Irish Farmers’ Association to showcase Irish produce, he recalls Mary Robinson’s brother-in-law was his boss.

Though the restaurant was subsequently taken over by Ballymaloe’s Myrtle Allen, who diagnosed that the menu was “far too French”, Gleeson had by then returned to Ireland. Touching down in December 1980, “on the day John Lennon died”, a job in a Grafton Street restaurant proved fateful. “Cristina was working in the restaurant too. Six months later we were married and we came to Mexico in September 1983.”

Gleeson admits he had no idea what he was going to do in his wife’s native land but says: “I was very hard working so I knew I wasn’t going to have a problem.”

Having also worked under renowned French chef Michel Guérard in the kitchen of Régine’s private club in Paris, the Clare man says in light of Mexico’s own distinctive food culture: “I wasn’t sure if they were ready for nouvelle cuisine and those small colourful portions. Though it probably wouldn’t have worked in Ireland either at the time. It wasn’t the ideal hunting ground for a French-trained chef, so we decided on the plane basically that we’d open an English school.”

Starting with one student each, Gleeson says that Irapuato, a city of 400,000, was virgin territory for English schools. Renting a one-room second-floor unit for lessons, the Cedin English Center was born. Gleeson admits that it was only when he later took a one-year Cambridge course in methodology that he realised how much there was to teaching. “I then realised I wasn’t a teacher at all, I had been committing a fraud,” he jokes.

With his wife having previously taught at the University of Irapuato, she spotted a demand for bilingual secretarial courses and in the 1980s student numbers swelled to 300. Just as technology took root and the need for traditional secretarial skills waned, multinationals started to arrive, including Irish companies Kerry Ingredients and Smurfit Kappa.

“We saw a niche in the early 1990s for company classes and that really put us on the map,” says Gleeson. Building a school in 1993, Cedin now employs 15 teachers and teaches Spanish, Portuguese and English to private students and to employees in 12 multinational companies. It has five teachers alone working with 60 employees of Kerry Group.

Having built a strong relationship with the University of Limerick, Gleeson has also recruited graduate and co-op students from the college for the past 20 years.

He says while Mexico is open to new business, support levels vary by state. “The state government of Guanajuato has something similar to the IDA . . . they will give you the tools you need and will probably give you tax breaks. There is a lot of competition between states for investment.”

The success of Guanajuato in attracting investment is also because the state is comparatively safe, he says. “I think because we are 1,700 metres above sea level, we are away from everything,” he says. “Because of the altitude and the location of the state, the drug trade basically is done in coastal areas and border areas and we are landlocked.”

Gleeson says Mexicans are divided on president Felipe Calderón’s infamous war on drugs. “Most people would say, drugs don’t effect me, so what’s going to happen when or if he defeats the drug lords? What will their new business be? Where do we go from there?” He says a more real fear for many Mexicans is kidnapping and extortion.

With elections in July, Gleeson says the economy is flourishing. “When I arrived, inflation was over 100 per cent yearly, now it’s down to 3 per cent. Things are very stable and the government has tonnes of money stashed away.” But although the economic environment is healthy, the government has been unable to lessen the divide between rich and poor. “They don’t seem to be able to bridge that gap to having a fairer society and I think that’s the real challenge.”

Though it’s a long way from Clare, Gleeson, now aged 53, says his quality of life would be hard to equal back home. With a daughter studying at UCD, however, he and his wife are regular visitors.

To those thinking of following in his footsteps, he says: “I would have nothing but positive things to say about emigrating to Mexico, especially this part of Mexico. Emigration has been very positive for me. You learn so much and as the old saying goes, you only live once.”

[ cedincolegioirlandes.com ]