The handsome young couple, dressed head to toe in black, look like models who have just walked off a Vogue shoot for a high-end Italian fashion label, and the room they’re leading us into is just as glamorous, with its pitch black ceiling, moody lighting, exposed beams and wooden dining tables picked out by spotlights.
The wood burning stove, and sheepskins thrown casually over chairs, suggest luxury ski lodge, but there is no snow reflected through the many floor-to-ceiling windows; instead there are suggestions of greenery and trees, about to lose their leaves.
We are not in San Moritz or Aspen, instead it’s Bullaun, a townland outside Loughrea, Co Galway, and the rather unlikely location for the Irish restaurant most hotly tipped to win a Michelin star when the next guide is published. The would-be models are chef proprietor Danny Africano and his fiancee Molly Keane who is manager of the restaurant. They met a decade ago, when Keane’s older brother Luke and Africano attended the same school in Roscrea, and have been together ever since, across countries and continents.
Lignum, the restaurant they run together in rural east Galway, is known for its tasting menu of seasonal Irish and Italian ingredients, cooked over fire. Glowing embers are created by burning a variety of kiln-dried wood – birch, ash and oak – in a giant domed pizza oven imported from Naples, and transferred as needed to a series of grills that can be adjusted up and down to control the heat. A small induction plate, for sauces, is the only other heat source.
“It is a beautiful thing working over wood. It’s just so different, you really become one with the ingredient because you need to take care of it a lot more. And you always need to have embers in the oven. If you run out of embers mid service, it’s a big problem,” Africano says. Wood is a recurring theme; Lignum is the Latin word for the material, it is used extensively in the restaurant’s construction and design, and the restaurant is surrounded by trees.
“My mother fell in love with the trees,” he says, explaining how the property came to be his family home for a time in the early 2000s. Africano, who turned 30 last April, has an Italian father, Rosario, and an Irish mother, Maura Winters, from Loughrea. The couple own and run a hotel and restaurant, inherited from Rosario’s parents, right at the entrance to the archeological sites at Pompei, near Naples, catering to up to 1,000 guests a day during high season. It’s where they met, when Winters was travelling in Italy as a young woman. “She met Dad and just didn’t go home,” Africano says.
Bu there was a period, in 1999, when Rosario and Maura left Italy, bringing the then eight-year-old Danny and his elder sister Elizabeth to Ireland, seeking a break from “the craziness of Naples”. The desire for a quieter life brought them to Bullaun, where they established a successful restaurant, Slateford House, in an old stone building that is now part of Lignum. “Mum and Dad ran the restaurant, front of house. They always had really good Italian chefs.”
It’s where Africano caught the cooking bug, hanging around the kitchen, “annoying the chefs and looking for jobs”. When he was 14, he took a summer job in Italy and his fate was sealed. He reconnected with chef Danilo Di Vuolo, who had worked at Slateford House before returning to Italy and earning a Michelin star at Ristorante Maxi, in the hotel Capo La Gala near Sorrento on the Amalfi Coast. “I was just in love. I was amazed,” Africano says of his first experience of the kitchen at a restaurant at this level.
Four years later, having completed his chef training at Dublin Institute of Technology, he headed straight to Italy. “The day after I finished my exams, I left. I had my bags packed, ready to go before I did my final exam.” He knew where he wanted to work, Torre del Saracino, a Michelin two-star, again on the Amalfi coast. But the season had begun, and the kitchen was full. “It took me six days of being at the back of the kitchen at half seven in the morning, begging the chef to let me in.”
He stayed two years there, working on fish with four Japanese chefs and making his way up to chef de partie. It wasn’t easy. “There were periods when I wanted to quit, because my hands were swollen from [handling] all the fish, and I was so tired. I was getting, probably, four hours sleep.”
“I went over to visit him one weekend, and I was actually shocked how thin he was. He just looked exhausted,” says Keane, who was in college in Dublin at that time. She has been a keen horsewoman all her life, and was studying equine science at UCD.
After a spell back home in Ireland, at Mulberry Garden in Donnybrook, Africano headed to Australia, and Keane followed. “Danny moved over to Australia a little bit before me, while I finished up my exams. I didn’t really know what direction I was going to go in. I had planned to work on some farms. But I ended up in restaurants and did that for most of my time in Australia.”
While in Australia, Africano worked in restaurants in Melbourne, and earned his first head chef role, at the age of 25. Then an opportunity to open his own place fell through at the last moment when the investors pulled out. Between jobs, and without a visa, he began to re-evaluate his situation. “I rang my parents and said, I don’t know if I’m going to get a visa again, and I don’t want to be an illegal immigrant here.’ So they said `Is it time for you to come home?’ ”
The roof was gone. There were leaks everywhere. We had to completely gut the place
But at home, things had changed. Rosario Africano’s father had passed away and he returned to Naples to take over the running of the family hotel, while Maura remained in Ireland, managing Slateford House. “My mum always said that she would move back to Italy, when both my sister and I had finished our education,” Africano says. So, when the 2008 recession took hold, the family took the decision to close the restaurant, and Maura joined Rosario in Italy. “Initially, just the lights were turned off, and the gas was turned off. And dad was like, we’re just gonna leave it, because at some point Danny’s gonna come back.”
Fast forward to 2018, and that moment had arrived. But time had not been kind to the property. “The roof was gone. There were leaks everywhere. We had to completely gut the place.” Builders were brought in, and work started on the creation of a new restaurant, adjacent to the family home at Bullaun, but something very different from the Tuscan farmhouse vibe of Slateford House.
Things were taking longer than expected, and costing more than the family, who were funding the venture themselves, had counted on. “The money was just burning so quickly, and my dad was like, ‘you’ll never be open at this rate, and at this cost’. ″ The solution was to hire a team of builders from Italy to come and complete the job. “It was full steam ahead from there. The builders came over and brought with them absolutely everything they needed. We bought a container and filled it with tiles, all the tables and chairs, everything.”
The builders stayed on site, and at times up to 18 people had to be catered for. “The house became a mini hotel which was stressful as well. I had to feed them breakfast, lunch and dinner every day,” Africano says. And being Italians, they had expectations that had to be met. “I took one day off from cooking,” Africano says, and chicken broth with overcooked pasta, and, worst of all, no bread served with the meal, did not go down well with the visitors. “We came back the next day and all the builders were just sitting at the table, ready to book their flights home. They just said, ‘Go cook pasta’.”
But they got the job done, in three months, and on September 27th, 2019, Lignum opened to the public, with Africano in the kitchen and Keane front of house. Critical acclaim came swiftly, with positive reviews from national newspaper critics. “The most exciting Irish restaurant, from a young team, in years” wrote Catherine Cleary in The Irish Times Magazine in January 2018. “The booking system just went crazy,” Africano notes. We all know what happened next.
Initially, Africano was reluctant to get involved in the restaurant meal-in-a-box concept that Covid created. But then “things really started to look scary. So obviously I had to bite the bullet and put my pride aside and think of the business, and my parents also. I thought we might do 30 boxes, and we ended up doing 300-350. It was the kitchen really became a factory. It was it was crazy.”
As ensuing lockdowns rolled in, he reached a tipping point. “I said to the guys, I can’t do takeaway boxes any more. It all started becoming a bit too much for me. I said ‘you can stay here, if you don’t want to go home to your families. This is your home also. But I’m going to take a little break and I’m going to go away.’”
You hear a lot of chefs now talking about work life balance. But I’ve never worked in a place where it actually exists
“Away” turned out to be a stage [unpaid work experience] at Kadeau restaurant in Copenhagen that proved to be a defining career moment, and has shaped what will be the future of Lignum. In response to an email enquiry, Africano got a reply from Irish chef Kevin O’Donnell at Kadeau, saying “When do you want to come? We have staff accommodation for you, and a staff car.” He flew out the following week.
“It was one of the best decisions I made to go there because it’s completely changed everything about how I thought of a restaurant. You hear a lot of chefs now talking about work life balance. But I’ve never worked in a place where it actually exists.”
Kadeau showed him how it could be. “It’s a real family atmosphere and it’s not just about you, it’s about your family as well. At the restaurant, when we would sit down for staff meal, you had girlfriends and husbands and wives come for meals too and you would have a glass of wine. The idea behind it is because as chefs, we work long hours, and you miss those opportunities to go for drinks with your friends.”
Staff at Lignum, where Attila Galambos and Szabolcs Bella from Aniar recently joined the kitchen team, now work a four-day week (previously Lignum required a five and a half day week). “And staff meal is a huge thing. We all sit down for breakfast and lunch. It’s not in the budget to have wine every day, but we do have it on a Saturday. I want to get to know the people who work with me. I want to know if I can do anything for them, outside of work. It’s a big thing now for me.”
Africano and Keane got engaged in September in Italy and are planning a small, beachside wedding there for family and friends. They share Africano’s family home at Lignum. So how is it for them, living and working at the restaurant together? “Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s not so great,” Africano says, while Keane adds “It’s great for the most part, but it has its challenges, navigating through running a business together for the first time, a new restaurant, and then going through all that we’ve been through in the past couple of years.”
They have ambitious plans to build eight luxury log cabins in the grounds next spring, so guests can stay overnight, and a glasshouse that will serve as a reception area and breakfast room. The layout of the restaurant is getting an overhaul as well, with changes to the location of the kitchen and the pre-dinner drinks area. But one thing won’t change, they will continue to work with both Irish and Italian produce for the restaurant’s 12-15 course tasting menu.
Rosario Africano calls his son every morning, but on Tuesdays, the call comes extra early, at 5am, from the produce market. “We do a video call, he talks to the farmers, I talk to the farmers and it’s a bit crazy, because it’s Naples. There’s a lot of shouting, and haggling over the price, and then the next day, at 11.30am, the veg and fruit is here, in the kitchen.”
“Lignum is a wonderful place to eat, and I will be astonished if it doesn’t land a Michelin star next year,” wrote Corinna Hardgrave, in a review for The Irish Times Magazine earlier this year. Whether it does, remains to be seen. But either way, this young couple, and the generation before them who laid the building blocks to success, are doing something unique and admirable in the Irish culinary world. That was recognised this week, when Lignum won best restaurant and Africano best chef in Connaught at the Food and Wine Restaurant of the Year awards 2022.
