First Look: Michelin trailblazers behind Aimsir restaurant take up residency at Carton House

When the news broke earlier this year that chef Jordan Bailey and his wife and collaborator Majken Bech-Bailey were leaving Aimsir, the Co Kildare restaurant where they shot to Michelin fame by earning two stars within a few months of opening in May 2019, there was consternation. The question everyone wanted the answer to was, where are they going?

Now, just over three months on from their final service in that diningroom, the couple are still in Ireland, despite lucrative offers from around the world. They have set up a hospitality and events consultancy firm, Bech-Bailey, and this week, they began a five-week residency at Fairmont Carton House, also in Co Kildare.

Three nights a week, Wednesday to Friday, until September 1st, working with hotel staff and key members of their own team, they will bring their Michelin magic to the hotel’s Morrison Room with a 12-serving tasting menu that follows their ethos of using only Irish ingredients.

“The reason we’re still here is because we love Ireland. We love the Irish producers. We love Irish people. We have been looking in England, we have been looking in Denmark, but Ireland is home, it really is,” says Bech-Bailey.

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At one point in our conversation, emotion gets the better of the Dane turned adopted daughter of Kildare. “People have been so nice to us, so interested in what we are doing,” she says, struggling to maintain her composure as she recounts kindnesses and encouragement shared by industry colleagues and former customers over the past few months.

“We want to stay here; there are many reasons, that’s why we chose to be here in the first place,” Bailey says in agreement. “We don’t want to rush into the next restaurant. We know exactly what we want to do, and it’s a big ask. It hasn’t been done here and we knew it was going to take time. We want to create the full experience, not just the restaurant, we want to have rooms and gardens too,” he says.

“But we don’t want it to be a hotel,” Bech-Bailey clarifies. Rather than a hotel, they see their next project being a restaurant with rooms, in the vein of Sat Bains in Nottingham, a Michelin three-star where Bailey was part of the kitchen team, and Henne Kirkeby Kro, a thatched inn with two stars in southern Denmark, where the couple met when Bech-Bailey worked there. “The whole experience will be about the food,” Bailey says.

They took a break after Aimsir to regroup and spend time with their daughter Evig, who celebrates her first birthday next month. Recently the couple launched their consultancy business, which led to the Fairmont Carton House collaboration.

Describing the scope of their offering as “very broad”, Bailey says that it can be anything from sharing knowledge about foraging, to setting up a new restaurant. “We’ve been asked five or six times already, since we launched this, to build restaurants from ground up.”

On the events side, you can, if you have deep enough pockets (think somewhere in the region of €5,000 for 10 guests), have the Bech-Bailey tasting menu food and drinks experience brought to your home or office. Key members of the front and back of house teams from their previous restaurant have joined them in this venture. They will bring absolutely everything they require with them, and will tailor menu and drinks to the client’s wishes.

[ Aimsir, Co Kildare: The restaurant that puts Ireland on a plate ]

[ How Aimsir hit the jackpot: The story of a Michelin two-star restaurant ]

Next month, they are doing a 50th birthday party for 100 guests in Ireland, as well as a corporate dinner for 20 in London. But it’s not all tasting menus and wine pairings, more casual parties and corporate events are on their books too and, unlike their restaurant experiences, for these they break their Irish-ingredients-only rule, and “give the customers what they want”.

The Fairmont Carton House residency grew from a suggestion that they would do a one-off dinner with the Morrison Room’s new head chef, Maynooth native Adam Nevin, who joins soon from the Dorchester in London, and has grown into an almost sold out 15 nights (there are limited accommodation inclusive deals available and a cancellations list is in place).

What they are serving in the Morrison Room is a mixture of Bailey’s signature dishes, and some new additions. “Highlights of what we’ve done over the past five years, with a few tweaks,” is how the chef describes the menu. Food foraged from the Carton House grounds is being used, as well as the estate’s own honey.

At Wednesday’s launch night dinner, standouts were a dish of grilled baby courgettes with hazelnut miso, wild flowers from the estate and green strawberry salsa verde; and Achill Island mountain lamb with Velvet Cloud sheep yoghurt, wild thyme vinegar and lamb fat dressing, served with a deeply flavoured lamb broth, aromatic herbs and grilled sourdough.

A few changes have had to be made to how some of Bailey’s signature dishes are plated up as the organic, bespoke handmade dishes that they used previously did not suit the gloriously ornate setting of the Morrison Room, and its classical china and flatware. The volume has increased too, with 40 covers a night, double what they did previously. And there is one other big change.

“The big difference is it’s not an open kitchen. I’m not in the middle of the diningroom, I can’t see anything. So it’s going to be very different for me, not having eyes on everywhere. There will be a lot more verbal communication whereas before we didn’t have to talk to each other, it was that slick. If you needed someone you literally just had to look at them ... now we don’t have that luxury.”

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Being back in the kitchen suits Bailey, who seems energised by his new career path, and just as smitten by Irish ingredients as he was in the past. “There’s so many suppliers and producers that we haven’t even gone out to yet and there’s new ones popping up all the time” he says.

“There’s ones that have been there for decades and generations that we still haven’t made it out to, or used on the menu, because we didn’t have enough time. We’ve got big unfinished business.”

It’s a case of watch this space for this talented duo, and their team.