MasterChef’s Nick Munier: ‘The celebrity chef thing is over’

When Nick Munier talks about selling his share in the Dublin restaurant Pichet, and his plans to open a new city-centre restaurant and bar early next year, there is a mixture of sadness and excitement in his voice.

The sale of his “baby” has been forced upon him by circumstance and had his marriage to co-owner Denise McBrien not irrevocably broken down earlier this year, it’s unlikely he would be moving on today.

But moving on he is and while the scale of the upheaval – both professionally and personally – has shrouded his life in darkness in recent years, the turmoil never overwhelmed him and he is optimistic.

But before he talks of the future, he talks of the past. Pichet should never have worked. It opened in 2009 at the height of the worst recession in the history of the State, in an oddly-shaped building at the top of a Dublin 2 laneway populated largely by drunks, and people with intimate knowledge of the city’s best shortcuts.

Stephen Gibson was in the kitchen while Munier was the restaurant’s smiling face, front of house. They’d no money for advertising and served just 12 people on opening night. They were the right 12 people though, and within 48 hours there were queues out the door.

“We needed €26,000 to break even and took €40,000 in the first week,” he says with pride. “I was thinking, we do have something, something special here. It was all down to good food and comfortable seats – which were a gimmick.”

He is referring to the famous blue leather seats which attracted so much attention from critics and diners in the early days. “My father always said that in any business you need a gimmick, and that was the sea of blue chairs. I was hoping people would first feel comfortable and the food would be an added bonus. Obviously that was important, but if you think about it, not everyone goes out just for the food. They go out for the entertainment value, for the excitement and for good value.”

The gimmick – and the food – worked. Nick's Bistro, a popular TV3 documentary which followed Gibson and Munier in the weeks before opening night and showed them dealing with all manner of stress-filled disasters, was also responsible for creating much of the initial buzz.

But it was the food and the ambiance which carried it through the recession and Pichet has been flying ever since. “To be able to do something like Pichet at that time, in 2009, at the height of the recession in both Ireland and Europe, was a phenomenal feeling,” he says.

It’s over now though. Last week Munier’s involvement in the restaurant that has done so much to make him a household name in Ireland ended. “It came as a shock to me,” he says.

“Obviously the separation hasn’t helped matters because me and Denise worked together, but I just felt I needed to branch out and do something for myself. I wish them all the very best in Pichet. I think it is still a great product. It was hard letting go, but it was a conscious decision I had to make.”

Initially, he thought differently. As his marriage crumbled, he wanted to keep the restaurant and maybe take full ownership, buying the stakes owned by both Gibson and his wife. “That wasn’t the case,” he says flatly. “It dawned on me that I needed to take the emotional side out of it and look on it as a business decision and that is how I managed to cope.”

When, this summer, he accepted Pichet was lost to him, there was fear about what would come next. “It took me a long time to even compute in my head that there was life after Pichet.”

He now believes he has identified “something that is missing in Dublin”. And what is that missing ingredient? “There are a lot of restaurants, but I’m looking for that casual dining experience with great decor, a space everyone feels comfortable, where you’re giving something that will ignite people’s senses.

“I don’t want a loud bar. I want a nice comfortable restaurant, but where no-one is going to feel intimidated, so you are going to get good food, good service, great lighting – because I want to make sure that the detail is correct in every way. I want a simple enough menu. I’m going to introduce my art into it. It will be quite different. I want to almost create a lifestyle. You should not have one bad seat in the restaurant, all the detail is very important.”

As for the menu, he’s aiming for “very fresh, light food” and he has some idea who he wants in his kitchen, but has not approached anyone yet.

“I think the celebrity chef thing is over. The majority of chefs have a huge ego so they tend to run the restaurant, more than the kitchen and the front of house working together. I would rather have someone who is really passionate and young,” Munier says.

He wants to exert more control in the kitchen. “I want the restaurant and not the main chef in the kitchen to be the focus. Everyone will be on the same neutral level and every one will work as part of a team. I will be in charge and that is what it will come down to.”

In Munier’s new world, there will be no time for celebrity chefs and not much time for food critics either. “The critics will be there, for sure, but I genuinely believe that everyone has become a critic now. I think bloggers are more important. They’ll come out en mass and talk about your food and photograph it, so I’d be much more respectful and concerned about them than the food critics. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to say they’re not good for business, but ultimately it’s quite a hard thing to please everybody in that sector, so I think the bloggers are the way forward.”

While Munier is a celebrated restaurateur, he's just as well known for his MasterChef role, alongside Dylan McGrath. The Irish version of the series has been canned – or put on hold, depending on what you read – by RTÉ because it struggled to find the right sponsor to cover production costs.

Will Munier miss his small screen role? “I enjoy being on television, I think it’s an exciting process. I enjoy the acclaim, for the ego thing, and that is natural, but I am also conscious of the flipside. Some people could be jealous of what you do and there are always going to be haters. My main focus is to be a successful restaurateur and to be passionate about my art. If I am getting acknowledged for that, I am quite happy to dabble in a bit of TV, because I enjoy it.”

The breakdown of his 10-year marriage is never far from the surface. In the past, he blamed himself exclusively. Specifically, he said his love of the limelight and his constant need for validation from the media did irreconcilable damage to the relationship. He is, perhaps, less hard on himself now. “I do take the responsibility on my shoulders because why would I want to upset the other person,” he says, before adding that there are “always three sides to every story – there’s yours, there’s theirs and there’s the truth.”

He describes the break-up as “the worst pain I have experienced” and says “It was very hard to keep a business going and go through the suffering of that. I didn’t go out. I almost became a recluse and just focussed on my three boys and my work. But over time things do get easier and now I am out of that dark place.”.

He has spent the past couple of years getting out of that place and “trying to soul search”. He has had acupuncture, taken up yoga, seen a therapist and gone to church and to a gym. “All these things really helped me. It was important, because I didn’t really have any friends. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so it was very hard for me to express, so I would do all these things to make me cope much better. And it helped.

“I know what I am doing in my workplace but when I come out of my workplace I have no idea what I am doing. My personal life could fall to bits, but what I am doing inside work is an amazing feeling. So I became sort of a workaholic and that didn’t help, either. I needed hobbies .” He needed them to stop himself overthinking. “When you overthink, you move towards depression.”

He knew he could exploit his celebrity status and drown his sorrows at launches and events. “I stayed away, I closed myself off from all that. It wasn’t a route I wanted to go down because I wasn’t comfortable and I didn’t feel happy. I’d rather go home and paint or see my children because that was the cycle I wanted to keep on. I didn’t want to divert from that and I didn’t want to go down the road of boozing, which is very easily done.

“And then I got into this obsession about my diet, so I had no carbs whatsoever. I had to lie a lot to the people who came into the restaurant about dishes,” he says with a smile. When it comes to his own life, there are “elements of exerting control” over his diet, but when it comes to guests, “it is about the enjoyment and the way it makes them feel.”

Art was another thing he used to keep himself busy, but it has morphed into more than a hobby. He is an accomplished abstract artist.

“It was an amazing thing because it was an escapism for me. The mad thing is, I can only paint when I am really happy, so I didn’t touch a paint brush for a year and a half. Then I said, get up off your arse and do something. There was a flood of emotions. Everything that was pent up just came out.”

He is famous as the front-of-house man, but started his working life as a commis chef with the acclaimed Roux brothers in their Michelin-starred London restaurant. “I loved that, but then I saw all these glamorous ladies coming into the restaurant sipping Champagne and I was like a little boy looking out through the porthole thinking ‘what are they talking about? I want to be in there rather than being in this hot sweaty kitchen’.”

So he left the sweaty kitchen and started a “love affair” front of house. He says it was about “being able to anticipate the customers’ needs. I used to play games with myself and give myself challenges – to put myself in the shit, to stress myself out to see if I could get myself out of it. That is how I learnt the business.”

In the early 2000s, he moved to Ireland, met his wife and worked in Peacock Alley, Restaurant Patrick Guilbauld and The Clarence. Then Hell's Kitchen came along. He played a role, alongside Marco Pierre White, as a bumbling French maître d'. The pair played up a difficult relationship on camera, but fell out for real in 2009 before Munier opened Pichet.

“It was 6am and I told Marco I was opening up my own place. He was opening on Dawson Street and thought I was going to work for him. I decided I wanted to do my own thing and I think he took umbrage and we’ve not talked since. I’ve sent him a few olive branches but he’s rejected them. It’s unfortunate.”

As for his new plans, he has the venue ready to go – although won’t reveal its location as contracts have yet to be signed. “It will be a restaurant with two bars, bars for the 30-plus group. It will be an amazing space. The music won’t be too loud and the cocktails will be quirky. I’m looking at €35 a head for a starter, main course, dessert. Food trends are one of those fickle areas but I just want to be able to offer the punters something clean – it might be tuna and avocado, but that’s it. Simple, wonderful tasting, for a fair price, where you have the freshest of produce on a decent porcelain plate in a lovely setting, comfortable chair, in great company.”

From any angle, it has been a hard couple of years for Munier, but he says he is in a better place now. “I’m extremely happy because I know I am on this amazing journey. It was a really tough two years. I have let go of my little baby, which was really tough, but I have got over it and now I am looking forward to the next decade. You close one door and another opens.

“Happiness is a hard thing to achieve but all I’m worried about, all that I am concerned about, is that my children are well looked after, and to leave a legacy for them. That is what motivates me. I’m putting everything on the line for this. I can only do what I can do and do it well, and the rest is up to the public.”