PAUL RANKIN is sitting in his restaurant, Cayenne, on Great Victoria Street in Belfast, discussing the dark days of the Troubles.
In about 1990, he recalls, “we were having two big Italian wine dinners, back to back, with an Italian wine producer over, accompanied by the wine merchant James Nicholson. The first night went fantastically well, but then later on a huge bomb wrecked Shaftesbury Square.
“I remember walking into the restaurant through the front window rather than the front door. I could have cried; things had been going so well.
“So, what to do? Well, we cleaned up and we brushed up and we boarded the broken windows and we created this path to the door past two walls of broken glass, and we opened for the second wine dinner. ‘Oh my God,’ said the Italian as he came through the path, ‘this is the Belfast we see in the news.’ But we had a fantastic night, and it was absolutely the right thing to do.”
Rankin is conscious that, in his way, he had a role in helping Belfast escape if not the horror then the drudgery of the Troubles. “We were fed up being in this dark place, and we wanted to play our part in giving people a normal life,” he says.
He believes modern celebrity chefdom – a phenomenon he helped pioneer – was also a positive force in the island.
“All the food programmes and food journalism have been a good thing. Ireland always had great products, but, let’s face it, we were s*** cooks . . . Now we have world-class restaurants, cooking world-class products, and we are not an embarrassment to ourselves.
“Foodies are sometimes pretentious food-obsessed idiots, but then they catch themselves on and just like food. And that’s good.”
Now 52, Rankin still has the longish hair, beard and slightly hippyish demeanour, and is still fondly regarded by people in Northern Ireland.
When the bombs were still exploding and tourists were nonexistent in the North, he returned from Canada with his wife, Jeanne, to open the top-class Roscoff restaurant – the first in Northern Ireland to gain a Michelin star – since replaced on the site with Cayenne.
In the noughties he expanded the Rankin brand. He opened restaurants and cafes in Belfast, Dublin and Portadown, and at the height of his expansion he had 13 restaurants and employed 300 staff. By 2008 he had nothing left but Cayenne – and for a time that also was jeopardised.
Rankin says he could have “cut and run”, gone bankrupt, put out a “good PR story” to keep him in celebrity-chef work, and started another restaurant when the dust had settled.
But he tried to dispose in an orderly way of most of the cafes, saving numerous jobs in the process, and did a deal with the revenue and creditors, whereby over five years he will pay his remaining debt of £1 million to the tune of about 80 pence in the pound.
He says he wasn’t cut out for the big business projects and believes he should have stuck with what he did best – cooking and appearing on television. “I should have had the fecking common sense to see and realise that,” he says.
His name still appears on bread and sausages sold in shops. Sales are about £25 million annually, from which he gets a small cut. He is thinking about some “careful” expansion in this area.
He is three years into his repayments, and although it has sometimes been hard to meet his monthly commitments, he hasn’t missed a pay date, he says, and, with two years to go, “thank God I can see light at the end of the tunnel”.
There was also a brief run-in with hygiene inspectors when his kitchen scored one out of five, but this was an aberration, he says, and was quickly rectified – and his kitchen now scores four out of five.
Rankin says Cayenne’s “technique for fighting the recession is simply to get more value and to work harder like nearly every other owner-operated business in Ireland. You give more just to survive”.
After the ceasefires of the 1990s, and in the good times before the recession, Cayenne was popular with southern visitors and day trippers, but these customers have “all but disappeared”.
“I don’t understand why people can’t take one lunch off a month with their families or their great good friends and have one boozy lunch. Lunch is one of the great things to do with friends,” he says, making his pitch.
He reckons his prices are half of what you would pay for similar fare in Dublin. Certainly, the food is top-notch and the prices reasonable – this year a three-course lunch or pretheatre dinner at Cayenne costs £15.95 (€19.50); a later dinner costs £22.95 (€28). This would have starters such as Asian prawn chowder, crispy duck salad or pear and Roquefort salad; mains such as pheasant breast, seafood gratin and duck confit; and desserts such as autumn-fruit crumble, buttermilk pannacotta and homemade ice cream. Well worth a day to the “happening” city of Belfast, Rankin reckons.
The menus change regularly, but nearly always include salt-and-chilli squid, a signature dish for, it seems, decades.
“I am bored with that particular starter,” he says. But his regular customers won’t allow him to take it off the menu.
Rankin divides his time between Cayenne and his TV work. An eight-part series with his Scottish friend and fellow chef Nick Nairn comes out on UTV in the spring. Called Paul and Nick's Big Food Trip,it features them cooking in Scotland and Northern Ireland to an Ulster-Scots theme – "Ulster fries and lamb and haggis Wellington".
Rankin’s marriage of more than 25 years to Jeanne came to an “amicable” end earlier this year. “We are still friends,” he says. “I consider myself very fortunate to have had such a long and happy marriage and such a beautiful family with her.”
They have three children, Claire, who is 25 and studying French and working part-time in Canada; Emily, who is 22 and studying medicine in Newcastle; and Jamie, who is 14 and at school at Methodist College Belfast. “The girls are pretty good cooks, but there are no chefs in the family. They could all eat for Ireland.”
For Rankin, who brought fine dining to Belfast during the dark days of the Troubles, it has been an eventful year: up, down and up again and still dishing out good grub. “You just have to cope with the storms as best you can. I am quite proud of how we handled our storms.”
