Thornton 'thrilled' after taking 'chef of the year' award

He may have lost a coveted Michelin star last year, but Kevin Thornton's status in the restaurant business has been confirmed after he won the Veuve Clicquot "chef of the year" award.

Thornton, the owner of Thornton's Restaurant in St Stephen's Green in Dublin, won the award ahead of such luminaries of the culinary world as Nevan Maguire, Richard Corrigan and Ross Lewis of Chapter One.

The Food & Wine Magazine/Edward Dillon Restaurant of the Year Awards were presented at the Mansion House yesterday.

Thornton said: "I'm really happy, really thrilled. We've won the award before, but this one means more for us because we reinvented ourselves and pushed ourselves more.

"When you think of Thornton's, you think it's this snobby restaurant that's expensive, but we've created a canopy bar to get rid of that perception. Good food is for everybody.

"It's very dangerous to work for awards. For me, I lost a star, because I took my eye off the ball, but there was something I had to do at the time, but I sometimes think you have to take a step back to go forward, and we've gone forward incredibly in the last year."

The restaurant of the year award went to Michael Deane, the owner of Deane's Restaurant in Belfast. It is the North's only Michelin-starred restaurant, a status it has retained for 11 years.

The award comes in a busy year for Mr Deane who opened a Deane's restaurant at Queens University in January and another outlet in Banbridge.

He admitted to have been "shocked" by the award. "We didn't expect to win overall restaurant. There is still a great divide between the North and the South. We do look up to Dublin, but Belfast is going to get there.

"It's been hard for Northern Ireland when you look back over the last 25 years. It's been a lot of sleepless years. We stuck by it. We believed in the people of Northern Ireland, but I don't know if restaurants are just enough. It's got to be tourism, the tourist board and everything else."

The Hall of Fame award went to John Howard, the ex-chef and proprietor of Le Coq Hardi in Pembroke Road, Dublin, a restaurant whose reputation for good food was surpassed only by the lavish spending of its most famous patron Charles Haughey.

Although he retired in 2001 and closed what was arguably Dublin's most famous restaurant, Mr Howard is still active in the business as president of Bocuse d'Or Ireland and as a judge for the Bocuse d'Or world culinary contest, the world's most prestigious cooking competition.