French connection: a chef moves to Mayo to follow the family tradition

Quenelles de brochet, a famous old Lyonnais dish made from pike in a creamy sauce, is particularly tricky to make, requiring great precision and patience. It dates from 1830 when pike abounded in the Rhône Alpes region of France and is not often seen these days on restaurant menus in Ireland or elsewhere. The only time I have ever experienced its sublime taste was in the mid 1970s in the middle of a carpark in Castlebar.

The restaurant was called La Petite France and it was the brainchild of a French chef called Gerard Morice from Metz in northwest France.

At catering school, the renowned Lycée Hôtelier de Strasbourg, one of his professors played golf with Francis Mumford Smith, proprietor of Newport House Hotel and heard that he needed a chef. Francis’s father Henry, had bought the beautiful 18th-century house in 1945 and turned it into a hotel and the family were very keen on French cuisine.

Thus it was that the Frenchman arrived in Mayo in April 1971 aged 19, a skilled chef but without a word of English. Guests at the time included Grace Kelly and family, various French artists and the team from the movie Taxi Mauve. “Supplies were difficult so we used local produce, seafood and beef from Kellys in Newport (now an award-winning artisan butcher) and cooked it the French way,” recalls Morice. “Wild salmon, however, was plentiful and I loved cooking it.”

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Gerard would winter back in France in a maison traiteur famous for its foie gras called Artzner dating from 1830. While in Newport House he met local girl Imelda Corbett and they were married in Newport in 1975. He was 25 and she 21 when they opened La Petite France three years later offering a sophisticated French menu and it was one of our pleasures to stop and enjoy some remarkable meals there, usually departing with gifts of wonderful cheeses like Milleens and Gubbeen then in the infancy of their celebrated reputations.

“They only want steak and chips here,” he once told us ruefully. As for the quenelles, one of his favourite dishes, “you couldn’t use the word pike on the menu, so we dealt with the problem by calling it white fish mousse and got compliments for it,” adding that in his opinion, pike’s flesh can be compared to halibut or trout.

Though they had “five great years” in Castlebar, the recession in the 1980s forced them to close and move back to France with their six-year-old son Alain where Gerard subsequently developed a successful career running hotels.

A flair for cooking runs deep in the Morice family. Gerard’s father from Normandy was a chef well known for his classic cuisine bourgeois. Gerard’s son Alain, having trained in the same catering school as his father continues the family tradition and spent the last year as a sommelier before moving to London. For the next 20 years he perfected his skills with Terence Conran, Joël Robuchon, in Pont de la Tour and other famous restaurants while maintaining his links with Ireland.

When he and his Spanish wife Nuria had their first child Eoin, the couple decided to leave London and move to Ireland to start a restaurant. With the opening of Savoir Fare in Westport in April 2019, a new generation of Morices is now making a mark in Mayo upping the town’s culinary cachet. A bustling shop/café/lunchtime restaurant, it seats 25 and having closed due to Covid, reopened in June 2020.

The venture is based on Alain’s passionately held belief that “Irish produce is the best in the world, bar none. We find small artisans who produce quality and except for wine, lemons and peppers, we only sell Irish produce. This is a small, loud place with a lot of toing and froing,” he says proudly.

It’s a family affair too; one sister does the baking while the other sourced the salvaged furniture including tables made from premier cru wine boxes, Burgundy oak barrels and an old counter from a bakery in Normandy.

Gerard, though retired, remains active in Beaune, chairs a local chamber of commerce, is a senior judge on an employment tribunal and, as a deacon in the Catholic church, officiates at weddings and funerals.

“My three children live in Mayo, but love having a foot in both Ireland and France,” he says. “One of my son’s favourite dishes is pâté en croûte, very fashionable amongst French chefs, which he is making with the lesser cuts [of meat]. He’s reinventing a classic dish – it’s a bit the same as I did with the pike – so voila!”