Ciaran Kavanagh

I did eight years in Italy.

Okay.

You fly to Bologna, it's on the coast.

Eight years, yeah.

First four seasons, I did just a summer in a hotel as a head chef and I wintered in Dublin, either in the pub or I worked for agencies.

Yeah.

And then...

I went back, I was full-time head chef in a restaurant in a small town called Chervia.

And it was not in Tuscany, it was the next province, so it's Tuscan Emiliano kind of food.

And I was lucky enough that I worked with a lot of older chefs who did old dishes, a lot of women chefs who did a lot of old dishes, like rabbits and their own pastas and stuff like that.

Well, the mad thing was when I got there back in 2000, a mad cow hit.

And the restaurant I was working in was T-bone steaks, like Fiorentina, and a lot of beef dishes.

And we just had to scrap it all.

And I found all the game and all that.

Was it?

Yeah, and then we were getting in, we were getting in bison, we were getting buffalo in, we were cooking everything.

A lot of rabbit.

Oh yeah, they wouldn't touch beef.

It took a long time.

And then when I started back with beef a couple of years later, I got my beef from Ireland because it was one of the ones that were way ahead of everybody.