Sam Moody is all about connection: connection with the community; connection with the customers; connection with the producers; and connection with the soil.
The English-born chef came to Ireland in 2016 to take over as Executive Head Chef at the luxurious Ballyfin Demesne, having previously been awarded a Michelin Star at the Bath Priory in England.
Laois Today spoke with the chef ahead of the launch of his new restaurant, located in Abbeyleix.
“I was looking for my own restaurant in England when Damien Bastiat, the General Manager of Ballyfin, asked would I be interested in coming to have a look? From driving through the gates, the decision was made. It’s such an impactful property – it was always going to be hard to say no,” Sam said.
“I immediately fell in love with the idea of working at such a prestigious hotel, which is really focused on the guest experience.”
“Also, the chance to work with such a huge vegetable garden, which was something I was interested in developing more in my cooking. I’ve always really enjoyed the link between the kitchen and the producer and it doesn’t get any closer if you’re growing your own produce with your own team,” he said.
Sam oversaw the kitchen during a period of time when Ballyfin was ranked Best Hotel in the World. But he always wanted more.
“Ballyfin was always a stepping-stone to opening my own business,” he said.
“I’ve wanted to own my own restaurant for a very long time. Since I was a commis chef at 17, I’ve dreamed of running my own restaurant, but I’ve always been acutely aware that it had to be the right place both hopefully commercially and also for me. It had to tick all the boxes.”
“We’ve had a quite a few false starts, we’ve gotten very close a few times, but Ballyfin was that stepping-stone to enable me to do that.”
His seven years living in the Slieve Bloom Mountains clearly made an impression on Sam and his family.
“It’s the cliché,” he said. “People in Ireland are just amazing. From the minute we arrived, people went out of their way to make us feel welcome.”
“Then it was taken to another level when we had our first child, Inês, who is now nearly five. Never does it ring more true that it takes a village to raise a child. You really get that impression that everybody is interested and everybody cares about the welfare and the upbringing of your children, and it’s really lovely.”
So why Laois? Why Abbeyleix?
“When I came to see Ballyfin, Damien really encouraged me to get out and explore the area,” Sam said.
“One of our meetings had been at night; we’d gone for a pint over the road in Morrissey’s and grabbed a bite to eat and Damien said ‘you should really come back here during the day.’”
“I had my little rental car and I was driving around. As soon as I saw Abbeyleix in the daytime I just thought ‘oh, this is a really lovely little town,’ and I drove past Bramley, and thought ‘that would be such a good restaurant.’”
“I had this idea that Abbeyleix and Durrow were almost the same place when I first arrived and I had this image in my mind’s eye of this wonderful town with this double-fronted restaurant that would just be incredible if it ever came onto the market.”
“So, it’s always been in the back of my head to open a restaurant either in Abbeyleix or near Abbeyleix from the day I arrived in Ireland really.”
Now that Sam has finally realised his dream of opening his own restaurant, in his dream location, he has begun putting in place all the necessary elements to create something quite special.
“Right now, we’re giving the place a good refurbishment and showing it some love,” he said.
“Bramley, the building, has been here since the 1800s and I think it’s been known as Bramley since 1920. So, we’re quite keen to reinstate it as ‘Bramley’ and that we are its current custodians and we’re going to run a restaurant out of it, in its simplest form.”
“We want to create a relaxed, elegant space that people can come and enjoy. Our ambition is to create warm, friendly hospitality and serve really good food. Food that people really want to eat.”
“We’re opening a restaurant, it’s not going to be a café,” Sam insisted. “But at the same time, I want to create a hub in the community based on food.”
“I’d love it if people come and have a simple lunch and a cup of coffee and then at dinner, we’re going to elevate it slightly. It’s going to be more refined, more elegant.”
“But my food is very approachable and I sort of catch people off-guard with a little bit of technique. If we’ve made a soup – the most humble of things – I like the fact that people are like ‘how did you do that?’ And that’s what we are going to try and achieve with Bramley.”
“We’ll have a concise, simple wine-list with affordable, approachable wines. As my knowledge grows, we will grow the wine offering. We’re working with a great Irish wine supplier called JN Wine and we’re really excited about that.”
“Wine, like food, is so fundamentally human; it’s been essential for thousands of years as way of preserving fruit juices, and like food, it brings us together. You can drink it just to enjoy it or you can really think about it and it opens up this whole new world.”
Chefs have always followed Sam wherever he has moved to. When he joined Ballyfin, he brought his Sous Chef and Pastry Chef with him from The Bath Priory. Now that he is leaving the luxurious hotel, he has again recruited another talented chef.
“James Flannery, who I’ve worked with for five years in Ballyfin, will be running the kitchen with me. We will have one other chef with us, we think, to start off with. James really gets the way people eat in this area and that’s very important to me.”
“Then it’s about getting the right front-of-house team together to offer that really genuine, warm hospitality.”
Sam has also been working with two artists to create a unique style and ambience in Bramley; Nadia Rice, a Laois illustrator; and Erica Devine, a Wicklow artist who specialises in Plaster of Paris creations.
Ireland currently has more Michelin Starred restaurants than ever before. Where once these restaurants would have been practically exclusive to Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Kilkenny, a growing number are now popping up in more rural locations.
Thomastown, Ardmore, Castlemartyr, Celbridge, Lisdoonvarna and Ballydehob have all earned the prestigious award in recent times. Could Laois be next?
“That’s always been in the back of my head – It’s always nice to be the first person to do something,” Sam said.
“We didn’t manage to achieve a star at Ballyfin – for many reasons – mainly because I’m guest focused: I want to cook for the people who are eating in the restaurant,” he said.
“Michelin Stars are lovely, but it’s the people that pay the bills; they’re always who I want to look after. I want to create a product they enjoy – and they want to enjoy over and over again.”
“If Michelin are to recognise that and give me a star, great; but my priority is always the people sitting in my dining room.”
Sam and his wife, Emily recently bought a house and have begun to create a fabulous home garden, designed specifically to create produce for the restaurant.
“Emily and I have been looking for our home, our family home – we have two children now and another one on the way. We’d been looking for years to find the right place and then this wonderful old farm-house near Clonaslee came up. It’s got a bit over an acre of land and I immediately saw that as a veg garden.”
Sam says he learned so much from working with the gardeners in Ballyfin. His time has influenced how he cooks, what he creates, and his attitude towards food waste.
“There’s a constant battle when you’re trying to use what you’re growing. If you have 20 kilos of peas ready or whatever – what do you do with all these peas? So, you have to return to that idea of how do we preserve this? What do we make from this? Obviously, quality is important – it has to be tasty. It also has to be labour-efficient. It has to tick all the boxes.”
“One of the criteria for working for me is that you’re going to go out of your way not to waste things.”
“But you can find yourself guilty of delaying the inevitable; rather than just wasting a product or turning it into compost, you can end up creating waste through storage like a vac-pack bag. You just have to find a balance – it’s a very interesting way of working.”
“I’m fascinated with soil ecology,” he said. “What appears to be nothing under our feet is actually a really complex ecosystem. The more I’ve read about not breaking soil and not damaging soil, the more interested I’ve become.”
At the same time as Sam is launching his restaurant, he is also busy converting his patch of land into a no-dig vegetable garden.
Having seen the beginnings of the project on the chef’s Instagram page, Brendan Guinan, a regenerative farmer and founder of Fiorbhia Farm in Boghlone, reached out to Sam. Brendan supplied Sam with pigs, which have become a valuable part of the home garden.
“The pigs remove a lot of the weeds really quickly and really effectively. Any damage they do is minimal because they’ve evolved with forests and woodlands so they root naturally. They push their snouts in to get what they want and they’re incredibly accurate.”
“I’ve just moved them and the ground is still in good condition, they’ve just completely stripped it of all the weeds.”
Sam is creating a miniature version of the eight-acre garden he had at his disposal in Ballyfin.
“We’re starting simple. This year we’ll be growing broad beans, peas, and salads, for the restaurant. We missed the opportunity unfortunately to plant fruit trees, so it’ll be two years before we have our own gooseberries and whatnot for the restaurant. But we’re getting there.”
“It’s really important for me to have that; it’s what I came to Ireland for,” he said.
There is not long left to wait as Sam hopes Bramley will open its doors at the end of April.
“There’s a lot to do but it will be transformed in the next two weeks,” he said. “Our website is almost built and bookings will be available once I know I can open.”
You can follow Sam’s journey on his Instagram page.
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