How award winning chef Tommi Miers dropped eveything to follow a dream
Thomasina ‘Tommi’ Miers was drifting. She had finished university, done a bit of travelling including time in her beloved Mexico but still had no clear idea what she was going to do with her life. She met her guardian angel at a modelling show: Clarissa Dixon Wright (just recently deceased), one half of the TV cooking programme, Two Fat Ladies, and all-round force of nature, was a fellow model.
“We met on the catwalk,” says Miers, “she was an amazing woman — I went to her funeral only last Monday — and I was 26 and pretty desperate at the time, I needed to find a career.
“I was a massive fan of cooking, always cooked but never stopped to think of it as a career. Clarissa asked me what my passion was and when I told her, said I should follow it. ‘The best thing you can do is head off to the best cookery school I know, in Ireland. I’ll telephone Darina tomorrow and ask her to place you on the waiting list in case someone drops out,’” she said.
“And someone did, so I went to Ballymaloe Cookery School in 2002 and it changed my life, it completely turned it around.”
Rory O’Connell remembers the first time she walked into his class: “Tall, beautiful, enthusiastic, an elegant stick of spaghetti, you never know when you meet students in the kitchen for the first time how they’ll do afterwards.
“We couldn’t have imagined with her what would happen, no more than anyone else, but on the other hand, we were not surprised. She is one of life’s enthusiasts and when the Mexican bug bit her, you could see that enthusiasm shining through,” she says.
Miers took to Ballymaloe with such enthusiasm, she found it hard to return to England. “After the course was over, I stayed around. I lived with Giana and Tom Ferguson down in Gubbeen making cheese with them for two or three months and shared a market stall with Clodagh McKenna selling sourdough bread. Eventually, my father said it’s time to come back and earn some money and I had an English boyfriend who was pissed off at me having such a good time over in Ireland!”
Back in England, she continued her culinary endeavours including a lot of baking before heading off to live in Mexico once more.
“When I went to Ballymaloe, I didn’t think anyone would be interested in Mexican food but Darina is absolutely passionate about it as well. When I talked about it, I discovered it was a shared passion.”
In 2005, she entered BBC’s Masterchef and won. “By the seat of my pants,” says Miers, “I definitely learned a lot.” After that, she began to work for Skye Gyngell at the Michelin-starred Petersham Nurseries Café.
“That brought me right back to Ballymaloe,” she says, “picking veg fresh from the garden to use in the kitchen.”
By now, she knew she wanted to get involved in her own restaurant and hooked up with her now business partner, Mark Selby, an old friend from university.
“Mexican food had faded into the background for me at that stage, there was no Mexican food in London and I was wondering if my memory was playing tricks — was it really that delicious?
“We went out to Mexico for 10 days, eating in all my favourite places and it was amazing so we decided to try and make it work in England. It took us a year to open, to find the site, do the menu.
“It was an eye-opener. I lost a lot of weight and gained a few grey hairs in the first few months. But it was very exciting times. We lived on air and guacamole for six months.
“From the moment it opened, there seemed to be a mad queue that never dissipated, we were obviously doing something that people wanted.”
Wahaca is now a highly successful chain of 12 restaurants yet still adheres to a sustainable model, recycling and using as much local produce as possible, a lesson first garnered back in her student days at Ballymaloe.
Miers has gone on to co-present several food programmes on Channel 4, including Wild Gourmets, A Cook’s Tour of Spain and Mexican Food Made Simple, also the title of one of her bestselling cookbooks.
Though Miers made it to the inaugural Litfest last year, she reckons she’ll enjoy herself much more this year.
“It was just seven weeks after the birth of my second child and I didn’t get to see much. I love the writing side and though I’m definitely a ‘cook who writes’, I will write more in my old age, it’s not so easy with a young family. Cooking is incredibly therapeutic. These days we are all in such a hurry, physical activities that engage the brain like cooking, gardening, painting, writing, sport, anything that helps you switch off and tune in. I have to cook!”
