'It was completely new and different': Denis Cotter on 30 years of Café Paradiso in Cork

It’s 30 years since chef Denis Cotter opened his now renowned vegetarian restaurant. He looks back at three incredible decades with Joe McNamee

Denis Cotter, owner and executive chef of Paradiso in Cork. Pic: David Creedon

At the 2023 Irish Food Writing Awards, held at the end of October in the salubrious surroundings of Dublin’s RDS, where over 90 nominees for multiple awards attended a splendid banquet in the vast library, the reaction and applause was especially heartfelt as Denis Cotter headed to the stage to receive the award for Best Irish Cookbook for Paradiso: Recipes and Reflections (Nine Bean Rows Books).

It was the cherry, on the icing, on top of the cake in a very special year for Cotter — actually, make that “years”, for just days before, his internationally renowned, multi-award-winning vegetarian restaurant celebrated the 30th anniversary of its founding in 1993.