Behind the counter with Dino Cregan: 'You’re only as good as your last bag of chips'

Ahead of World Fish and Chips Day, Ellie O'Byrne spends a day behind the counter with Denis 'Dino' Cregan in his Kinsale chipper, as he marks five decades in business. Plus, we reveal Ireland's top 10 fish and chip shops, as voted by you   

Denis "Dino" Cregan at Dino's Family Chip Shop in Blackpool, Cork. Pic: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision

No sooner has Denis Cregan walked through the doors into the sizzling, bustling kitchen of Dino’s chipper in Kinsale than he has his jacket off and is over at the fryers, or “pans” as he calls them, demonstrating how to fry the perfect chip.

“Come up here and I’ll show you,” he says, giving one of the baskets a brisk shake. “The first pan is one heat, the second is a different temperature, and the third is the hottest one then, and that finishes off the chip. See this?” 

He points at a potato hopper that dispenses portions of raw chips into frying baskets. “This is the best idea of the lot. You know who came up with that idea? Me. A certain amount of chips comes out each time, the same amount each time.” 

A portion of crisp golden chips is placed on a plate alongside an equally crisp piece of freshly battered fish, ready to be served.

“Look at that,” Denis says. “It’s simplicity at its best. Everything here is simple.” 

Denis ‘Dino’ Cregan is 84 now, and he’s in on a flying visit, the day-to-day running of the Kinsale branch of his fast-food empire in the capable hands of his daughter Denise and her team.

Dino Cregan, owner of Dino's Family Chip Shops: "I’m a real Cork man, from the Bandon Road." cooking at the fryer in his chip shop in Kinsale, Co. Cork. Picture: David Creedon

‘Italian for Denis’, but a real Cork man

It was 5.10pm on a Monday in 1970 and Denis was 33 when he opened the doors on his first chip shop, on Tower Street in Cork City. 

On the menu was “Fish and chips, potato pies and a bit of sausage”. Months earlier, in the winter of ‘69, Denis had hit upon the name that would become so synonymous with his business that many regulars would take to calling him by it too: Dino.

“Coca-Cola were coming to put a sign up outside my door, and we didn’t have a name,” he recalls. “I was standing by the fire and I said, ‘We’ll call it Dino’s because it’s the Italian for Denis’. Then a lot of people would think I was Italian but I’m far from it: I’m a real Cork man, from the Bandon Road.” 

Cork was a different world in the 1940s and 50s: A developing country, in many ways, and life was correspondingly tough for inner-city kids like Denis and his siblings. 

Denis recalls being amongst a throng of kids at football matches at Turner’s Cross, vying for the privilege of holding one of the players’ coats and earning a tip after the game.

“In my time, when you went to a match you’d have to hold a fella’s coat because there was no dressing rooms,” he says. 

“He’d tog off at the side of the ditch and give you his coat and there’d be some money in it: It was a privilege to hold a coat, nobody touched you if you were minding a coat. And our mothers and fathers? We weren’t fit to be holding their coats. They were much better than us. They reared loads of us, with nothing, and we were never in trouble. We should never forget where we come from.” 

School attendance was not, it’s fair to say, amongst the young Denis’s priorities: “I hold the record in Greenmount school … for not going there,” he says with a laugh.

The entrepreneurial spirit that saw him open his first chipper in his 30s didn’t come from his love of, or indeed as he acknowledges, knowledge of food: “I didn’t know how to boil an egg,” he chuckles. 

He had been driving a pick-up truck for a living, but one of his brothers had worked for the famous Jackie Lennox, who had a chipper on the Bandon Road that has queues out the door to this day, while another brother worked for National Cash Registers.

Dino's Family Chip Shop on Pier Road, Kinsale, Co. Cork. Picture: David Creedon

First night of business

That first night in 1970 was a herald of the good business to come. 

“It was pounds, shillings, and pence in those days. Can you guess what we made, that first night? A week’s wages in those days was a tenner; a month’s wages was IE£40. A hundred pounds was an awful lot of money. We put seven and thrupence into the drawer when we opened, and it was nine pence for a bag of chips that time. By the end of the night, we had £55.” 

Denis stops and looks around. “But God we’re doing very well,” he says, surveying the queue of customers and the bubbling fryers with visible pride. 

“Have a look at this shop.” From £55 in the drawer at the end of that first night, over 50 years later, Dino’s is a Cork institution, a family-run fast-food empire with nine outlets in city and county and 108 staff.

His wife Mary, he says, worked hard alongside him “from the day we opened,” and they raised a large family: Seven sons and daughters of whom are involved in running the family fast food empire.

“I’m very lucky because I have great family,” Denis says. “I don’t know where I got them from. I have three daughters, and they’d buy and sell you. See her?” he says as Denise rushes past, her blonde hair tied back, “don’t cross her”. He chuckles.

Another of his daughters, Christine, is by his side. She tells the Irish Examiner she remembers her upbringing as firm but fair, their parents a united front on house rules. They were taught the benefits of hard work

from a young age, and all put in stints working at the pans in their teens.

But while they were taught to be grounded, as time went by and the Dino’s business grew, their lifestyle improved: The family moved to Douglas, and Denis and Mary didn’t hold back on home furnishings, nor on Christmas, when the kids were “spoiled,” Christine says.

Dino Cregan, owner of Dino's Family Chip Shops, with his daughter Christine at his branch in Kinsale, Co. Cork. Picture: David Creedon

Denis, of course, has not only been a chip shop owner: He also owned several pubs, although he says the chip shops were always the better business. And, fuelled by his knowledge of people generated by years of chat at the counter, he also had a career in politics for 30 years.

Serving first as a Fine Gael city councillor, then as lord mayor in the early 1990s, and then as senator, Denis says it’s what he learned about human nature behind the counter in his chip shops and bars that made him an accessible politician.

“For the two minutes that you’re with me, I’m looking at you and I’m trying not to blink because: I’m trying to see what kind you are,” he says. 

“And it’s always, ‘how are ya boy?’ We don’t lose that, we don’t lose where we’re from. I’m not Mr Dino to anyone, I’m Dino. Some people suffer from delusions, but I taught all my gang that you’re only as good as your last bag of chips.

“You’re only as good as your last bag of chips,” is his humbling catchphrase, repeated often, his reminder that you never get above your station.

Today, the Dino’s operation is so big that it requires its own warehousing and processing unit to supply all seven of their outlets. They get through 20 tonnes of potatoes per week, and are championing the Irish spud, working with Irish farmers.

Not only Irish spuds, but ones grown within 30km of their outlets: In October 2023, Dino’s announced a Bord Bia backed partnership with Blackwater Valley potato growers, meaning their chips are as authentically Cork as Dino himself.

2020 was supposed to be the year that the Cregan family celebrated 50 years a-frying, but of course Covid restrictions postponed all that. 

As with so many SMEs, the Cregans had to reinvent their empire, pivoting to a click-and-collect service to survive closures. But they didn’t stop planning and growing. 

The sod is now well and truly turned on a drive-thru in Midleton, and the plan is to finish this before beginning work on another drive-thru in Dungarvan.

There’s so much to be proud of, not only for Denis but for his hard-working clan. 

But still, even as he talks through plans to expand, for the new drive-thru chippers, he repeats it from time to time, the motto of this self-made man: “You’re only as good as your last bag of chips.”