Kinsale Food Festival provided ingredients for novel idea

Caroline James’s first visit to Kinsale’s Gourmet Festival in 2011 inspired her new novel, So You Think You’re A Celebrity… Chef?

“Kinsale left an enormous impression on me,” James says. “It wasn’t just the town and its restaurants, both of which are so gorgeous, but, really, the whole buzz of activity around the Gourmet Festival that set me thinking about somehow bringing it all together in a book.”

Having owned catering businesses, including a pub, a hotel and restaurant, Caroline lives in Cheshire, where she writes. Her debut novel, Coffee, Tea, The Gypsy & Me, was set in north-west England, in a country house hotel during a gypsy horse fair. The book was number three on Amazon’s bestseller list.

For So You Think You’re A Celebrity… Chef? Caroline took a variety of ingredients and mixed them in a steamy stew.

“There’s a tough-cookie media agent, who’s clawed her way to the top, and a con-man who wants to open a cookery school,” she says.

“Added to that is a washed-up celebrity chef, whose career needs rebuilding, an aging rock star fresh from rehab, and a ‘sloane ranger’ food writer who gets her own TV show. They are all brought together at a gourmet food festival, in Ireland, a place where anything goes,” she says.

The book’s diverse elements came together during James’s first visit to Kinsale — a place she says is “quite magical, somewhere that really inspired me to use its beautiful location as the backdrop to much of the action in the story.”

James previously had a slight notion of Kinsale’s colourful characters. “I was aware that Keith Floyd had lived in the town for a number of years, and some of my staff, in a restaurant I once owned in England, said I had a bit of the Floyd personality myself,” James says.

“But I never realised just how important a foodie destination Kinsale really was, until I went there. It was like discovering a well-kept secret.”

James threw herself into the organised hilarity that is an integral aspect of the festival. Of its highpoints, she says: “This crazy day called the ‘mad hatter’s taste of Kinsale’, where everyone wears a silly hat and follows the ‘mad hatter’, Alice, and her friends, to savour the delights of the many restaurants in the town, was simply the most fun I’ve ever had,” she says.

“And, of course, as soon as they heard it was my first time in Kinsale, everybody insisted on me being brought to the front at every turn.

“Needless to say, the drinks continued to flow as we made our way around the town and, by the end of the evening, I felt I’d lived in Kinsale all my life,” she says.

James can’t think of another town whose small population supports such a large list of good restaurants, and says Kinsale’s ability to promote itself could be a template for other emerging foodie centres.

So You Want To Be A Celebrity … Chef? centres around media agent, Hilary Hargreaves, who travels to Ireland to look at a campaign for a new cookery school.

After meeting reformed alcoholic Long Tom Hendry, in whose crumbling mansion the planned school will be based, Hillary realises she’s developing more than a passing interest in her host.

Things become more complicated when she bumps into a blast from her past — the romantic, but reckless, chef Mickey Lloyd, a man hell-bent on resurrecting his flagging career. Juggling all these exotic ingredients, Hillary discovers this is one stew with explosive possibilities, unless she handles it with care.

“The original germ that became the book came directly from that visit to Kinsale,” James says. “I returned home to Cheshire buzzing with ideas.

“It wasn’t just a marvellous weekend full of wonderful new people, it really spurred me to get this down on paper as part of a book.”

Now a convert to the delights of Kinsale and its famous restaurants, James has succinct advice for other visitors: “If you ever get a chance to go to the gourmet festival, I can only say, ‘go, go, go.’

“The time that I spent in Kinsale was so wonderful and the Irish hospitality so memorable. I recall that happy time with a great deal of fondness and look forward to going back.”

* So You Think You’re A Celebrity … Chef? (Thornberry Publishing)

* The Kinsale Gourmet Festival takes place from Oct 11-13.