Culture That Made Me: Macroom chef Denis Cotter on Bourdain, Flann O'Brien, and Corcadorca
Denis Cotter, owner and executive chef of Paradiso in Cork. Picture: David Creedon
Denis Cotter, 64, grew up in Macroom, Co Cork. He gave up a career in banking to open Café Paradiso in Cork City in 1993.
As a vegetarian restaurant in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, it was a curiosity, but it prospered.
In 2019, Café Paradiso was a prize winner at the inaugural World Restaurant Awards in Paris.
Cotter published the first of several cookery books, The Café Paradiso Cookbook, in 1999.
His latest, Paradiso: Recipes & Reflections, is published by Nine Bean Rows.
- See: www.ninebeanrows.com.
In my late teens/early twenties, I discovered Flann O'Brien’s novels like The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds. The Third Policeman I’ve gone back to many times. I love his visual imagery. He could write something as surreal as The Third Policeman in such a way that he could make pictures in your head. When I’m reading it, I can see the road to Old Mathers’ house. It’s so visually perfect and it’s very funny.
My favourite food book is Anthony Bourdain’s story of that Irish woman known as Typhoid Mary in New York. It’s a tiny book. He comes at it from the point of view that she was a cook. Cooks do not call in sick. There was always the question about her: “Why the hell if she's got typhoid was she going around cooking in people's kitchens?” She's a cook. She goes to work. That's what she does. He manages to tell the story from her perspective, a very sympathetic point of view. Along the way, he explains the minds of chefs and cooks.
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was one of the first grown-up books that got me. It's short. I reread it recently. Some of the imagery when he's depicting a scene – for example, when they're down by the river – is marvellous. There was a particularly grotesque line in it that stayed with me. One of the farmhands points out that the cruel boss wears a glove on one hand to keep his hand soft – he keeps one hand for beating men, and one hand for his wife or something. It would make you wobble.
When I first met my wife, Maureen, she gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. It blew my mind. He has that quality of setting out on a surreal journey and creating a world that you go down into. You come to know it intimately and you understand it, and it makes total rational sense, even though it isn't really rational. It’s very good storytelling in that it creates a world that you fall into easily. I love all his books, including his books about writing and running.
There is a connection between Paradiso and Corcadorca. It’s 30 years since Paradiso opened. That era in the early 1990s in Cork was really exciting. There was lots going on in music and theatre. The work that Corcadorca did over a 30-year period was astonishing. The small play they did, Disco Pigs, became such a huge hit. And they did big outdoor productions that were happenings in the city. It felt like the whole city took part in so many of them. Particularly The Merchant of Venice, which started in the old distillery and ended in the courthouse; we all had to traipse across town following it. It was an extraordinary piece of theatre.
I remember seeing Waiting for Godot in Dublin’s Gate Theatre around 2000 with Barry McGovern and Johnny Murphy. It was unbelievable. I took my kids. They were maybe 12 and eight. They loved it. The thing about Beckett is the experience – you're understanding something profound, but afterwards, you can't explain it. It doesn't mean anything. Kids get that. It was as available to my kids as it was to me, but none of us could talk about it afterwards, or explain what we loved about it, except that it was hilarious.
We had a great little record shop in Macroom called Gallagher's; they would try to order any record you wanted. I bought Talking Heads’ first album, 77, and the Ramones’ second album, Leave Home, on the same day. Bringing those two home changed my world. Talking Heads’ 77 album was like nothing that came before it. It wasn't punk. It wasn't rock music and the songs weren’t about things other artists wrote about – girls and love and cars. It was exciting and angry and edgy, with an astonishing vocal performance. What a brilliant singer David Byrne is.
The TV show Cheers was always there in my life at a certain period, around the 1980s – and now is again, as I watch repeats on Channel 4. There's hundreds of episodes. I'm amazed at how good it is. It has fantastic characters. It comes across as a strong feminist series. There's always a dominant female character – played by Shelley Long or Kirstie Alley. Particularly Shelley Long existed to put Ted Danson’s character right on assumptions he grew up with.
A 1988 film I’m drawn to is The Moderns by the director Alan Rudolph. It's set in Paris in the 1920s when great American writers were there. I've probably seen it half a dozen times. It’s so evocative. It’s not that I'm particularly interested in its real-life characters like Ernest Hemingway. There is something about the way the story is told. It's a great piece of storytelling.
Fall of Civilizations is a podcast by a guy called Paul Cooper. He's made around 17 of them. He puts one out about every six months. He does long episodes – maybe two, three hours long – on obvious ones like the Incas and Aztecs, and on ones you've never heard of like civilizations in Burma, Africa or the Middle East. He tells the stories so well – how they came up and how they inevitably collapsed. It’s fascinating how an entire civilization that once was so dominant can disappear, often for small reasons.
I've been going to Turner’s Cross to watch Cork City football team since the mid-nineties when they moved back to Turner’s Cross from Bishopstown. I took both my sons when their time came. The thing about fandom – you have to go to all the games to catch good ones, so you spend lots of time watching bad ones. I was there when Colin Healy scored with an overhead kick against St. Pats a couple of minutes from time in 2014. The time they beat Derry to win the league in 2005 – with John O’Flynn, George O'Callaghan and Kevin Doyle – stays with me. It was so exhilarating. You get such highs from football, and you put up with a lot of lows, but the highs are extraordinary.
