Saturday with Mateo Saina: There is something in us humans that is voyeuristic
Mateo Saina: It’s important to me to be healthy now that I’m getting older and have a family.
I get up at 7am each Saturday because I have to walk my dog Zola and get in a bit of a run. I’ll go for a walk with Zola in Sundrive Park near my home and force her to run 5km — at least she doesn’t bark any more! It’s important to me to be healthy now that I’m getting older and have a family.
I don’t eat breakfast — I will have the first two coffees of 10 that I have throughout the day. I’ll have two flat whites followed by an orange juice or a smoothie.
I get to work around 8.30am. At our restaurant, Ian’s Kitchen by Mateo in Kimmage, we open at 9am and close at 4pm. We specialise in breakfast and brunch and we are also open for dinner on Friday, Saturday andSunday. We open the doors at 9am, I put my head down and don’t get a chance to look up until about 4pm.
On a busy day it will be me plus one other person on the floor and a barista.
I’ll take all the orders from customers. Even though I’m on TV it’s no big deal when it comes to the customers. They see me running around on the floor of the restaurant and they have the good sense to leave me alone and let me do my job. I’ve been in Dublin for 20 years, people have seen me around for years, nobody bugs me even though I’m on First Dates Ireland.
The persona you see on the TV is the same persona you get in real life — it doesn’t bug me what people expect or don’t expect me to be like — I passed that stage in life ten years ago. If you like me, cool, if you don’t, cool. I love my family and my friends, I try to treat everybody right and expect people to treat me the same — being on TV doesn’t phase me, so why would it phase anyone else?
If we are filming for First Dates Ireland I will arrive at 10am. We’ll have breakfast and then I’ll go and put my suit on.
The first daters will arrive. We have 12 main daters a day. I’ll sit the first few daters down. It can be a pretty slow day of filming because I sit the daters down but then I pass them over to the barman and I don’t want to overstep the mark on his role — we each have our own parts to play. My main interaction with the daters is at the door and a little bit afterwards at the bar.
Janine, our floor manager, is fantastic at keeping us all in order and running everything to schedule on the day. The history of the show says it works. It’s a professional production — everybody knows what they’re doing. If you gave the production to me it would have been shut down in year one but these people really know what they’re doing.
I think everyone loves First Dates Ireland because it appeals to people of all ages. People also love to be a fly on the wall — there is something in us humans that is voyeuristic — we like to see things we are not supposed to see.
The show has changed along with a changing society — it is more diverse now because society has become more diverse and more open about that diversity.
Older people may have something to say about changes in society but we all have our time — time leaves us behind — it is meant to be like this.
I don’t take a break during service. Breaks are for amateurs. Gastronomy doesn’t work this way — in a restaurant you take a break when it’s time to take a break, not when you think it’s time to take a break.
We will take turns around 3.30pm or 4pm to grab a bite to eat. Then it’s back into the dinner service again.
I’ll finish work around 11.30pm. I’ll go straight home to my family who are all asleep. I’ll hang around for about half an hour and then I’ll head to bed. I might occasionally watch a movie but I try not to because half an hour can become three hours and then I’ll suffer the next morning when I have to go to work.
In this business, you have to be quite disciplined and you have to be consistent, which, as you know, is one of the rarest human conditions and one of the hardest to achieve. He who achieves consistency has a fighting chance but if you don’t have consistency, there may be trouble ahead.
My ten cups of coffee a day don’t prevent me from sleeping — it’s a normal thing for me. If I had just nine cups a day my body would think there was something missing. Then it’s up on Sunday morning to do it all again — it’s sleep, repeat, in this business.
- First Dates Ireland returns to our screens this Thursday, January 9. Watch the show at 9:30pm on RTÉ2 or catch up on the RTÉ Player.
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