For a young man who is head chef at the most ambitious Dublin restaurant in decades, Mickael Viljanen looks far more relaxed than you might expect. It’s between the lunch and dinner services at the Greenhouse, on Dawson Street, Dublin, and the 30-year-old Finn, whose name is on everybody’s lips these days, is clearly at ease in the luxury surroundings of his new home.
He settles in, double espresso to hand, his speech littered with the Irish-isms that he’s picked up in the 12 years since he first arrived here to work at the Hodson Bay hotel in Athlone. Since then, he has married Brenda O’Connor, from Tullamore, had three Irish children and, you might say, gone native.
“I want to do it properly,” Viljanen says, with a nod to the sophisticated decor and the impeccable, plentiful staff. “I’m aiming for happy punters and a steady pace. If people are comfortable, they spend more.”
The similarity of the capital’s menus has never been more apparent. Chicken breast, sea bass farmed in murky Aegean cages and 21-day-aged rib-eye are all far too familiar. But that’s not Viljanen’s kind of food. “I like to create dishes on the spur of the moment. If somebody offers me sweetbreads, I want to put them on the menu straightaway. Most of the time we get things right, sometimes not.”
Advertisement
With diners more inclined than ever to keep what money they have in their pockets, it takes guts to offer such dishes as duck hearts, pig’s head, burnt aubergine and milk solids. Yet this is what Viljanen is doing — and it’s working.
Sunday’s restaurant critic, Ernie Whalley, declared the chef a genius and described his food as scintillating. Another food writer said Viljanen’s “fantastical fancies are a dream come true”, while a third thinks the dishes are “unlike anything you will find in other restaurants in the capital”. Funny, then, that Viljanen doesn’t have much in the way of kind words for Irish food writers in general.
“The critics here are too soft. In Britain they don’t care about putting people out of business — maybe they’re too tough — but here it’s a big clique. They should be more honest.
“Often I find myself eating somewhere that I’ve read about in a review and it’s just not the same. I wonder if I’ve come to the wrong place.”
Of all the positive reviews, Viljanen is most gratified by the thumbs-up from Andy Hayler, the BBC MasterChef guest critic. “Book now while you can still get in,” Hayler wrote on his website in April.
Advertisement
Barely two months after the restaurant opened, the word is that Michelin inspectors have already visited twice. It’s almost unheard of for a new restaurant to land a star in its first year, but Viljanen might just do it and, however much he demurs — “You could stress yourself to f*** about that stuff” — there can be little doubt a star is top of the agenda for the chef and his business partner, Eamonn O’Reilly, the chef-patron behind Dublin city centre’s One Pico. The room, the staff and the ambition of the menu shout it loud, even if he doesn’t.
Viljanen came to the Greenhouse from Gregan’s Castle in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, where he spent four years and made his name, honing his distinctive style in the middle of nowhere. “Gregan’s was a great experience for me — it was my lucky break.”
With Viljanen in charge, Gregan’s became a foodie destination during those years, as much of a tourist attraction as the flora and fauna of the Burren. In control and with a brief to do something different, Viljanen flourished.
The food was unlike anything else to be found in Ireland and those in the know congratulated themselves on making the trip before the young Finnish chef landed a Michelin star and it became impossible to get a table.
Then, last October, the star never arrived and, although Viljanen is too discreet to say so, this may have been part of the reason he agreed to move when O’Reilly dangled the carrot of a 40-seater restaurant in a prime location in the capital.
Advertisement
“I said to Eamonn at the outset, ‘Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for? My food isn’t for everyone,’” he says.
Viljanen has a stake in the new business. It’s a clever move on the part of O’Reilly, one that will do much to allay the tensions that tend to arise between creative chefs and their backers.
The ingredients used in the kitchen are not expensive — think pollock, rump and belly (although there are flashes of foie gras) — but the preparation is labour intensive, with every possible bit of the animal, including cod skin and duck hearts, used.
Neither is it Viljanen’s style to bulk out dishes with starch. There is a lot happening on every plate. A seven-course tasting dinner menu costs €78, while a two-course lunch is a bargain at €25. “I might have been guilty of extravagance in the past, but now if people leave happy and we’re making a profit that’s good,” he says.
Advertisement
The Finnish influence is there in the cured mackerel and the little rye loaves served on small slabs of warm marble. The restaurant has its own forager — they’re all the rage these days. A horticulture student travels the country in search of wild primroses and sorrel, sweet briar and gorse flowers, sea buckthorn and “gear I’ve never seen”, as Viljanen puts it, that helps set his food apart.
Some worried that the move from country to city might unsettle him, but Viljanen was raised in an urban environment in Pori, Finland, eating wholesome home-cooked food and visiting the market each day with his grandfather to shop for ingredients for dinner.
“My commute to work is the same in Dublin as it was in Clare. I get up at six and I’m in work at seven. I work all day until between 11 and one. I go home and eat Lidl salami sticks with white bread and have a glass of milk. And then I get up the next day and do it all again.”
He does miss being able to head out from his house with a gun and go shooting in the fields. The shooting around his new home in Straffan, where his neighbours include Georgia Salpa, the glamour model (“I keep telling Brenda I’m very happy to put the bins out”), is a little more “exclusive”. Dublin, though, allows frequent deliveries to the restaurant kitchen and Viljanen can easily send produce back if it doesn’t make the cut.
In the Greenhouse he has installed Karl Breen, his loyal lieutenant from Gregan’s, and a brigade of young and enthusiastic chefs, the type “who’ll sleep on the floor of the kitchen if I asked them to”. It’s a steep learning curve for them, Viljanen says, “because they don’t know what I like and what I don’t like, but they learn quickly”.
Advertisement
The chef has come a long way: the boy who, to the dismay of his teachers, chose catering college over university and worked on a cruise ship before getting his first head-chef position at the age of 23 in PK’s, a restaurant in his home city.
“I was doing fish in a water bath in 2000. There was lots of rubbish, too,” he says, “but you learn from doing rubbish. In your head everything works and then, when it’s on the plate, it might not. I could spend a day-and-a-half working on something only to dump it.”
It’s still his way. “You learn through trial and error. These days it’s more trial than error. I might change my mind 10 times a day and then scrap the dish after it’s been on the menu for three days.”
A taste of the unusual
A sample seven-course dinner menu from the Greenhouse:
Foie gras royale apple and walnut
Organic salmon poached in chicken fat, horseradish, avocado, local radishes
Celeriac baked in salt and rye, Skeaghanore duck hearts, truffle, milk solids, hazlenut, sorrel
Glazed cod, scallop roasted with sea purslane, brown shrimp and egg yolk toast, cauliflower, wild asparagus, buttermilk
Slow-cooked rump and shoulder of milk-fed lamb, sweetbreads on hay, sea beet, wild garlic, artichoke, anchovy emulsion
Strawberry, elderflower, basil, goat’s milk and vanilla ice cream
Guanaja ganache, yeast ice cream, passion fruit, violet, onion caramel