Cookery course offers a chaos-free Christmas

When they got to know that a hotel manager and his chef wife had bought one of the nearby up-market B&B properties, neighbours in Bunratty could have been forgiven for presuming that the couple planned to carry on with the established business.

But three bedrooms and three bathrooms have been swept away, to be replaced by a sprawling kitchen with enough hobs, eye-level ovens, freezer capacity and storage space to cater for a regiment. There is still a steady flow of people to the one-time B&B but it’s only once a week and none stay overnight any more. Instead, they leave with the dishes they have prepared and cooked at the Bunratty Cookery School, where very different courses for Christmas are being supervised by Donnagh Gregson.
From Limerick, Donnagh trained with CERT at Raheen and got an early taste for top-bracket cooking at the city’s Quenelle’s Restaurant and the sadly missed Copper Room at the old Jurys Hotel.
Donnagh then took off for the Channel Islands. “I went for a summer and stayed eight years,” she said. Between jobs at top Jersey establishments, she married the deputy general manager at the four-star hotel, where she was in charge of fish courses.
Her touch with pastry in her first Jersey appointment got her a move to the Michelin-starred Loughville Manor, where she headed up the pastry department, as well as the management of the larder. She interrupted the Channel Islands phase of her career when the bright lights of London beckoned. But even the celebrity clientele at the Sir Terence Conran-owned La Pont de la Tour restaurant at Tower Bridge did not match up to Jersey, to which she returned.
When Donnagh married Lee Gregson, the couple agreed that working in the same hotel would not be wise, so she made a complete break from her primary career and spent three years as a trainer. “Naturally, I had experience in training kitchen staff, but in this case it was utterly different and I was training business people in the complexities of intellectual property,” Donnagh said.
Even though her husband was English, they were drawn to Ireland and they moved to Wicklow when Lee was appointed manager of the Glenview Hotel. But the lure of Limerick and the Shannon region was even stronger.
“We were spending whatever weekends we could over here, so we started looking for a job for Lee and a house,” she said. It all worked out when Lee was appointed manager at the Bunratty Castle Hotel and they found the right property tucked away off the Sixmilebridge Road at Deerpark.
It was only when their four-year-old son was starting school last September that Donnagh decided it was time to get back into the professional kitchen. Her Bunratty Cookery School started last January and now draws customers from as far away as Galway. “Aged between 17 and 70, we get a fair sprinkling of men and a few repeat customers,” said Donnagh of the once-a-week classes limited to a maximum of 10.
She gets groups of women, who come along for a “girl’s day out” and she is also quite pleased with the level of business from the large firms in and around the Shannon area. Her years in business training are paying off, as Donnagh has designed a cookery class as a team-building exercise.
At present, she has doubled up to Friday and Saturday classes to fit in the seasonal courses that she has designed to make Christmas dining different in one way or another. There’s a course on edible Christmas gifts – shortbread biscuits, cranberry jelly, chocolate truffles and Turkish deligh while another is designed for Christmas entertaining and includes cakes, pies, stuffing, canapés and Christmas cocktails. Also on the menu is a “chaos-free Christmas” class that sets out timetables for all the traditional fare. There’s also a turkey-free alternative Christmas with smoked salmon starter and duck as the main course, while a vegetarian menu is also catered for.
For the full-day course, Donnagh provides all the ingredients and clients eat or share what they have prepared for lunch and take home everything that they have cooked when they leave.