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Neil and Katie Lucey Bondings copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2005
‘Are you serving food?’
I am sitting in the bar of the Gougane Barra Hotel, deep in the mountains of West Cork, on a Sunday afternoon, when a small group of tourists poke their heads in, and interrupt the peace and quiet.
‘Of course we are!’
Neil and Katy Lucey simultaneously leap out of their seats, and wipe down their aprons, grinning like mad at the intruders.
‘But we’re only doing sandwiches now, until dinner,’ Katy says, offering a menu. The tourists hum and haw.
‘Oh, we really wanted something hot.’
‘You would be much better off going next door,’ I suggest. ‘They have really great cakes next door.’
The tourists take my advice and go to the café next door. Neil and Katy sit down, clearly confused.
‘You’ve been on your feet all morning,’ I explain. ‘And we’ve only got an hour to do this interview. If you disappear off to cook, what am I going to do?’
Luckily, the young couple see my point. And accept the physical impossibility of doing two things at once. They are a charming pair, for whom nothing is too much trouble. If you stay at their hotel, you will notice that they work nineteen hours out of every twenty four and somehow still manage to beam at you whenever you see them. I am the kind of person for whom a dinner party for six requires a domestic help and three days of recovery, but clearly this is not the case for the Luceys. For the past few weeks, it has been impossible to get a table for the Sunday lunch and people are being turned away. Even I can’t be accommodated today.
‘I hate turning people away!’ Neil says.
‘It is surely a better thing to be turning people away than to be twiddling your thumbs, waiting for customers,’ I point out.
‘I suppose so,’ he says sadly.
Neil and Katy Lucey met in catering college, in Galway and became friends instantly.
‘One day we were talking and Kate said she would love to have a penguin. So I went off and came back with a little concrete penguin called Fred.’ Neil says.
‘He had on one of those big green parka jackets and I saw it and I jumped!’ Katy giggles.
I ask Neil to describe why he was attracted to Katy. He blushes.
‘Oh My God!’ ha ha ha. ‘The character. I dunno. WE just got on great.’
‘What are her best qualities?’ I prod.
‘Character. Number one. So bubbly and lively. I can’t think of words to describe it!’
‘She never asked you what you like about her?’ I ask.
‘No. We had just clicked. We are a really really fortunate couple to have clicked so well.’
And that’s all he will say.
Do you never fight? I ask.
‘No!”
Neil and Katy were married a year after they met, and now have three children, Conor, ten, Jane, seven and Alison, five. As we sit and chat, I spot the two little girls running around the garden. The children they were all very excited at the prospect of taking over the hotel, which was run by Neil’s parents until this Spring. The hotel is located at the edge of a lake, overlooking one of the most alluring beauty spots in Ireland and has been in Neil’s family for five generations.
‘Neil’s grandmother is lovely, she still makes bread,’ Katy says. ‘She used to say to me ‘Katy, you know when I came here first, I wasn’t sure if I liked it at all. Ring your mam there now, if you’re lonely.’
Marrying into a family business can be more than usually challenging because the new person has to adapt to what might be traditional ways of doing things. For Katy, coming into the Lucey family meant working very closely with Neil’s mother, something that not every bride would look forward to. ‘I am picturing the scenario’, I say. ‘There you are, in the kitchen, doing your best, when she turns to you and says ‘That’s not the way my Neil likes his dishes washed!’
Katy laughs.
‘We actually work really well together,’ she says. ‘We never even bump into each other in the kitchen, when it’s busy. We cook together for most dinners in the evening and for the Sunday lunch, Breda always cooks the roast lamb. She loves it. She does a lot of the baking as well.’
‘Is it not like on television? Do you scream at each other and throw knives?’ I ask.
She is horrified.
‘No! But yesterday I looked at the bucket of brown bread and went ‘Oh My God, Neil we’ve no bread for dinner!’
After the couple first got married, they set up a wholesale fruit and vegetable company, which they ran from home while the kids were small. Katy did the books and Neil went on the road. It was very successful.
‘It was a question of getting the product, service and price right.’ ‘We are trying to do the same thing here, now,’ Katy interjects.
‘You want the person who came in first to be treated as well as the person who came in last.’ Neil says.
The ambition is that when you come back next July you will be treated the same or better!’
‘He’s very idealistic!’ Katy laughs.
Aside from the hotel, there is a production of ‘The Tailor and Ansty’, by Ronan Wilmot in a marquee in the garden. The play has been packing out the house all summer and the success has swept the couple off their feet entirely, work-wise, but they say they are deliriously happy. The business of entertaining and feeding people is in their blood.
‘My father is a chef and my uncle had a hotel in Lahinch,’ Katy says. ‘I would started in the kitchen, making prawn cocktails when I was only a child.’
Katy’s dad is seventy two.
‘He is very enthusiastic still, about cooking. He is always bringing in recipes for me to try and he’s full of energy. My mother is the same. Yesterday Neil’s dad was giving Neil’s mum a hand in the kitchen. They always make the tarts for Sunday lunch together, Christy peels the apples. It’s so sweet! So romantic. I actually said to her that I hope we will be like that, me and Neil!’
The secret of their success as a couple and as a family, lies, apparently, in their kitchen.
‘The kitchen is the nucleus of our house,’ Neil says. ‘Everything happens around the kitchen table, all meals, all homework, all colouring and all discussions. The kids don’t watch television much.’
The other key ingredient is the fact that both sets of parents have had good relationships and work together in partnership.
‘‘Conor said to me last night ‘We don’t see Dad much at home anymore.’’ Katy says. ‘ And I said ‘Yes, Conor, but most people don’t get to go to work with their parents and be part of what they do.’
And he said ‘Yes, I love that, it’s really great fun.’’
The three children are already being groomed to take over the business and have proved themselves in the art of bread baking and napkin folding. ‘Perhaps the family that bakes together stays together?’ I say, entirely envious of these paragons of domestic bliss, who confounded my Fawlty Towers fantasies and who do make exceedingly good prawn cocktails.
The Gougane Barra Hotel 026 47069
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