How Mickael Viljanen won Dublin's Chapter One its second star

Chapter One was also recently named the best restaurant in Ireland by both the Irish edition of The Sunday Times and the Irish edition of The Independent on Sunday and, to top it all off, within seven months of relaunching, Viljanen and his team were awarded two Michelin stars in February (the 30-year-old restaurant, previously run by venerated Irish chef Ross Lewis and his wife, Jessica, had been rated one star since 2007), equalling his achievement at the Greenhouse in 2020.

A few weeks later, on a rainy March morning in Dublin, as Viljanen tours me around Chapter One's impressively refurbished semi-basement, with its warren of austerely beautiful, interconnected dining spaces decorated with the work of modern Irish artists, he tells me the only thing he's had time to celebrate with is "a plate of bangers and mash and that was it". Which is a far cry from the dishes he serves to customers lucky enough to bag a table at the restaurant that's fully booked three months in advance and serves between 55 and 60 covers at both lunch and dinner.

On the menu at Chapter One

Evening options are billed as either a four-course dinner at €135 (£113) or a six-course tasting €170 (£142), but there are plenty of unadvertised ‘extras' that are every bit as technically brilliant and deeply delicious as the main elements of the meal.

The flurry of individually served canapés include a tiny red coca butter ‘pill' served on a golden spoon, containing an intense chilled borscht soup and topped with a low salt caviar from Paris made to the chef's own specification; a miniature tartlet made of Irish seaweed and artichoke-flavoured pastry filled with a tartare, cremeaux and frozen nitrogen pearls of wild salmon, topped with salmon roe; a second tart, this time filled with whipped and smoked turbot roe topped with cubes of honey vinegar gel and pickled turnip; and finally a celeriac skin taco filled with a Chantilly of celeriac and nutmeg and finished with maple syrup and grated smoked duck heart.

When I hear about chefs talking about journeys and stories at the table, I just want to leave

"I don't write down every single canapé and petit four onto the menus, which seems to be a trend these days that I can't stand. Of course, you're going to get three different types of bread, canapés and petit four. At the end of the service, we do a trolley with a classic sugar tart from Normandy with your coffee to finish you off. Do I print them on the menu? No, I don't, because it's a service."

He is equally dismissive of what he sees as another trend in high-end restaurants. "When I hear about chefs talking about journeys and stories at the table, I just want to leave. For me, going to a restaurant is about social interaction; I'm there with people, on business or with the people I want to be there, family, friends – whatever it is, I want to have a jolly good time. I don't want to listen to anybody else's journey or stories."

From Scandinavia to the Emerald Isle

Viljanen's own culinary journey began in Finland, growing up as part of a working-class family, foraging for berries and mushrooms with his grandfather, shooting with his father and enjoying good food.

"Wild salmon when I was kid was like sausages, it was common. You'd have it with morels and new potatoes. We grew up with game, and fish and game are probably my favourite things to cook. I shoot every now and then whenever I have time, in the Midlands here in Ireland, shooting woodcock and snipe and ducks."

Although he's worked as a chef since the age of 14, starting part-time in a local pub, Viljanen's CV is not the usual tick-list of leading establishments. In fact, the first Michelin-awarded kitchen he worked in was when he won a star for the Greenhouse in 2016, four years after becoming head chef.

Viljanen doesn't go into detail about his career, brushing over a short stint in London, saying only that he worked in "good" restaurants. "You need to work in a bad restaurant as well, which I've also done along the way, because you learn what not to do. You need to work in multiple environments because I think you're stronger for it."

One place that did leave an impression on Viljanen, and that he's more than happy to talk about, is the Tannery in Dungarvan, owned by former Nico at Ninety head chef Paul Flynn, where he worked in 2007. "Everything you do influences you along the way. I spent just over a year with Paul and he's a great cook and he has an amazing palate. He will tell you himself, he's not a technical cook, but he can eat well. He always knew exactly how to rectify something that wasn't quite right; he'd tell you what it needed, and it worked. I had an amazing time down there."

Since his time in Dungarvan, Viljanen's career has gone from strength to strength, but his decision to leave the Greenhouse in May last year, less than a year after winning the restaurant a second star, was, on the face of it, a surprising move, but the chef says it wasn't a rash decision.

"I turned 40 last July, and a couple of years of lockdown during the pandemic doing nothing gives you quite a bit of time to think about what you're going to do. This opportunity came up and Ross and Jessica are the most supportive people ever. They operated here for 29 years, and I guess they wanted to see the place go on and it suited both sides really well.

"I'm purchasing the business over so many years and Ross is staying on until we get to that point. He does a lot of work in the background. He doesn't do day-to-day, but he does a lot of things I don't have time for and I'm very grateful for that because it lets me focus on the food and the service."

Although Viljanen has taken on short-term projects outside of Chapter One (he's recently cooked at the Fairmont hotel in the Maldives and will return to the country this summer to guest at the Soneva resort. He's also reportedly working on a TV series about restaurants around the world for the Discovery Channel), he says he's missed a total of two services in the last nine years of his career and one of those was for his youngest child's communion.

"When it comes to a certain price point, people expect you to be there, and I think they're right. They're paying for it. I have my time off –it's not like I'm sleeping here seven days a week – but I think at service time I need to be here. They come, they pay big money. It's good value, but at the same time it's a special occasion. I think a chef's place is in the kitchen. I don't mean anybody should die with their boots on in the kitchen, but at the same time, that's my main focus, I'm here. If things go wrong, it's my responsibility."

Viljanen admits that his constant presence is something of a double-edged sword for his 13-strong kitchen brigade. On the one hand, his dedication to craft skills means that the team move around the sections and learn everything from boning out whole carcasses to pastry skills ("my endgame with them that when they leave here, they can work anywhere"). On the other hand, Viljanen's ceaseless desire to improve and dissatisfaction with the status quo can be a challenge. "Ask the guys – I'm a pain in their bollocks, changing the lunch menu all the time. I'm happy with something for three days and then I'm not happy with it any more. We jig it a little bit, make it better and better, and when it's where we want it to be, it's time to change again."

There are, however, some dishes Viljanen can tinker with but not get rid of entirely, such as the jewel box-like signature of foie gras royale with apple and celery jelly, smoked eel, caramelised walnuts, foie gras snow, pickled apple and celery and apple and celery sorbet.

"They're a bloody curse those dishes. There's a couple of dishes which you take off and then you get emails asking, can you do it? It's like anything. You ask the Rolling Stones to play ‘Paint It Black' a hundred thousand times over. It's a great tune, but to them, they're sick to death of it."

What's next for the Dublin restaurant?

Although Viljanen happily waxes lyrical about bistro and brasserie cooking, which he says is "an art in itself" and admits to an ambition to open a place himself that's "as casual as it comes", he says it's a long way off and that he won't be distracted from his work at Chapter One, least of all by speculation about the possibility of him becoming Ireland's first ever three-Michelin-starred chef.

"The last thing you want is your head filled with predictions. Michelin has been an incredibly great thing for me. It's incredibly important. People who say it isn't often tend to be the people who have never been involved. It's been part of some of the proudest moments in my career and it is phenomenal for the business.

"But we don't work for three stars, we work to be, every week, that bit better, that bit more consistent and to have a room full of happy people. What comes may come, what doesn't, doesn't, but as long as we are happy and the punters are happy, that's the most important thing. And I genuinely mean that."

Tasting menu

• Canapés: foie gras, verjus, chamomile, grapes, eel
• Organic salmon ‘Parisienne', cucumber, sorrel, caviar, elderflower vinegar and jalapeño
• Barbecue lobster with kari gosse glaze, pomelo, bonito, carrot, aromatic lobster sauce
• Milk-fed lamb with anchovy kosho, red pepper, ewe's milk, wild garlic, jus gras
• Ugandan vanilla, coffee, roasted coriander seed
• Valrhona Jivara and chartreuse, bergamot, lapsang tea, burnt honey

Photos: Barry McCall Photography