Ahmet Dede: A day in the kitchen with West Cork's Michelin-starred chef

And not only do diners come from all parts of the island to eat in Dede at the Customs House but they also come from all over Europe to the little restaurant in Baltimore, in West Cork.

But that’s the kind of thing that happens when your ‘café-deli’ instead winds up as a Michelin two-starred restaurant fast developing an equally sterling international reputation for chef Dede’s quite magnificent marriage of superb hyper-locavore premium West Cork produce to the fabulously exotic flavours of Turkey, where he was born and raised, served up as a quite delicious and truly original Hiberno-Turkish hybrid cuisine in an easygoing ambience that is as deceptively casual as it is genuinely convivial, an atmosphere that had even the normally rather buttoned-down Michelin guide gushing like a lovestruck teenager, describing it as “a restaurant where everyone leaves feeling better about life.”

If you were designing a Michelin-starred kitchen from scratch, you would not begin by emulating the Dede kitchen. Actually, you’d quite probably do the very opposite for there’s more room on the leanest rasher than in this long narrow galley-style space where the chefs have to pirouette around each other when passing up and down.

Every square inch of space is used. Drawers, cabinets, fridges, freezers inserted under counters and every other nook and cranny available. 

Beginning with the tiny ‘hot’ kitchen at one end of the ‘corridor’ where up to four chefs including Dede himself dive and dart around each other with the intricate and spontaneous choreography of a murmuration of swallows; on to the kitchen porter’s station where all dirty pots and dishes are dealt with, often an entirely separate space in other professional kitchens; then a ‘cold station’ for prepping ‘starters’ from the extensive tasting menu; and finishing at the other end with the even more impossibly tiny pastry section. On the day I visit, there are nine chefs and one kitchen porter in there.

Everyone has been working in the kitchen since 8am, completing often mundane and simple little tasks, the myriad individual steps that can go into creating a Michelin-starred dish, the art of which is defined in drawing all these processes and ingredients together into a single, coherent whole.

Sous chef Ali, Ahmet’s right-hand man, is prepping lamb kebabs wrapped in caul fat while also putting together a dish for staff dinner later in the day. On the cold station, two young stagiaires (chefs partaking in a stage, or unpaid period of training) are precision-plating with tweezers a dish of asparagus and langoustines that begins with a layer of langoustine, then overlayed with wafer-thin discs of blanched asparagus. 

An emulsion of wasabi and creme fraiche is piped on top and then they finish with mustard leaves and edible flowers, each one delicately and oh so carefully set into position, but presenting as if they just happened to lightly flutter down on to the dish. It is as appealing to look at as it is to eat.

Elsewhere, Ade, another stagiaire, is assembling Sogan Dolma, Ahmet’s Michelin-starred take on a traditional Turkish dish, sweet onion, poached in onion stock, then confited in olive oil and stuffed with Turkish rice, dried apricots, mint and spices, topped with smoked buffalo yoghurt, caviar, and chive flowers. It begins with the singular and rather prosaic-looking cooked onion, which will never win any culinary beauty contests on its lonesome, but when fully adorned, looks every bit as good as it tastes. 

It too is a slow and laborious process for what is in essence a single though very delicious mouthful. In the pastry section, Gokhan and Mine work side by side. 

Gokhan is shaping dough into braided rings to make Simit, a Turkish street food staple that Ahmet used to sell as a child of 10 or 11 to make a little extra pocket money, but which he has now elevated from humble origins to a special place at the Michelin table.

Gokhan rolls the dough with the effortless and practiced ease that comes with repeating an action many thousands of times. The dough is then left to ‘marinate’ in a molasses syrup before being dredged in sesame seeds and baked.

Mine is dipping pistachio petit fours speared with a cocktail stick into melted cocoa butter to be later assembled for service. 

After each one is dipped, she very carefully applies a final drop to cover the minuscule hole left by the cocktail stick. 

Out of 100 people, 99 wouldn’t even see it, but this is typical of what it is like to set and then maintain a level of consistency and standard that merits a restaurant two Michelin stars.

I am using a handheld gadget to punch out leaf shapes from sweetened pink sheets of baked rice flour that will garnish another dessert, first cutting the A4-sized sheets into long narrow strips to be fed into the gizmo, each sweetened shape stored away to be ready for service. 

So much of the daily prep in a Michelin-starred kitchen is made up of these seemingly mindless and mundane tasks, but each is accorded the same level of attention and care. 

Towards the end of one strip, there isn’t enough for a complete leaf, one tiny corner shorn of maybe a millimetre or two of its full size. It is discarded. It doesn’t meet the standard. 

Ahmet is not standing on my shoulder to point that out but the entire kitchen is drilled to self-police when it comes to maintaining standards.

I never notice who hands them out but breakfast plates —scrambled eggs, slices of cheese, olives, almonds — appear to have sprung up around the kitchen in various little cubbyholes but no one sits down to eat, wolfing it down on the fly while continuing with their work.

After a successful career in business, Maria Archer met her life partner Shane Menton in Baltimore and they dreamt of living there full time. 

“I wanted to open a café-deli,” says Maria, “the kind of place that I could run down to pick up some goodies if friends dropped by. For so long, I’d have to drive into Skibbereen or Clonakilty to pick up stuff like that, coffee, pastries, sandwiches, nice soups and so on.” 

She and Shane bought and renovated the old Customs House in 2019, the café idea still very much to the fore. 

Ahmet Dede was then the Michelin-starred head chef at Mews, less than 100 yards away but now closed. He had earned Mews their first star the previous year for his very precise delivery of a hyper-locavore menu of premium Irish produce but swerved sharply towards his
Turkish roots for a couple of pop-up nights in the Customs House during the Taste of West Cork food festival, in 2019.

Ahmet wanted to open his own place but needed a partner to take care of the business side. When Maria and Shane invited him to become a chef-partner, he didn’t need long to give his answer. 

They planned to open their serious fine dining restaurant on St Patrick’s Day, in March 2020. Then the pandemic arrived soon followed by lockdown and Ahmet found himself twiddling his thumbs. 

Plans were revised and they began serving takeaways and deli items and then, when allowed to open again, a much more casual, family-friendly shortened tasting menu.

“It had a massive impact on me,” says Ahmet, “Before that, my background, I had always worked in fine dining, trying for a certain level and concept. That was who I was. Obviously, we had to survive business-wise and do something much more casual but I
enjoyed finding out more about myself as a chef, cooking breakfast, lunch, dinner, takeaway deli, baking breads. It changed me a lot, I realised that the food doesn’t all have to be beautiful, spiffy, you can still have a beautiful experience in a shorter time period. I put all my ego in a box and said this is, my business I am trying to build here and cooked the best and most delicious food that I could.”

Ahmet’s partner, Carly, and their infant daughter, Aleyna, have just returned from Skibbereen farmers’ market with cheeses and pastries for the staff. 

A clearly besotted Ahmet wanders around front of house cuddling and cooing at his beloved daughter as the entire team, front and back of house, assemble in reception for a pre-service briefing for upcoming lunch and dinner service later that evening.

Ahmet is swift and efficient, noting the numbers booked in —15 for lunch, 31 for dinner — and one or two special instructions. The brief meeting dissolves with everyone engaging in a ritual fist bumping before heading back to stations, Ahmet pausing to briefly fix the collar and apron of one of his young Turkish stagiaires like a mother fussing over her child at the school gate.

Anyone who has ever worked in a professional kitchen will be familiar with the daily rhythms, where the never relenting pace and thrumming efficiency of pre-meal prepping gradually rises in tempo to peak during service, when the clanging and clatter of pots and pans can often be peppered with regular explosions of human volatility, what the dining public imagines to be the head chef going full-blown Gordon Ramsey. 

There is often truth in cliché but the Dede kitchen is the polar opposite. 

If anything, it grows quieter as the speaker that has been booming techno all morning like a sonic pacemaker is silenced and the chefs further hone their levels of precision and concentration in assembling each dish. 

Ahmet calls the orders with all the seeming urgency of a body wondering if anyone has seen the remote control but he has no need to even raise his voice let alone shout for his authority and control is absolute. 

If the art of each Michelin dish is the final assemblage of the results of myriad little preparatory actions over preceding hours and even days, the art of running a Michelin kitchen is the assemblage of team and then melding and guiding all those individuals and their varying roles into a single entity that hums with the controlled power of a formula one car. Except this one is an electric vehicle, nearly silent.

As he calls the orders, his chefs chant back as one, “yes, chef!”, then resume their monastic silence, their hyper-focus on the task before them. 

It takes perhaps the bones of an hour and a half to get through most of the lunch menu, with the pastry kitchen bringing up the rear, then service is over and staff dinner is served. 

Ahmet walks the 100 yards around the corner to his home to spend an hour playing around with Aleyna before returning for evening service at 6pm, the only break he takes in the day.

Ahmet Dede grew up in Izmir, in Turkey, and wound up in Dublin with his then partner, an Irish woman, and not entirely sure what he wanted to do with himself but knew that he enjoyed cooking, first at home with his mother and then happily playing amateur MasterChef in his own domestic kitchen. 

He decided he’d like to train as a chef and applied for one of the now defunct Fáilte Ireland Culinary Skills course that once produced brigades of kitchen-ready commis chefs for years before they were finally — and foolishly — closed down. 

Ahmet applied but was turned down with only 16 places for the hundreds of applicants for each course. He took a job in a pizza place and kept applying, refusing to take no for an answer.

MTU culinary lecturer JJ Healy was Ahmet’s first proper teacher.

“He is one of the nicest fellows I’ve ever taught,” says JJ, “he was like that from the very start. I remember the woman who did the interviews, saying that he was so persistent yet so polite, even when he didn’t get it. She’d done hundreds of interviews over the years but said she knew from his personality that he would do well — and she was right.

“I knew from the beginning that he’d go places, he was so dedicated. We’d do a lot of government functions, for the Dept of Foreign Affairs and so on, and he’d volunteer for every single one of them for the experience. I had a food truck at the time with a couple of other fellas and every time we were in Dublin, he’d turn up and start helping out without being asked, always smiling, always good-humoured, never shouty or egotistical. I even took him along to an Irish stew cooking competition in Sligo and three of my chefs took all first three places and they wound up interviewing Ahmet for the Six One news because he was such a confident, charming character.”

JJ could see the depth of his ability and persuaded Ahmet to study at DIT. 

Ahmet also called into Chapter One and asked the then chef-proprietor Ross Lewis for a job working for free one day a week. Lewis can spot a winner, even one then as professionally callow as Ahmet and offered him a full-time position as soon as one became available. 

Ahmet would go on to work in other Michelin-starred kitchens, including Restaurant Patrick Gulbaud, The Greenhouse (Dublin), & moshik (Amsterdam), and Maaemo (Oslo), before coming to Baltimore and earning his own first star.

Ahmet, Maria and their tiny team ploughed on through the first months of lockdown rather enjoying the novelty of their altered operation but by summer the brutal reality of covid struck close to Ahmet’s heart. 

His aunt and uncle both died of covid within ten days of each other. Shortly after, his father wound up in ICU, also with covid, the family told he wouldn’t survive. 

Meanwhile, his mother had too been diagnosed but didn’t tell her three sons [Dede’s two brothers run their own restaurant in Holland] lest they risk their own health by travelling back to Turkey.

“I didn’t want to do anything else, just be with her,” he says. “It was very, very difficult, I was broken for weeks after but the cooking actually saved me and still does, kept my mind busy, I forgot for a few hours.”

Throughout that summer after hospitality re-opened, Dede’s delivered a casual, simplified menu and had temporarily shelved Michelin Star ambitions for the restaurant. But, just before Christmas, the Michelin inspector called.

“He came just before Christmas lockdown, very professional, didn’t say who he was but stayed with us for four hours, he was delighted and so happy. He had the tasting menu. One of the snacks was lobster kebab and he said he could have had ten of them.”

It was enough to earn Dede at the Customs House a first star.

“I learned that we didn’t need all the fussy stuff to achieve this,” says Ahmet, “it’s what makes me most proud.” 

The following year, Turkish accents hinted at in initial menus were now the beating heart of a new menu. 

Sourcing those flavours — spices, grains, olives and olive oils, vine leaves, almonds, hazelnuts — directly from Turkey a hybrid Hiberno-Turkish fusion that knocked the socks off every diner who ate there, including the Michelin inspectors. 

In March 2023, Dede at the Customs House joined that rarified elite of restaurants around the world holding two stars. Now customers come not only from all parts of the 32 counties of Ireland but also from Britain and all over Europe.

Night service is almost as low key as the lunchtime, a beautiful evening in Baltimore meaning most diners opt to eat in the lovely little courtyard to the rear, so the dining room itself is curiously still and peaceful. 

The only real activity in front of house is by the reception and bar area with restaurant manager and sommelier Jacques Savary de Beauregard directing his team of servers.

I sit nearby, relishing the parade of dishes, each as stunning and brilliantly original as the next and at the end of the evening the gushing enthusiasm of the departing diners is tangible, electric and entirely understandable.

Ahmet and some of the chefs retire to the courtyard to share a hookah and a glass of wine, while he talks of his plans for the future, he and Maria’s desire to aim for a third star and possibly open a small hotel. Bed calls at 2am.

I awake at 7.30am the next morning to the sound of smashing glass. In the rear alley that runs behind the restaurant, Ahmet is already up and dressed in his chef’s whites, busily disposing of all the wine bottles from the previous night’s service, and ready to go back into the kitchen and do it all over again.