Last week Ireland lost a consummate hospitality professional, Hazel Allen of Ballymaloe House Hotel near Cork.
An email last Friday afternoon with the sad news that Hazel Allen had died marked the end of our lovely friendship. She was one of the triumvirate of extraordinary women who has established Ballymaloe House near Cork as one of the finest examples of Irish cooking and hospitality.
When I set out the 20 restaurateurs I intended to profile in my 2012 book The Art of the Restaurateur (Phaidon), Hazel’s name was the first on the list. I did not realise then that, as the book evolved and we decided to present the subjects alphabetically by surname, she would also introduce the main text, as well as being one of five female restaurateurs that I was to profile.
Nor did I realise, as I sat with her over a pot of Barry’s tea in one of the sitting rooms of this extremely comfortable country-house hotel, that I was the first person who had ever interviewed her. I discovered this only months later, but when I returned to Ballymaloe after the book was published, for a Ballymaloe Literary Festival, I remember being thanked by many of her team for finally shining a light on this fabulous woman.
Raised in Dublin, she was thwarted in her original career as an occupational therapist and told to enrol in hotel management by her mother in an era when ‘one did not argue with one’s mother’, as she put it in her soft, rather quizzical Irish brogue. She’d read about Ballymaloe in 1970 in a trade magazine while working in Canada and, after being taken on there, she fell in love with Rory Allen, son of Ballymaloe’s founder Myrtle. Hazel and Rory went on to have five children and a very happy life together. Ballymaloe has a tradition of putting daughters-in-law in the seat of power. When the highly successful Ballymaloe Cookery School was established in 1982, a clear division emerged. The school would be the domaine of Myrtle’s daughter-in-law Darina, Tim’s wife, and the hotel that of Hazel, with each providing synergy. (Ireland's most famous tv chef Rachel Allen is Darina's daughter-in-law.)
I recall Hazel being particularly emphatic about the different skills required in running a hotel and a restaurant. ‘I don’t believe that there are many skills on the hotel side that require training. It is more a matter of aptitude. But the principles of restaurant service, of how you look after and serve your guests in the dining room, certainly do. Those skills have to be ingrained.’
It was therefore in the dining room where Hazel felt that she was most essential to Ballymaloe’s continuing success even if, as she confessed when I interviewed her, she was not quite as quick to spot any minor omissions as she once was. But she did know precisely when she was most needed in the dining room.
‘It’s late at night when things go wrong and I have to be there to ensure that they don’t. We always put the younger staff in charge of the cheese and dessert trolleys because it encourages them to be enthusiastic and charming and it is a great boost to their confidence. But both they and the food that is on these trolleys do tend to wilt a bit and it is absolutely essential that I watch this, to ensure that the last table in the restaurant receives the same quality of food and service as the first.’ This meant that Hazel usually left the restaurant after midnight when, as she described it, she had ‘put the place to bed’.
And then she would be up for breakfast, the most sumptuous hotel breakfast I have ever encountered: Macroom oatmeal porridge; smoked mackerel with a poached egg; or a full Irish with rashers and black and white pudding.
Little will change at Ballymaloe. The cooking will still have the same finesse, the service will continue to be as friendly and as charming, and the bedrooms will still be as comfortable as they always have been. The carefully chosen art on the walls and the gardens will continue to sparkle.
But there will never be another Hazel Allen standing in the corner of one of her seven dining rooms, her eyes roaming the tables. For her, ‘accommodating your guests is what is most exciting about my role. Those who only want Tanqueray gin before dinner or soya milk with their breakfast, those who come to eat here on purpose when they know we will be harvesting fresh peas.’
All of us will miss her quiet but reassuring presence.