Pride comes before a fall but for Mullan it was his petrol

Cover of the book Food for the Famous by world renown celebrity chef Eamon Mullan. PHOTO| THOMAS RAJULA

What you need to know:

  • Starting from the position of commis chef (basically a hand to other chefs) with Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook and Household Guidance as his only source of knowledge on cooking, Eamon has helped shape the service industry and helped improve the standards of quality in preparing dishes.
  • Through his book, we see Eamon shaped by his mother’s keenness in getting the freshest and best products for food even though they didn’t grow up having much.

Eamon Mullan is an executive chef, of no mean repute. For the man who has more than once prepared pallet delights for the queen of England, presidents and celebrities, the journey has been an eventful one as he captures in his autobiography Food for the Famous.

It all started when his pride that had gotten the best of him, saw him drop out having sat only one ‘O’ level (in Art). The indiscipline also ruined his chances while he was on trial at Blackpool Football Club  as a 16-year-old in 1967.

It was this same pride, however, that made him go out and look for a job outside of steelmaking like most of the youngsters back then in Corby, England.

Starting from the position of commis chef (basically a hand to other chefs) with Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook and Household Guidance as his only source of knowledge on cooking, Eamon has helped shape the service industry and helped improve the standards of quality in preparing dishes. Through his book, we see Eamon shaped by his mother’s keenness in getting the freshest and best products for food even though they didn’t grow up having much.

Even though he was proud, he had always believed in giving his all to a course. Hard work and superior grade in his dishes saw him winning admiration as hotel after hotel came for him.

Having worked in hotels in England, France, Scotland, Germany and Jamaica, he came to Kenya in 1975 to work at The New Stanley Hotel.

He rarely stayed anywhere he had worked before for more than two years. But he’s been in Kenya for over 40 years, though on and off.

He has also worked at Norfolk Hotel (he was there when a terrorist detonated a bomb there, killing 20 people on December 31, 1980), Fairview Hotel and is now at Muthaiga Golf Club. He has seen Kenya’s food service industry go through evolution of being regular, to attaining high standards, before accountants took over and the bottom line made the quality drop. Through it all, he has dug in defiantly to maintain the dignity of the dish while giving customers the best pallet experience they can have. Through this he has been at loggerheads with company executives, but especially the accountants who tried to make him compromise on the quality of his dishes in the name of saving a shilling.

He has seen the hotels change management from one international company to another and denotes how a lack of involvement of locals in a business’ operations is detrimental. He also decries tribalism and the cartels in the industry. His relentless demands have seen his apprentices get jobs in seven-star hotels around the world and many more winning gold in different competitions continentally and globally.

He fell in love with the country and has stuck by it all the time, even when he got better offers to go elsewhere. His daughters were born and brought up here, taken care of by a Kenyan yaya. He later on even built his home here.

Did I mention there are recipes in the latter pages of the book for the food he has prepared for those different, famous individuals he has come across throughout the years? This autobiography is a look through recent history, an opprobrium of what putting profits before quality or products is doing to not only beguile consumers but also pull back on growth, and a funny read especially when Eamon’s Irish  humour and sarcasm tear through, especially where he wants to make visible the absurdities of what others see as logic. There are also pictures inside commemorating the auspicious occasions in Eamon’s life as well as the places he’s worked in and the celebrity photo-ops he took.