Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Up Close & Personal for the Renegade Magazine. I’m here today after day 2 of one of our Summits in Tortworth Court, here in Gloucestershire. I’m with one of the guys that I’m lucky enough to have in my group, who’s always making me laugh and is good fun to be around. If you don’t know him, his name is Paul Hannagen. How are you Paul?
Paul Hannagen: Very well indeed.
Steve Matthews: Good man. . . This guy here is a Michelin starred chef, or trained. Worked for Gordon Ramsey?
PH: I did, back in the day.
SM: Claridges, The Ritz?
PH: A bit of time in Claridges, mostly Maze in the days of Jay Saredon.
SM: Sommelier?
PH: Wine trained not officially a Sommelier.
SM: Surfer?
PH: Yes, that was a yesterlife, I’m 30 years old.
SM: 30 years old . . . Just a baby. And also, an ex pro athlete?
PH: And again, not quite a pro athlete but I was an international athlete.
SM: Exactly, you’re being modest. So, without any further ado, who are you and what do you do?
PH: My name’s Paul Hannagen, I’m the CEO of Incubator Kitchen or Inck for short, the world’s first gastronomic marketing company. So, we help brands communicate their massages to food and drink experiences.
SM: That sounds pretty good. We can tell from your accent that you’re obviously not from the UK. So where are you from originally and where do you live now?
PH: I’m from Galway, the West Coast of Ireland and moved to London just under 10 years ago to learn to cook. I’ve been a fledgling entrepreneur for the past 7 years and I live in North West London with my beautiful wife, Kie and we’re expecting our first child next month.
SM: Beautiful. . . You’ve already said you’re just a wee snippet at 30 years of age. So, who inspired who or what inspired you to run your own business?
PH: Having been an athlete I had a desire for achievement, an ability and a work ethic. Not sure about the ability when I stepped onto the international stage and came up against some of the gold medallists. The sport was rowing, so when I started at 13 years old it was very much about getting up and on the water at 5am and going to school, studying during break, training after school, sleep and repeat for 5 or 6 years. So, going into that I had a big drive to succeed and also it took me a few years to realise how to do that and to decide that I wanted that to be on my own terms, and not in somebody else’s kitchen. That led to my entrepreneurial journey.
SM: You mentioned the rowing there. Tell us about the epiphany you had one morning when you rode out to the centre of that lake.
PH: Yea, so I was just gone 18 and I was basically training full time. I had scholarships lined up to basically any University really. I was one of the top ranked athletes in the country, my results were pretty good in school and I had the mis-guided dream to try to get a single scholarship, one-man boat to the junior world championships. And I wasn’t a very good single scholar and one day I was on the river, it was like glass. I was there on my own, it was about 8:30 in the morning and I spun the boat around and realised I hated it. So, I rode down the river and rung my coach and quit. Rung my parents and quit and said goodbye to all my scholarships and lost basically all my identity within 10 minutes.
SM: Mad! You could have gone to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard.
PH: Potentially, yea. There were a few of them on the cards, especially in the States. A couple of my friends have ridden the boat race and rode that level but at that stage I was about an 85-kilo athlete, so I was too light to be heavy weight and too heavy to be light weight. So, yea I don’t know if I’d have made it or not, but I just realised I hated it. What I loved was succeeding and I wasn’t succeeding at this stage. I’d been exposed to the international scene and got my arse handed to me by people that I could train against every minute of every day for the rest of my life and still not beat them, because they were so physically gifted. And harder than me maybe as well, just better athletes.
SM: I guess training as a full-time athlete to then working in some of the most famous kitchens in the world, you had to start somewhere and Lahinch your spiritual home comes into play there, doesn’t it?
PH: Yea, so, what basically happened was, I used to train from about 5 in the morning til about 8 on the river with the squad and then I’d go swimming. I’d swim about 2k as cross training which would bring me up until about 11am, and then I’d work as a waiter in a diner from 12 til 4pm and then I’d do pilates/yoga in the afternoon and go to sleep. No drinking, no kind of extra-curricular activities really, it was very regimented. But all of a sudden of course I’d lost my structure, when I lost my identity, I lost my structure, so I ended up becoming a full-time waiter. But what was really good about this was, this diner was in a student village, so there were a lot of girls around and one of them basically invited me down on a surfing trip to Lahinch, which is essentially Irelands answer to Cornwall. We went down and were told to eat in this restaurant, Mrs O’Brien’s Kitchen. We went in and ordered Bailey’s cheesecake, they dropped it on the floor, so they said, “come in tomorrow and we’ll give you a free one”. Went in the next day all garnished up and I asked if they had any jobs. So, I got a job as a commis chef. And that guy who gave me the job, Dan O’Brien, was meant to be best man at my wedding, unfortunately he couldn’t come for some reasons with his restaurant, but we went over to see him at Christmas with his beautiful family. So very much in contact 13 years later.
SM: Amazing mate, amazing!
PH: So, my poor parents, I went from going to be an elite athlete with Ivy League future to becoming a commis chef and leaving home within 2 weeks. So that was something they had to get their head around alright.
SM: It must have been quite tough for them but what now motivates you and drives you on a day to day basis. . .
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