My father, David Byrne, who has died aged 78, was a restaurateur and hotelier who pioneered Bloomsday – the annual celebration of the life of James Joyce – as an epicurean festival. David was a man ahead of his time. In his approach to food, as to so much else in life, he followed the mantra to “keep it simple”. Whether his recipes were for lobster or offal, or a fresh green salad, they were always demonstrations of simple food, perfectly executed.
He was born in Navan, Co Meath, the eldest son of David Byrne, a civil servant, and his wife, Noleen, and after early education at local schools, went to St Finian’s in Mullingar as a boarder. There David developed a great passion for classical music, undertaking roles in school operas.
He then trained at the Shannon School of Hotel Management, Ireland’s first school of its kind, which included a formative period of study in Zurich, Switzerland. David was one of a cohort of talented young graduates of the school, and he was only 23 when he became general manager at the Great Southern hotel in Kenmare in 1966. He was a natural and gifted host.
Inspired by the exquisite seafood and shellfish local to the region, he served fresh sea urchins at the hotel bar and specialised in oysters by the dozen. David was instrumental in establishing the Kenmare seafood festival in the late 1960s in which great displays of seafood dishes were judged for competition.
In the 70s David married Deirdre Igoe, a tourist guide. After a brief stint in Hastings, East Sussex, they returned to Ireland with their young family and ran an outdoor catering business. Then in 1988, in the basement of our family home at 1 Martello Terrace in Sandycove, Co Dublin, they founded the South Bank restaurant. The restaurant commands a panoramic view of the Martello tower in which Joyce stayed for a few days in 1904 with his friend Oliver St John Gogarty. It is this Martello tower, now home to a James Joyce museum, that is immortalised as the early morning starting point for Leopold Bloom’s celebrated perambulation of Dublin in Joyce’s novel Ulysses.
David and Deirdre spotted an opportunity for the South Bank and conceived of Bloomsday as a gastronomic event. Together with his friend John Kieran, David extracted the culinary references in Ulysses and produced a Joycean breakfast menu of “nutty gizzards, urine-soaked kidneys and snot-green soup” to enjoy as an alternative to sausage, bacon and eggs by guests who were sewn up in Joycean costume and treated to readings from the novel, with Molly Bloom’s erotic soliloquy a memorable standout.
The first event, in 1991, was a great success and in subsequent years attracted enthusiastic news coverage. Other hospitality businesses joined in and the culinary event has now grown beyond all imagination as part of a large-scale annual festival in Dublin.
The clientele at the South Bank were a broad church who frequented the restaurant to enjoy the food and the charming company and service of David, and they would be disappointed not to find him out on the floor. But in 1998, David and Deirdre retired and relocated to Co Limerick. There he continued to employ his service skills as visitor host at the Limerick Concert Hall, where he was also able to indulge his interest in classical music.
He is survived by Deirdre, four children, Charlotte, Garrett, Stephanie and me, six grandchildren, Jack, Dylan, Magnus, Matthew, Ethan and Holly, and three siblings, Michael, Patricia and Patrick.
