A culinary life less ordinary: Michael Deane

Michael Deane takes home Lifetime Achievement and Restaurant of the Year at the 2025 LCN Awards

Michael Deane has never taken the easy route and after more than 30 years in hospitality, that relentless drive has been recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award and Restaurant of the Year title at the 2025 LCN Awards for his newest venture, mrDeanes.

Growing up in Lisburn, Deane says he was “just an ordinary boy with an extraordinary hunger for achievement.” His decision to leave Northern Ireland for London in the 1970s was a leap into the unknown. “Being an Irish kid in London back then was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he recalls. “It would’ve been easier to go somewhere like Italy or Monte Carlo, but it wasn’t the thing to do.”

He worked under culinary giant Anton Mosimann and honed the precision that would earn him Belfast’s first Michelin Star in 1997. “I stayed in the kitchen for a year straight,” he says. “I didn’t leave until we got that star.”

His latest restaurant, mrDeanes, launched less than a year ago, is already pulling in over 1,000 covers a week. It also earned Northern Ireland’s only Michelin Bib Gourmand this year. “I wanted to knock the chefy words off the menu. No more emulsions or textures,” he says. “Just good food people understand and want to eat.”

On his double win at the LCN Awards, Deane said: “I’m especially delighted both my personal Lifetime Achievement award and the award for mrDeanes in the company of our own peers… it’s a total indictment of the dedication and hard work of each member of the team at Deanes.”

In the Summer Issue, we sit down with Michael Deane to explore his extraordinary career, his role as mentor, and how he’s still raising the bar for Belfast dining, decades in.