Up to scratch

Chef Darren Iddon is in the vanguard of a restaurant renaissance in Londonderry and he’s been speaking to Russell Campbell…

When chef, Darren Iddon, opened his own restaurant at Queen’s Quay in Derry during the summer, he brought with him a deceptively simple, people-centred culture that had at its heart well-trained staff and fresh local food cooked with flair and imagination.

At first blush, that seems to differ little from the vaunted intentions of restaurateurs and chefs anywhere in the country, yet Iddon and his team have applied their methods and philosophies with rigorous single-mindedness since they launched the restaurant in July and the results are speaking for themselves.

Iddon is one of a select band of chefs at the higher end of the market in Derry who are edging the city slowly towards an understanding and an appreciation of truly good food. And the culture of learning and development that he nurtures among his staff and leadership team at Queen’s Quay Social has been honed in some of the world’s most exclusive kitchens.

Hailing originally from Liverpool, this isn’t Iddon’s first foray to the province. He worked here before in Michael Deane’s flagship restaurant at Howard Street in Belfast before leaving to take up a post as executive chef with Capella Hotels and Resorts. That position saw Iddon work in exclusive four and five-star resorts around the world. His last post was in Singapore where he helped open a brand new resort for Capella in 2011.

He became involved with the restaurant scene in Derry when the owners of the building at Queen’s Quay where his business is now situated contacted him and asked him to come up with a concept for a brand new restaurant there.

At the start of 2013, Capella asked Iddon to take up a post in China – he didn’t relish the idea, so he got back in touch with the building owners in Derry and asked whether the restaurant ideas he’d supplied had ever been implemented:

“They said that they hadn’t gone ahead with the project because it had been too high end for them,” Iddon recalls recently. “We discussed it for some time and I ended up leasing the building from them and opening a new restaurant there myself in July last year.”