Chef Of The Year For Taste At Rustic

By the middle of the 2010s, Dylan McGrath had become a businessman. Yet the fine dining chef inside him had not gone away. In June 2015 he opened Taste at Rustic, upstairs from Rustic Stone^[2].

Japan, Peru And Spain

Taste at Rustic was a Japanese restaurant with flavours from South America and Spain^[1][3]. Georgina Campbell's guide said it recalled his cooking at Mint, but without the formal fuss of a fine dining room^[1].

The guide also praised his fish cookery as memorable^[1]. That is high praise from inspectors who eat out across the whole country.

The Award

In 2016 Georgina Campbell named him Chef of the Year^[1]. It was a sign that the critics still saw him as one of the most talented cooks in Ireland, not just a restaurant owner.

In September 2016 he was full of plans. He had built a development kitchen at the top of the Rustic Stone building, where every recipe for the group was tested^[2].

MasterChef

He was also known to TV audiences as a judge on MasterChef Ireland^[1][2]. In 2016 he said his time on the show was over, though he hinted at another project with RTÉ^[2].

He still dreamed of fine dining. He told TheTaste that he hoped to open a gastronomic restaurant within a couple of years, perhaps on the roof of Fade Street Social^[2].

The guide's judges also noticed how his role had changed. In recent years, they wrote, he had been seen more as a restaurateur and businessman than a hands-on chef^[1]. The award was a reminder of the cook behind the business.

In 2018 he told The Irish Times that he was a hundred percent back, as good as he had ever been^[3]. Taste at Rustic was being renamed and refined, and new projects were on the way^[3]. The award of 2016 had marked the start of a comeback.