A shepherd’s pie was the final straw
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As a boy, Jack O’Shea had to be forced into his family’s Tipperary butcher shop to help out on a Saturday morning. “I wanted to be out hurling or riding horses,” says the 35-year-old. “Not lifting hind quarters of beef in the slaughterhouse, when you have no muscle on you.”
But butchery was in his blood, with the family business stretching back for eight generations to 1805. And Templemore, the small town he’d grown up in, didn’t offer many opportunities for an ambitious young man. So it wasn’t that surprising when in 1996, aged 24, “one day at the dinner, literally over a shepherd’s pie, I said ‘sod this’, I’m going”. He’d spent his teens as a stable boy in Brussels, and thought there was an opening in the EU capital for a business selling pork and sausages to expatriots.
He headed there with a IR£40,000 loan guaranteed by his mother, “and landed into a pile of red tape, which the Belgians have mastered”. It took him more than a year to get a shop open. Worse still, he opened in summer, at exactly the time of year that the population of Brussels heads off en masse for their holidays.
At the time, “I was wondering if I’d made a mistake”, says O’Shea. But then a dioxin scandal hit Belgium. Human excrement was found in chicken feed in 1999. Overnight, O’Shea found himself buying in pallets of Irish meat for customers worried about buying from Belgian supermarkets. He rapidly expanded to ‘label rouge’-certified poultry from France and Belgian organic pork. “Pork sales tripled. Poultry quadrupled. And we were selling more and more beef as I got more obsessed with tracking the ultimate in quality down.”
He started to specialise in French cuts of meat unavailable anywhere else, and the restaurant trade flocked to him, including the ‘Jamie Oliver’ of Belgian TV, double-Michelin-starred chef, Yves Mattagne. “I realised it had become a landmark when an Irish supplier got to Brussels airport and told the taxi, ‘take me to Jack O’Shea’s’. And the taxi did.”
The business began diversifying further, selling pies and new world wine. But room for expansion beyond a certain point was limited. “The problem with Brussels is it’s transient. People come in on a three-year contract and leave again, so you’re not compounding customers.” So as the majority of his customers were originally from the UK, London naturally seemed like the next step. In November 2006, he opened his shop on the corner of Knightsbridge’s Montpellier Street, across from Harrods. “I always fancy a corner. You’re visible on two fronts,” he points out. He doesn’t ship in continental meat because “you have to play to national feelings”.
But customers have lapped up the organic British pork and other meats in his shop – turnover is set to hit the £1.6m mark this year – and the high-end, specialised nature of his business has boosted his profile. The prominent food writer Rose Prince gave him a four-page spread in The Daily Telegraph, which lead to “a call from the Fat Duck, the number-one restaurant in the world. Just because of that article. It was a very special moment in my career, because it was an endorsement that I was on the right track.”
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