Location(s)
By Denise Foley
Parents, take note: Brian Duffy is living proof that you do have a lasting influence on your kids.
He’s also a critical reminder that you don’t have much control over what’s going to influence them.
Duffy’s father has three master’s degrees and a doctorate. He taught honors chemistry at Archbishop Carroll High School. Duffy himself dropped out of Delaware County Community College when he got a better offer: A chance to live in a beach house with 13 women for eight days.
“It was probably one of the greatest weeks of my life,” says Duffy, the ball-of-fire head chef at Shanachie Irish Pub and Restaurant in the newly tony Ambler Borough.
Though he didn’t get the Ph.D. genes, he got the cooking chromosomes. “We all cooked,” recalls Duffy. “I remember huge parties at my parents’ house and everyone pretty much cooked.”
"Everyone" would be his parents, two brothers and one sister, and the house is in Ardmore, where Duffy grew up. “I was just with my brothers in Los Angeles and we were reminiscing about how important the cooking end of it was. When we were young we’d go out drinking at a bar and come back and the next thing you know we were making steaks with blue cheese.”
But it took a friend who was on the receiving end of some primo Duffy meals to point the accidental chef toward his career. Although he’s worked in restaurants since he was 14, Duffy was pretty much clueless. All he knew was that he was “so bored in school I couldn’t stand it.” After dropping out, he did get work in a restaurant and swore off them. “I said I’d never work in another restaurant again,” he admits. Then he sold clothes for Ralph Lauren in Philadelphia.
“But I was always cooking for my friends and for girls,” he says. “Then one day one of my buddies says, ‘Duff, you gotta do something with this!’ I was 19 or 20, and I enrolled in The Restaurant School.”
His parents didn’t mind that his classroom would be a kitchen. “They basically told all of us, we don’t care what you do as long as it makes you happy,” Duffy says.
He graduated in 1993 and hit the restaurant business running. His first job was as a sous chef in a restaurant in Key Largo, Florida (“I always wanted to visit the Keys”), then came back to Philly to “run a bunch of little places,” including his own restaurant, Kristopher’s, at Rising Sun and Levick, which became so popular that Duffy had to borrow tables and chairs from the place across the street (“I never gave them back—we were doing a great business and he wasn’t,” he says).
When he sold Kristopher’s, he took some time off. “I played golf every day for two months,” he says, a note of remembered bliss in his voice. “Then my wife [Sarah, a former waitress] said ‘You have to go back to work. I’m pregnant. Time to get a job.” (The Duffys now have two daughters, Emily and Fiona.)
Duffy put in his time at the Manayunk Brew Pub and its critically acclaimed neighbor, Sonoma. He got his Celtic feet wet at Downey’s Irish Pub. He starred on a Food Network show called “Date Plate.” Then he got the call: Folk singer Gerry Timlin and his friend Ed Egan were looking for a chef for the new restaurant they planned, one that would serve both traditional Irish food—shepherd’s pie, Irish stew, boxty—and new Celtic haute cuisine.
“Gerry and Ed were very concerned that I be happy, that I had the room to be creative,” he says. “You can’t really be creative with Irish stew, although I did once have it with ostrich meat at another restaurant. But it is creative. People do come in for the shepherd’s pie and the Irish stew. But then they come back for the crabcake [a Shanachie favorite, made with lots of crab, a binder of shrimp mousseline and a hint of mace and nutmeg].”
Duffy’s career is sizzling like bangers in a fry pan. Last St. Patrick’s Day, he was one of two chefs—the other was from Ireland—invited to NBC’s Today Show to prepare Irish stew for Matt, Katie and the crew. He’s a regular on the Food Network and DIY’s Hot Trends 2006. And through November, you can see him every Thursday morning on the show 10! on channel 10, the local NBC affiliate (it airs at 10 a.m.) for the Kraft Food Series, during which he’ll show how to make a new recipe using Kraft products. If you don’t like to cook, you can let Duffy do it: All the recipes will be featured as specials at Shanachie each week.
And you can join Brian Duffy here periodically as he shares recipes and cooking tips with www.irishphiladelphia.com, starting with my favorite, Mustard Crusted Scallops. He’s a remarkably generous man—with his time, expertise, and his recipes—and that all stems from his motto, which will strike terror in the hearts of dietitians everywhere. “I believe food is love,” he says. “It really brings people together. I see it when I walk through the room at Shanachie. People are laughing, having a good time.” He grins. “I love my job.”
