{"id":4639,"date":"2018-08-17T08:53:28","date_gmt":"2018-08-17T06:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gereonskeukenthuis.nl\/blog\/?p=4639"},"modified":"2018-08-26T09:25:26","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T07:25:26","slug":"talk-table-david-and-stephen-flynn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gereonskeukenthuis.nl\/blog\/talk-table-david-and-stephen-flynn\/","title":{"rendered":"Talk & table David and Stephen Flynn."},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/a>\u00a0picture: David and Stephen Flynn.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year I met the two guys Stephen and David Flynn for lunch at the INK hotel in Amsterdam.\u00a0<\/span>They were in the Netherlands to cook from their wonderful cookbook World of\u00a0 Happy Pear. Later that week I talked about these twins on local radio. About vegan and vegetarian cooking and being a happy pear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Because that\u2019s their starting point. Healthy food and an early morning\u2019s dive into the sea provide happiness. The Flynn brothers are invited to be my next summerguests in my series Talk & table.\u00a0<\/span>Based on the answers they give, I will conceive a recipe, that will please them and my readers. I suppose\u00a0<\/span>that it will have a vegetarian and Dutch twist. Needless to say I will add a personalized wine pairing suggestion.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Who are David and Stephen Flynn and what would you like to share with us?\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

We are identical twins from Ireland. We started our business 14 years ago to create a happier and healthier world and build community. Our business \u2013 The Happy Pear – started out with Dave, Steve and a little red van.\u00a0<\/span>Today there are around 170 people with us and we have three\u00a0<\/span>wholefood caf\u00e9s; two food stores; a sprout farm producing wheatgrass and healthy living, organic sprouts and microgreens; a Happy Pear branded food manufacturing and distribution business producing award-winning products (we have almost 30 products in around 1,000 Irish retailers and six products in the UK in Waitrose supermarkets); a coffee roastery producing hand roasted Happy Pear coffee; and a fermentation kitchen producing a variety of delicious fermented foods. We also have three bestselling cookbooks and a combined online and social media reach of around a million.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>We love what we do every day and we are passionate about it. The business was conceived to create a happier and healthier world and it\u2019s very much why it exists nowadays.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You have built quite a business with Happy Pear, it is all so joyful. What is up til now your most impressive project?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/b>Like anything, there are ups and downs, sunny days and rainy days, which are just part of life. As a whole, it\u2019s phenomenal and wonderful and we adore it, and we couldn\u2019t do anything else. We\u2019re very fortunate and content because it\u2019s our passion and what we love. However, it is important to have more challenging days too because they make you appreciate the good days even more.\u00a0<\/span>Our most impressive project is the business itself and the community we\u2019ve built. We love the team we work with. We have an amazing team of people from many different countries of the world and we\u2019re very proud of that and grateful for the community aspect of our business. Our community is far-reaching and includes our online community, the community around our cafes in Greystones and Clondalkin, as well as the broader community of like-minded people who are interested in eating better, moving more, and being better versions of themselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nowadays you are a culinary phenomenon\u00a0\u00a0How did you learn to cook? And where started your ambition to cook vegetarian?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We grew up eating a standard meat and two veg diet. It was only when we went abroad that we changed our diets becoming vegetarian and then vegan\/plant-based. Now we eat a whole food and plant-based diet and we have done so for about 16 years now.\u00a0<\/span>We started our business with a fruit and veg shop and we were obsessed with fruit and veg and how to cook with them. When we first opened our business there were no vegetarian or vegan cooking courses \u2013 they were considered quite niche here in Ireland. The only accessible cooking courses at the time were traditional French cooking courses, based around meat and dairy products, and this wasn\u2019t what we were interested in doing. So, when we decided to open our own caf\u00e9 we hired a chef called Doreen Palmer and she had about 30 years of experience as a vegetarian chef and she used to teach cooking. We trained under Doreen and one of the best ways of learning how to cook is to open your own restaurant because if your food isn\u2019t very good you have no customers! We quickly learned how to cook, to cook well, and to cook for lots of people.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Steve: \u201cI was in Whistler in Canada and I changed my own diet to become vegetarian and through that experience, I discovered that I was fascinated with cooking. It\u2019s a cool, party ski resort and all I wanted to do at the time was cook vegetarian food!\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Dave: \u201cI was in South Africa and I had a similar experience and changed to a vegetarian diet around the exact same time. It\u2019s a twin thing!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0pictures: Lunch with Happy Pear at INK Hotel, Amsterdam<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You both\u00a0\u00a0invest a lot of energy in defining new dishes and translating your experiences all over the place? The Happy Pear is more than just Veggies, it seems to me that it is a total lifestyle. In another life, would you do it again? Or would it be something else?<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We are both extremely creative and we shoot two new recipe videos for YouTube per week. This means we are constantly in that space of creating new content and recipes and experimenting and adapting. We tend to really thrive in that space!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Happy Pear is more like a movement, with family and community at its core. It\u2019s all about encouraging people to eat healthier and live better lifestyles and to have a laugh because ultimately, we\u2019re all going to die. It\u2019s not about being veggie or vegan but about having fun, enjoying life, and trying to be a little bit better.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>We\u2019d do it all again. Even with the mistakes along the way, which have led us to this point!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Your dishes and recipes speak to the imagination, certainly with me. They are gorgeous.I tasted your lasagne! How do you do that?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Certainly, a lot of experience helps! Having cooked so many dishes, in so many ways, for so many things [events] means you have a lot of experience to pull from, and often as a chef one of the most important tools is your tongue and taste buds and your ability to simplify more complex dishes. We spend a lot of time doing this because typically our audience on YouTube is younger and they want a tasty meal now. In our new book we\u2019ve really focused on trying to make healthy food quick, easy and accessible \u2013 like a home-cooked dinner in 10 minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In February you told me you liked Dutch produce to work with, can you tell about that?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We think Holland is phenomenal \u2013 it grows the most amount of veg for Europe and is a world-leader and leading light in horticulture. We eat a lot of veg and think you do an amazing job!<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The last two decades there has been a shift from meat to other more vegetarian cuisines. I see this in your books. Can you tell something about trends. In Ireland?<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When our first cookbook called The Happy Pear came out [the one with the yellow cover] it was a vegetarian cookbook and our publishers told us that a typical chef with a TV show might sell around 2,000 copies. We didn\u2019t have a TV show and our book celebrated vegetarian cooking but nonetheless, Penguin [our publishers] decided to print 6,000 copies \u2013 they told us because we had a caf\u00e9 and shop that we\u2019d sell them over the years. The book came out in October of 2014 and within six weeks we\u2019d sold the 6,000 copies and that Christmas it was the bestselling cookbook that year and to date, it\u2019s sold over 100,000 copies!\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Our second cookbook \u2013 The World of the Happy Pear \u2013 won \u2018Irish cookbook of the year\u2019 in 2016 and it\u2019s sold around 60,000 copies so far. Additionally, within 3 days our\u00a0latest cookbook,\u00a0<\/span>Recipes for Happiness<\/i>, became a No. 1 bestseller in Ireland and it debuted in the Top 10 bestseller list in the UK!\u00a0<\/span>All of this just speaks to the appetite of Irish people for something different, something more plant-based and veg-centric. It\u2019s amazing to see and there has been a huge shift. Back when we started our business vegetarianism was quite exclusive and now every day we meet people who are vegetarian or vegan or eager to try them out.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0picture: Boys at the barn.<\/span><\/div>\n
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What is beautiful about The Happy Pear is that it\u2019s also about forming a community. Did you both foresee that when you started?<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the main aims of building the business was to create community and to bring people together to share a similar philosophy in life and just to have a laugh! Naturally, as humans, we are all social creatures and we have this yearning to come together so we\u2019ve done lots of things of the years to enable this like our baking competitions. For example, every year in apple season we hold an apple baking competition, or it could be a chocolate love festival, and we ask people to make a dish using apples (we often provide them for free). Then we judge the best baking and we have a party to celebrate the occasion.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Also, in our cafes, we have a long-standing tradition of giving away free organic porridge every single morning (for almost 10 years). These are both great community events where people, neighbours and new friends are brought together through food.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Additionally, we go to the local schools and talk to children to help inspire them to eat more veg and be curious about where our food comes from.\u00a0We also swim in the sea at sunrise every day and increasingly people join us each day from all over the world. We do big public Swimrise events throughout the year and there could be between 200 \u2013 500 people at these so they really help to build community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We also offer free yoga classes at our cafe in Dublin, in Clondlakin, and regularly well over 100 people attend on a Saturday or Sunday morning!\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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More and\u00a0\u00a0more vegan start ups appaer. What do you think of the general quality. Has it become better the world wide culinary landscape?<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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It\u2019s fabulous and we\u2019re delighted to see a lot more plant-based eating and a lot more interest in it and a lot more vegan start-ups. It\u2019s great to see and demonstrates that people\u2019s tastes are changing. Some of the things affecting this are documentaries on Netflix like Cowspiracy and What The Health \u2013 movies like these are helping to open people up and drive awareness about the impact of how they eat and how it affects the political landscape and global warming. People are not starting to realise that animal agriculture has a significant impact on the environment and plant agriculture has significantly less. So, there\u2019s a lot more interest in this and a lot more people eating more vegetables. And it\u2019s also a consideration for our own health, which is amazing to see.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>In terms of the culinary landscape, it\u2019s great and very experimental and we\u2019re really enjoying seeing a lot more fusion cooking, it\u2019s more ethical, and more boundaries are being broken so it\u2019s super-exciting!\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
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<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0picture: taking a swim in the morning.<\/span><\/div>\n
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What do you miss in nowadays cuisine?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Really, it\u2019s the simplest things.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Steve: \u201cFor example, my wife is Polish and a couple of weeks ago we were in Poland and I walked into the greenhouse on her family\u2019s land and picked a big, ripe heirloom tomato and literally sat down and had tomato with a little olive oil and salt for lunch and it was incredible. Often we forget really good food can just be really simple produce and it doesn\u2019t need to be super-complex.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Speaking of food,\u00a0\u00a0which one is your favorite dish? And needless to ask which wine?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Steve: \u201cMy new favourite dish \u2013 and we filmed this for our YouTube channel last night \u2013 is Crispy Teriyaki Tofu Pancakes with a Plum Sauce. It\u2019s fabulous, so enjoyable and so delicious!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Neither of us drink alcohol! We both gave up alcohol around 16 years ago, around the time we switched to eating a whole food and plant-based diet. We came from a background of playing semi-professional rugby and going to all boys schools, where there is a perceived culture of lots of drinking [alcohol] so for us to give it up was quite a change but we\u2019ve found it to be hugely beneficial for our own health and happiness.<\/span><\/div>\n
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And what do you\u2019d never eat?<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

We never eat meat. It\u2019s just not for us and each to their own. Our message isn\u2019t about making anyone a vegan or vegetarian, it\u2019s about trying to get people to eat more vegetables and enjoy their lives!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

If you would give a cooking class, what would you want to teach us?<\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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Steve: \u201cI\u2019d like it to be more about cooking techniques rather than recipes because nowadays people have access to so many recipes that I\u2019d try to go back to teaching an appreciation for simple things. For example, with vegetables the key thing to getting more flavour is just trying to brown your veg and to avoid using too much oil. So I think I\u2019d start by teaching people the philosophy about whole foods and vegetables and their importance for our health and then I\u2019d show them the cooking techniques.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Last but not least, what is your favorite movie?<\/span><\/span><\/b><\/div>\n
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Steve: \u201cI loved<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>The Shape of\u00a0<\/span>Water<\/em><\/i>\u00a0that was out recently, directed by\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Guillermo del Toro. It\u2019s one of the best movies I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n