Richard Corrigan: ‘St Patrick’s Day is a passport to party – these are my favourite places for the best craic’

With St Patrick’s Day at the weekend, the most famous London Irish chef is a busy man. Not too busy to tell Hannah Twiggs why he launched his legendary annual party 10 years ago, and where he thinks you should head to to find the best Irish food (and perfect pint of Guinness)

Festivities for the Guinness-soaked affair will kick off today at Corrigan’s Mayfair (Corrigan Collection)

St Patrick’s Day celebrations looked quite different when chef Richard Corrigan was growing up in County Meath, just north of Dublin, in the Sixties and Seventies.

“When I was a kid, it was church in the morning, it was lunch, it was shamrock and cowslips, there was no parade-y kind of stuff,” he tells me, having just arrived back in the UK after hosting a pop-up in Washington. Even with the biggest Irish holiday looming, he’s a busy man. Jet lag will either be a curse or a blessing come the weekend. “It wasn’t even really an Irish thing, it was more of a religious holiday.

“For the immigrants and for other people, St Patrick’s Day has become so much bigger.” True, over 150,000 people celebrate it in London alone. Roughly 13 million pints of Guinness will be consumed. You do the maths. “It’s become more for the non-Irish than the Irish! It’s like a passport to a party, d’you know what I mean?”