David Harte is now based at The Sea Rooms at Kelly’s Resort Hotel and believes that anybody can cook
David Harte, in his early 20s and from Curracloe attended Wexford CBS before heading to Waterford and to what is now the South East Technological University to study culinary arts for four years.
In October, David won the Euro-Toques Young Chef of the Year 2025, presented by La Rousse Foods.
“In school they teach you all the recipes and fundamentals that they you all the recipes and fundamentals that you can take into the real world, but the best experience you can get is in the kitchen doing long days and long hours.”
David always wanted to be the chef. He started cooking with his grandmother, Rita, when he was young and in his latter secondary school years knew that he would either become a chef or join the army. “Sure, I was too soft for the army,” he admits.
He did his TY work experience in the kitchen of Riverbank Hotel.
“I was absolutely terrible to start off with. I was so young and so naïve. I was watching Jamie Oliver and thought I knew what I was doing, but when you are cooking for 100 people it is a different story.”
David Harte and judges
David says that cooking on a professional or amateur level effectively boils down to “the more you fail, the more you learn.”
In this year’s competition, he failed even more than last year when he was unsuccessful, but it worked out. Four years ago, he did his internship in Copenhagen, worked in Iceland on two occasions and did a semester in Canada.
When one thinks of the food capitals of Europe, whether you imagine pizza in Rome, snails in Paris or paella in Madrid, perhaps Iceland doesn’t come immediately to mind. David is happy to argue the point.
“The cuisine there is phenomenal. The menus are ultra forging forest, and we used to get fish in directly from the boats, and the seaweed from the coast.”
He’s been working with Kelly’s since 2024, where so much of the cooking he does at The Sea Rooms is over open fire. Having grown up beside the sea and being greatly influenced by seafood cooking during his international travels, David is more than content at arguably Ireland’s most famous seaside hotel.
Having got to the final last year, he returned to the Dublin Cookery School this year better equipped. Winning the top accolade Dublin’s Intercontinental Hotel was the culmination of years of work.
Chef David Harte’s winning dessert of dish Sissy red apples, skyr, honey, oats
“All four of us were left sitting there sweating. It was beautiful, all our families were there. It was mad. I was surprised, gobsmacked.”
Fine dining kitchens have a reputation for being violent places, verbally more than physically. Perhaps that reputation hasn’t been helped by Stephen Graham’s depiction in Boiling Point or The Bear on Disney+.
“Through all of the hard times come the good times,” David laughs.
The level David is cooking at and the level he aspires to be at, is out of reach for the overwhelming majority of people. But many who want to make more of an effort with their cooking, don’t know where to start.
“Keep reading. The videos on YouTube are phenomenal, especially when they are from people who have been there and done that.”