Chipeen: The Galway chip shop celebrating Irish spuds
Chipeen - the Galway chip shop formerly known as Prátaí - began life like many good ideas: as a notion shared between brothers after a holiday.
"My brother saw it when he was on holiday in, I think he was in Valencia in Spain, and just by the hotel, there was a chip shop", Joe Gaughan recalls about his brother, Barney. After some research the brothers realised that there was a gap in the Irish market for something like it.
"We thought, jeez, we're a country synonymous with the potato. There's no one doing something like this."
In the five years since launching their chip shop, the Gaughan brothers have made it their mission to bring Irish spuds back to chippies. "We just believe that why look elsewhere?" Joe says.
"Why are we sending away all of our spuds when we're so known for it? Why are we importing UK chipping potatoes or Spanish chipping potatoes or Dutch chipping potatoes? Because we don't have facilities of storage here."
The problem comes down to storage: potatoes come out of the ground at their peak between August and October, he says, and you can use them up to Christmas time before they start to turn. Once the potatoes mature, chemical reactions take place leading to the formation of sugars, which can alter how the spuds cook.
Keeping chipping potatoes as fresh as possible is necessary for perfect chips, but this requires them to be stored at specific temperatures year-round.
In 2020 alone, Ireland imported over 75,000 tonnes of potatoes.
The brothers went "all in" on nailing their Irish potato chips, with Joe even buying a mini deep-fat fryer and practising at home. There was one clear problem early on, though: the brothers knew very little about the industry.
Joe recalls how he phoned a close friend of his who he played football with, Eugene Greaney - one half of the team behind Galway pizza institution, Dough Bros, along with his brother Ronan. A chat about their idea soon "turned into a job offer" to work with the Dough Bros team for a year and learn the ropes.
"We were learning so much about customer service, about attention to detail, with just product quality, ingredients and how to interact, how to be efficient, how to give out a great product and service essentially because they're masters of that", Joe says.
This mentorship among brothers ran from 2018 to 2021, when Greaney suggested the Gaughan brothers venture out on their own with their original chip shop idea.
That year, the team took on the hugely popular Christmas market in Galway, which Joe calls "a baptism by fire".
"I remember opening up the hatch November 2021, I think it was the 14th or 16th, and we were absolutely terrified", he remembers. "It was a cold Friday night, and we knew how to cook one bag of chips well, but it's a different story when you have to cater to hundreds of people of an evening and you have loads of friers and timers going on."
Six weeks later and the team had found their rhythm, going on to run pop-ups and concessions across communities in Galway before landing at their permanent home at 27 Shop Street in Galway City.
Since then, they have built a reputation for excellent chips - achieved through a "low and slow cook for the inside to get them nice and fluffy and then a higher temperature to crisp the outside to get them that golden crisp" - topped with sauces like satay curry and cheese, salt and vinegar mayo and a spicy, poitin-infused sauce.
Now, with their latest pop-up launching today, 11 March at the Home of Guinness in Dublin, they're stepping into an entire new challenge, Joe says. Sitting in the food truck while doing this interview, he said: "We're in disbelief. We feel so lucky to be here."
For long-time fans of the Galway City staple, however, a recent rebrand might have come as a surprise. After five years as Prátaí, what inspired the name change to Chipeen?
"I remember at the time we knew it would be difficult to protect, but we thought we'd find a way", Joe says about landing on the business's original name. "We were under a lot of time pressure. So we just said, look, we love the name. We're going to go with Prátaí and we'll see how we get on."
Jump to a year or so into business and the team realised they couldn't trademark the name: "We got told by many different solicitors that you can't own the name potatoes, essentially."
Finding a name that fit in with the West of Ireland and paid homage to Irish culture was always a priority, Joe says, adding: "We love using the Gaelic language, but if we can't protect it, then we can't grow."
Now the team are gearing up for their stint in Dublin as part of St. Patrick's Day festivities at the Guinness Storehouse and Guinness Open Gate Brewery. It's a meaningful one for lots of reasons, but especially as the team opened their Shop Street location on St. Patrick's Day in 2023, another "baptism by fire".
As Joe tells me, "If we survived that day, we can survive any day."
