Worldwide experience left Dan ‘hungry’ for business success

A chef who travelled half way round the world in search of a business opportunity ended up finding it right on his own doorstep in his native Athlone!

Dan Harney grew up in a house where his mother, Helen, and his three aunts were “obsessed with cooking” and he can recall how they would regularly host dinner parties and “experiment with different cuisines from all over the world." Not only was his mother food obsessed, but his three sisters, Emma, Ellen and Yvonne all have a massive interest in cooking too.

Surrounded by all things culinary throughout his young life, it is little wonder that Dan thought about becoming a chef when he left school. “There’s no doubt that my interest in cooking came from watching my mother, my aunts and my sisters in the kitchen,” he says, “so I suppose I couldn’t escape it really.”

He joined the kitchen team in the Radisson Blu Hotel in 2009 and completed his apprenticeship as a chef before moving to Australia in 2012. The next nine years were spent travelling and honing his skills as a chef, not only in kitchens across Australia, but also in Germany, Switzerland and Portugal. “I mainly stuck to working in restaurants and hotels, but I did a bit of private chef work as well,” he says.

Dan says he was very lucky to have worked with “some great chefs over the years” and learned a lot from each of them. He decided to return to Athlone in March 2021 and the first job he took on his return was in The Villager in Glasson.

Having always been searching for what he describes as “the right concept” to make his own and to build a business around, the Athlone chef says “ironically, after all my travels, I found the right concept to move forward with right here in my home town.”

It was in The Villager that Dan Harney was first introduced to the complicated process of making pizza dough, and little did he realise at the time that he would go on to turn it into a business opportunity.

“After working in The Villager for a few months, I got an opportunity to run a pizza trailer in Kingscourt in Cavan called ‘Tadhg and Paddy’s Pizzeria’ which was a completely new venture,” he says. The people behind the venture were looking for someone to run the business, so Dan Harney spent 15 months there as the sole chef and describes the experience as being “invaluable.”

With his employers giving him “complete creative control from day one” in Kingscourt, he says he had to “build the business from scratch” but he was lucky to hit the ground running as the pizza truck was “busy from day one.”

The experience was not without its challenges, however, and he says he “learned a lot of lessons” during his 15 months in Cavan which have really stood to him since in creating his own business.

While his only son was operating a pizza truck in Cavan, Donie Harney was slowly building a prep kitchen in the garage of the family home in Crannaghmore, in the parish of Drum/Clonown, with a view to helping his son to set up his own pizza enterprise.

“I bought my own pizza trailer, a Rice horsebox from the 1980s, in Kilkenny and I asked a local builder and carpenter, Darius Gorski, to build it for me and he put a huge amount of thought into the functionality of it and I couldn’t be happier with the result,” Dan says.

At the start of the project, Dan Harney decided to bring a brand design company onboard, so he chose Neighbour, a local company run by Ryan Doyle and Emer Hannon, whom he worked closely with over a 12 month period before the launch.

It was during this process that the name ‘Hungry Bull Pizza” was born, and Dan says the attention to detail during the creative process was “incredible” and the methods employed by Neighbour to discover the identity of the brand was “what makes it stand out so strong today.”

The idea for ‘Hungry Bull Pizza’ – which was launched in March of this year - came from “many influences” with the first one being pizza trailer operated by the owner of The Villager, Cathal Moran, who is also a chef. “I also looked at what everybody else was doing, as there are lots of guys around the country doing the same thing as me, so I took the parts that I liked from each one to create my own concept,” he says.

Having dreamed about the launch of his own business for so long, Dan says when it happened “it just felt natural from the get go.” Being well used to pressure in the many kitchens he has worked in, he says the pizza truck “isn’t much different” and that once you are organized and have everything in place “it’s actually a lot of fun.”

He adds that “the preparation is the hard bit, being out in the trailer is great craic, and it’s the most enjoyable working environment I’ve ever had for sure.” He makes an interesting observation about the daily life of a chef, noting that they rarely interact with their customers. “To be able to see my customers and interact with them is a real buzz, except when you are up the walls busy, then it’s tricky,” he laughs.

The ‘Hungry Bull’ truck currently has two locations in Athlone, Wednesday and Thursday at Dans Tavern from 4pm to 9pm, and The Mill Bar in Bealnamulla on Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 4pm-9pm.

Right now, the enterprising owner is just “focused on consistency” and says he is not trying to overplan the future of his new business venture. “I’ll figure it out as it comes, the end goal is a pizzeria but I’m definitely not going to rush it.”

He makes all the pizza dough, and sources his flour, tomatoes and cheese in Italy which he then imports directly along with a lot of the toppings.

”I made some great contacts with Italian suppliers from my time in Cavan,” he says, and as well as making the dough he ferments it for four days to make it more digestible and to develop the flavour. “I don’t overcomplicate the pizzas. I get the best ingredients I can find and let them speak for themselves” he simply says.

Dan has also sourced a master pizza maker directly from Naples, Sergio Laporta, who will be working alongside him and his team over the coming months.

The customer demographic so far includes everyone from “toddlers to pensioners” he says, adding that “everyone loves a good pizza.”

That everyone includes the chef/proprietor himself who admits to eating “at least one pizza” for each day he operates his food truck!