From the tender age of 14 when he worked in a Michelin-starred restaurant on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, Danny Africano had dreamed of earning the pinnacle of culinary artistic recognition.

This week that dream came true for the chef and owner of Lignum Restaurant in the tiny village of Bullaun, a few miles outside Loughrea.

He’s just the second chef to currently boast a Michelin star in Galway and the only one ever to garner the accolade outside of the city.

It was just seven months before the Covid pandemic ripped apart the country and decimated the hospitality industry that he took the leap of opening a fine dining Italian-inspired eaterie in his homeplace.

His Italian father, Rosario, and Loughrea mother, Maura Winters, ran the Slateford House restaurant here for nine years before his grandfather died and his father had to return to run the family hotel.

His mother remained behind to continue the restaurant, with the help of young Danny and his sister Elizabeth.

When it became too much, they closed the venue and moved to Italy but later returned to finish school.

Danny studied culinary arts in the Dublin Institute of Technology before working in kitchens all over the world, including Singapore, New York and Melbourne. The three years he spent working in a two-star Michelin-starred restaurant outside Naples which had the biggest influence on his style of cooking.

“It was always my idea from a young age to open my own fine dining restaurant in Bullaun. I’m so fortunate. So many young chefs, their biggest obstacle is finding a premises. I already had this simple but clean space.”

He brought in Italian builders to renovate the former stables when he returned from Australia in 2018 creating a magnificent dining room which is surrounded by trees outside. The food is all cooked over an open fire fuelled by local ash, birch and oak which also inspired the name Lignum, which means wood in Latin.

Caption: Michelin star…Lignum in Bullaun.

Read the full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now, or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie. You can also download our Connacht Tribune App from Apple’s App Store or get the Android Version from Google Play.