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Chef Áine Budds: ‘I was drinking on my breaks in work — take a break, go to the pub, drink loads of pints and go back. But it was as if it was normal. No one batted an eyelid’

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4 months ago

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Chef Áine Budds: ‘I was drinking on my breaks in work — take a break, go to the pub, drink loads of pints and go back. But it was as if it was normal. No one batted an eyelid’

At 22, after just three years working in fine-dining kitchens, Áine Budds checked into rehab. Now nearly two years sober, the Allta chef opens up about her addiction, the female restaurateur who backed her at her lowest point — and why the hospitality industry needs to start talking about its drink an drug problem

Áine Budds talking about her sobriety

In the early days of her career in restaurants, a fellow chef took Áine Budds aside to give her some well-meaning advice. “You need to make up your mind what you’re here for,” he said to her. “Are you here to party or are you here to be a chef?”

“It was great advice,” Budds tells me when we meet in a cafe in the Dublin docklands. “But I didn’t listen to it at the time. He was dead right. He could see it in me back then. He could see what was going on.”

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