RUNNING A restaurant used to be easy. An owner and a chef, or a chef-owner, got a room and a kitchen and fitted them out. They wrote some menus, culled together suppliers, pulled together a wine list, and cooked lunch for paying customers from Monday to Friday, and cooked dinner from Monday to Saturday. On Sunday, the chef and the staff rested, and so did the VAT.
From the time of the earliest Parisian restaurants – created around about 1750, when a “restaurant”, a broth made with chicken or beef, was actually what you ate – through the great culinary chroniclers like Escoffier of The Ritz, and onto Derry Clarke in L’Ecrivain, precious little changed in the world of restaurants.
Restaurants were judged on the quality of their cooking, and thereby spent virtually no time on classic business ideas such as marketing, brand building, customer satisfaction, communications, post-sale service, innovation.
Such innovation as occurred was strictly culinary – classic cuisine begat nouvelle cuisine; nouvelle cuisine begat molecular cuisine.
“Oh, I never went in for any of that marketing talk,” the grand dame of Irish cooking, Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe House, said to me more than a decade ago. “I just tried to do the best I could and hoped someone would like it.”
Today, virtually everything has changed. The changes began early in the first decade of the new century. In August 2003, the long-time restaurant reviewer of the Financial Times, Nick Lander, wrote that “restaurateurs must realise that the rules governing their profession for the last 200 years no longer apply”.
For Tom O’Connell, of O’Connell’s of Donnybrook, the changes in the business over the last decade “have been consumer-driven: people began to tell restaurateurs what they wanted them to do, and that was not the case before”.
The twin cams of the restaurant offer today, says O’Connell, “are offering local Irish foods, and real value for money. When we opened in 1999 we listed our producers on the menus, and yet I spoke to a restaurateur recently who told me he had just switched to Irish chicken! It wasn’t free range or organic or anything, just Irish, and yet he thought it was a big deal. So, some people still don’t get it.”
Donal Doherty, of Harry’s Restaurant at Bridgend in Donegal, noticed a new focus on local ingredients after Lehmann Brothers and the 2008 crash. “Even though we used Inishowen foods, the appreciation wasn’t there. After 2008 it accelerated, and people began to want to know where and how far their money was going.” Doherty has upped the ante with local produce: “I have shorthorn beef on the menu now, next week it will be Dexter beef. I have five farmers supplying me with rare-breed pork. We were the first to use dry-aged beef, but now everyone claims to be doing that, so we have to move on. We pay more to our producers because we pay for taste, we pay to ensure customers return, we pay more so that the experience is memorable.”
One other factor that has given Harry’s a lift is social media. Doherty, a widely admired practitioner, estimates tweets and Facebook add 10 per cent to Harry’s bottom line. “We used to spend maybe €4,000 a year on advertising: now we don’t have an advertising budget – not a cent. But there is an art to it; bad places come out of social media very badly.”
Equal important, however, is the ability through social media to talk with suppliers, colleagues and others. “People in the business in Donegal used never share information or experiences; now they do.” When Doherty organised the Inishfood Festival last year, virtually everything in the weekend event was brought together through tweets. Social media has also enabled pop-up restaurants to open, winning an audience from posts and tweets.
But if restaurateurs have had to learn to listen carefully to customers, and to communicate more directly with them, they have also had to expand the concept of the restaurant itself.
For restaurateurs like Paul and Máire Flynn, of The Tannery in Dungarvan, their initial restaurant space, and its lunch-and-dinner formula, has expanded in recent years to include two townhouses with accommodation for guests, a smart cookery school, and an extensive garden with polytunnels beside the cookery school where the raw ingredients for the restaurant and school are produced.
Restaurateurs have similarly discovered that a restaurant can be a moveable feast. Both the Wheeler family’s Rathmullan House in Donegal, and Paul Cadden’s Saba, of Clarendon Street, Dublin, have enjoyed huge success by transporting their kitchens to the Electric Picnic festival in recent years.
Both Avoca Handweavers and Donnybrook Fair, whose restaurants form a significant element of a mixed retail/lifestyle experience, enjoyed profitable trading in the last year.
Avoca reported profits of €1.64 million on revenue of €48.6 million, and almost immediately opened a new restaurant with more mixed food/retailing in Monkstown, Co Dublin, creating 80 new jobs. Simon Pratt of Avoca reported that 2011 had been even better than the figures up to the end of January 2011.
Joe Doyle’s Donnybrook Fair, with four outlets, had turnover of almost €21.8 million, and profits of €472,600, a sharp turnaround from a previous reported loss of €815,000. Diversity is clearly working for top-end food retailers.
“Everything is going to get more casual” says Donal Doherty. “You are already seeing that in Dublin with pop-ups like Crackbird, and I can see a situation where people, over the course of an evening, move from restaurant to restaurant. The three-course menu – starter-main course-dessert – is going out the window, people are into sharing plates, and going to places where there won’t be any menu.”
“A relaxed, coffee-shop culture, where simple things are done well, is what we are going to see more of,” says Tom O’Connell. “I mean, I would walk 20 miles just to eat the Victoria sponge cake Eileen Bergin serves at The Merrion Tree in Mount Merrion.”
I think we will soon see more single-theme restaurants – rare-breed beef only; ham and cabbage only; wild food only; food only from Tipperary. In the New York Times recently, Pete Wells devoted his weekly restaurant review to Federal Donuts, a joint in Philadelphia that serves doughnuts and halves of fried chicken. They cook 80 halves of chicken a day and about 150 doughnuts. When everything is sold they close until the next day. That’s niche cooking.
In Killarney, Rob O’Reilly and Barry McBride’s Pay As You Please restaurant has managed to sustain a formula where the punters pay what they feel the food is worth. “People have been amazingly generous,” says O’Reilly, and when I visited in December last, the joint was buzzing.
The recession has been hard to restaurateurs, with smaller profits as people drink less, little if any business account spending and customers endlessly demanding more value. And yet, in forcing restaurateurs to be more imaginative, to think sideways and to broaden the ways in which they conceive their offer, the recession, ironically, has been the best thing to have happened to Irish restaurants in yonks.
John McKenna writes The Bridgestone Guides, and is author of How to Run a Restaurant(Estragon Press)
