The Restaurant, Foodies Fight Back, Sunday Indo Sept 20

Delighted to be asked to partake in Lucinda O'Sullivan's Foodies Fight Back series in The Sunday Independent. For the full detail click on..

"Dubliner Vanessa Murphy and her Spanish partner Anna Cabrera own one of Dublin's most popular restaurants, Las Tapas De Lola on vibrant Wexford Street."

We’re an industry of optimists and nothing like a crisis, whether economic or in this case both economic & public health, that it becomes ever more apparent. We’re always looking for the positives in the negatives, translating to “we’re open let’s throw everything we can at it” even though we’ve 45% less people walking through the door, “but it’s great to be open again”.

We’re in survival mode, but the silver lining of this crisis is how we’ve all come behind each other – there’s been amazing comradery amongst everyone in the industry. Everyone is helping each other in whatever way we can.

We closed our doors on Friday 13th March. The first few weeks were spent scrambling to ensure our team was sorted, our suppliers and our landlord.

It was a minefield navigating all the new government initiatives, but in fairness, they responded quickly with paying out to staff, but so much more needs to be done as we try to make it to the end of the year.

We reopened on the 1st July and slept less the night before reopening than we did the first time round 7.5 years ago. This was a whole new world and we had no idea how customers would respond, but we also wanted to be sure we put our best foot forward vis-a-vie public health, our team and our customers.

We removed all excess tables & chairs to deliver social distancing, installed hand sanitiser units all over the restaurant, invested heavily in PPE for our team, reduced our menu by 30% to alleviate pressure in the kitchen. No corner was left untouched.

Our team completed online training courses before returning and in-house COVID induction courses. We don’t think we’ve ever had such a well-trained team in our lives! They were fantastic, no complaints, just got stuck in!

The toughest part of reopening has not being able to hug & kiss our customers and our team. We’re a very touchy feely restaurant, so that has been very hard. But the support we’ve received since opening has been amazing.

We were asked recently what forecasted loss we expected between now and December. I don’t think anyone in this industry is forecasting beyond the end of the week or month let alone the year. If we were to realistically look at the numbers, we’d probably ask ourselves is it worth being open?

The goal posts change daily with new announcements from government, more recently the 11.30pm curfew, no more than 6 at a table, the new Wage Subsidy criteria. So it’s hard to say where we see ourselves this winter.

If we don’t see a realistic stimulus package for our industry in the next few months (reduction in VAT; re-evaluation of the Wage Subsidy Scheme to name two), we’ll be seeing a lot of closures. We’re expected to be 30% or more down to receive the subsidy on a monthly basis. Crazy in an industry where margins are already so tight that a swing of 10% would close a business.

We’re told this will be reviewed in the October budget, October is a long way away from today.

Dublin city centre is like a ghost town. We need action now to promote the amazing city we have. Autumn and winter will be the toughest challenge for us all with no tourists coming through the city, people working from home, schools back and the obvious high level of absenteeism as team members remain at home with any kind of flu symptoms.

But the optimist always comes through… In our hearts, “We’ll make it, if we fight it together!” In our heads, “Are we mad?”