There is no escaping the reality that these are tough times for Irish restaurants. They’re dealing with an enduring cost-of-living crisis on the double and contending with higher overheads across the board while catering for customers with less money in their pockets.
Some sectors facing higher costs simply increase their prices with few, if any, consequences because they know people have little or no choice but to cough up.
Health insurance providers have been rolling out price hikes twice a year while energy providers in effect doubled the costs imposed on consumers at the height of the crisis in 2023. And most households now spend at least a third more in Irish supermarkets than they had to in 2020.
Restaurants, however, don’t have the luxury of being able to increase their prices constantly and if they go too high then customers can simply choose not to eat out – with potentially devastating consequences for businesses trying to stay alive.
RM Block
So they have to use other techniques to manage their costs, techniques they hope diners will find more palatable.
But many of the techniques they have also come with risks.
Earlier this week we asked on X if users had noticed portion sizes getting smaller. Many people said yes and some were very unhappy about it.
As part of his job Joe Hayes travels around Ireland regularly and he told The Irish Times that in the last six months “portions have got extremely small. In one hotel I asked could I have extra mash and I was charged €4.50 extra. I had to pay an extra €3 another night for less than an egg-cup size of garlic sauce. In another hotel I got seven wedges with my very flat burger. The cheapest meal I’ve had in a hotel was €23.50, which was chicken and one scoop of mash, four small carrots and one parsnip”.
Keith O’Toole works in sales and travels the country. “I can assure you portion sizes have been reducing significantly over the past 6-12 months. Charging extra for the chips when you ask for half-and-half with your chicken curry. Needing to order a starter or a dessert because you know dinner will not fill you. It’s daylight robbery,” he said
Aoife McKenna is a fan of Indian takeaways, but in her experience “samosas have shrunk in size drastically. I would say half the size and also the price has gone up per portion”.
There were many others with similar stories, but what about those at the coalface?
There are few hoteliers in Ireland as focused on customer service as Brian Hughes of the Abbeyglen Hotel in Clifden, Co Galway. He greets guests with a beaming smile and nightly works the restaurant floor, moving from table to table sharing jokes and stories with diners with an effortless charm.
What is not effortless is keeping things ticking over in challenging times, and Hughes has had to make changes to his menus that he would never have countenanced in times past because of cost-of-living pressures.
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Some menu tweaks are small: he has taken the smoked salmon out of the breakfast buffet and listed it as a menu item instead, a move that slashed how much fish he needs to buy weekly. And he now buys individual steaks rather than full striploins to cut costs.
Then there have been price increases. “Two years ago, my dinner menu was €49, now it’s €69,” he says. “If you’d said to me four years ago that I would be charging €70 for my dinner menu I would have laughed and said it would never happen. I have to charge extra for steak on the bone and a supplement for oysters, too, now.”
There are some things he just leaves off the menu because they cost too much. “I live in Connemara and one of the most amazing things we have is wild Connemara mountain lamb, but I can only put it on the menu maybe twice or three times a year because it’s so expensive.”
Gareth Mullins is the Marker Dublin Hotel’s executive chef and runs its Forbes Street fine-dining restaurant as well as more casual food options including the bar and room service.
More than most, Mullins knows how hard it is managing a food business in an era of spiralling prices. Like all restaurants have done, he has had to look at the business model “because we can’t just keep upping the prices”.
He rattles off some numbers: the price of beef has climbed 22 per cent over the last 12 months, vegetables are up around 17 per cent and dairy products cost about 15 per cent more.
“I can’t just keep charging more, so we have what we call in the business ‘menu engineering’,” he says.
In recent months he has started using two cuts of meat as part of the same dish to cut costs while still offering value to his diners.
He points to the loin of lamb paired with neck of lamb on his menu. “I’ve 100g of loin and 80g of braised neck. If I go back five years, I’d just have put on 200g of loin, but I can’t do that at today’s prices. And I promise you that dish is more delicious now, but it takes a level of skill to be able to do that and it takes time. Loin off the bone can be cooked medium rare in 10 minutes, but with the neck we start the process three days out.”
Last year he noticed sales of his 8oz fillet steaks were weak. “I put on a 6oz steak to see what the difference would be and the fillet started selling again. Now it drives around 80 per cent of the sales.”
He recalls being in catering college nearly 30 years ago and lecturers telling their classes to be very mindful of portion sizes, but while managing costs is not new “it has never been harder to keep the doors open in a restaurant”.
“I’m not necessarily in that market. I work in the world of luxury, in a five-star hotel that has bedrooms that help us prop up our food and beverage offering. I have five food outlets in this hotel,” he says.
“I don’t just have to keep a restaurant open. I’ve got the bar, I’ve got the rooftop, I’ve got banqueting and I’ve got room service. And it’s my job to manage all of those different outlets to make sure that they’re all washing their face and making money.”
He stresses he is not whining – he thinks his industry does itself no favours by perpetually playing the poor mouth. But he does says it needs the support of people.
“One thing I would say to people is if they can go to that restaurant that they like a little bit more often than they used to then it is really going to help that business keep their doors open.”
