Ireland’s dining boom is back - but at what cost?

It’s a small but steady change. You’ll notice it in desserts that start at €7.50, bigger deliveries of sparkling water, the bottle of good wine instead of the glass of house.

The days of two spoons with one pudding are a fading memory for some. Restaurant goers are not only loosening their purse strings, they’re also having their wallets prised open further by a trade that survived the economic slump on lower margins, cheaper rents and a flock of early-bird deals.

From where I sit as Irish Times restaurant critic, I see prices rising. It’s a smaller, calmer boom but the psychological barrier of pricing a main course under €20 has been thrown to the wind.

This year the midrange restaurant has been getting steadily pricier. A year ago dinner for two with drinks was comfortably under €100. Now that’s the exception rather than the rule.

And nobody seems too upset. A recent Monday night attempt to book a table at a newish Dublin restaurant was met with a, “Sorry. We’re fully booked with groups.”

It’s partly down to the strong wave of tourists, whose dollars and sterling buy them a better class of dinner. Visitor numbers were up 11 per cent in the first six months of the year, one in four of them travelling from the US or Britain.

Strong sterling has given hotels and restaurants in the Border counties a boost.

Drink sales are up. And there has even been a recent sighting of the "whale customers", as Anthony Bourdain calls them, the tables who spend five figures on the wine bill on an expense-account credit card.

Water butlers

One of the signs restaurants might be dreaming up wheezes to help us spend our cash came in the summer when Belfast’s Merchant Hotel launched a water menu.

It consisted of 13 bottled waters priced from £4.95 to £26.45 a bottle.

The hotel appointed “two new water butlers that can help guests choose the water that is right for their palate”, according to a press release that landed in the inbox like a shiny penny dropping.

That almost €40 bottle of water was Canadian Arctic Ice Shelf Newfoundland, water from glacial ice melted after thousands of years.

Climate change in a glass, at a euro a gulp.

Of course, they said, anyone who didn’t find that to their taste could have a glass of Belfast’s finest tap water, free of charge.

Restaurateur Kevin Byrne has watched the cycle from his Terenure restaurant Mayfield.

“For a very long time everybody was splitting bills according to what they had. They were trying not to put pressure on others.

That’s dropping off now. You’ll get one person who’ll say, ‘I’ll cover that.’ ”

In recent years people watched every extra to minimise the heartsink when the bill arrived. Eating early, choosing carefully, sharing dessert and going for the plonk meant you could squeak dinner for two under €50.

“People stopped drinking,” one industry source says. “You had people only having a glass of wine with dinner or definitely only going for the cheapest bottle. Now it’s not unusual for the €35 bottle of wine to be ordered.

“Lunch service was just there to maintain cashflow. Everyone was looking for deals, but the early-birds have gone. There’s a feeling now that it’s a good time to put prices up. If they don’t go up now they never will.”

So that pent-up demand for better profits is spilling on to a revised menu near you.

“The reality is that during the core recession years restaurateurs had to take a hit,” says Tom O’Connell of O’Connells in Donnybrook.

So now there’s an attempt to “try to win back some of those personal pension monies that were plundered to keep the business afloat”.

Costs such as rent, rates and insurance have gone up for some restaurants. But restaurateurs have to “read the market”, O’Connell says, and after 17 years in business he sees it as a matter of adapting or failing.

“The single-course meal has arrived. The two-course meal with a sweet shot is the new three-course meal.”

Restaurants are seeing a return of customers in their 30s and 40s, he says. “They have refound their confidence and are willing to spend it,” although he suspects this is “very much a Dublin thing”.

Eight of the 14 mains in O’Connells are now above €20. He would prefer that it wasn’t a majority.

“My reading of the market is that 80 per cent of customers got used to ‘exceptional value for money’ during the recession and that they are not ready to leave that space.”

He’s designing a new menu at the moment. To keep the three-course under €29.50 “it will not necessarily include fillet steak. And yes, the Irish love affair with fillet steak is alive and well.”

O’Connell also cites the chef shortage (“chefs are an endangered species”) as a major factor in the prices diners are being asked to pay.

The skills shortage has been flagged for years now and is not going away as the country’s midrange restaurant scene explodes.

According to one industry source, part of the reason for these price increases is that restaurants have to put more money in the pockets of talented chefs to keep them from flitting to the next new place.

August and April seem to be the months when chefs’ feet get most itchy, and it is proving expensive to persuade good chefs to stay.

“We’ve been very lucky,” one restaurateur says. “But there’s a massive shortage of chefs. You hear about places on their knees having to train up kitchen porters. And that’s when things can get sloppy.”

Work permits

Concerns about a skills shortage haven’t fed into any major Government policy shifts.

The Fáilte Ireland catering college on Dublin’s Amiens Street was one of the first casualties of budget cuts when it was closed more than four years ago. The college used to train about 250 chefs a year.

The Government can point to the drop in the VAT rate for restaurants to 9 per cent to help tide them over the bumpy times.

But the jobbing commis chefs and chefs de partie that are in such short supply are ineligible for work permits in Irish restaurants if they come from outside Europe.

The army of Mexican cooks that do much of the restaurant cooking in cities all over the world are barred from working in Ireland unless they are specialists or senior chefs.

That may be about to change. A spokesman for the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation said this was up for review.

“We are aware that the [National] Skills Bulletin indicates that there is a general skill shortage relating to chefs, and as a consequence it is likely that the presence of the [general chef] category on the Ineligible List will be considered during the autumn review.”

Last month the department changed the rules to make meat boners from outside Europe eligible for work permits in response to a skills shortage in the powerful meat processing industry.

But some diners are a stratosphere away from concerns about the bill. Chef Kevin Thornton watched with alarm recently when his sommelier started opening a particular wine bottle in Thornton's Restaurant.

It was a bottle dating from 1880, and it came with a price tag just shy of €2,000.

Thornton went to talk to the table of four.

He wanted to see if they “deserved” this bottle of wine, he says, and to explain to them that when they drank it that would be a piece of history gone.

They passed his assessment and then ordered a second bottle similarly priced. The final bill for the table came to an eye-watering €6,500.

Tap water not required.