Orna Mulcahy’s big regret? Missing her chance to open a Dublin cafe

It was the early 1980s and things weren’t great. Friends were scattering to London and New York and I was stalling a bit, doing catering jobs and waitressing, with a vague idea of setting up a cafe with a friend. I’d been baking apple tarts since childhood and I loved – really loved – making tea for people. My friend had lived abroad in exotic locations and had grown up with diners and ice cream parlours and pavement cafes in the sun.

The Dublin cafe market was in no way crowded. There was Bewley’s, and an Italian place on South Anne Street called the Coffee Inn where you could get a milky coffee with a bit of foam on top, and the odd place where your mother would meet a friend. Mostly the coffee was weak and awful. Cappuccinos, espressos, flat whites were all in the future. Premises were plentiful, though. Shops had closed down and no one was rushing to open them again. South William Street had nothing going on, and Temple Bar was quite dead. A guy we knew owned some buildings around Duke Street. He offered us one, rent-free, for two years.

Suddenly my friend just wasn’t that keen. She wanted to get away from Dublin, and while I was picking out crockery in my head, she was doing a Tefl course so she could teach English abroad. Soon after, she left for Spain. I moved to London and got a job on a magazine. A few years later, in Sydney, I worked nights in cafes, as well as a day job in journalism and loved being in charge of a big, hissing espresso machine.

I still love making tea and coffee for people and have a humongous collection of cups and saucers. But my own cafe? It just wasn’t to be.