If you’re peckish, come into parlour

The first Gourmet Food Parlour restaurant opened in Dún Laoghaire in 2006, the second in Swords in 2008 and the third in Malahide in 2010. The company has not been immune to the chill winds of the recession, but it has managed to keep growing and three outlets have now become six. There is also a separate outside catering division and the business as a whole employs 115 people.

"When we opened in Dún Laoghaire, the boom was in full swing. We found it very difficult to find a location and a lot of people thought we were completely mad," says Lorraine Heskin, who co-founded the company with long-time friend, Lorraine Byrne. "It wasn't as if we were going for a main street spot," Heskin adds. "In fact we deliberately wanted to be in a side street as we had seen others go this route successfully."

Heskin and Byrne met while studying at the University of Limerick. They then went their separate ways and Heskin ended up in the food import business in New York before returning home to become export manager of Jacob Fruitfield.

She is the company’s managing director, while Byrne whose background is in hospitality and customer service, is financial controller.

“Both of us wanted to do our own thing and we spent about a year researching where we could fit into the evolving food scene in Dublin,” Heskin says. “Fresh, quality, and homemade were three key criteria and about 99 per cent of our food is produced on site each day, with locally sourced ingredients where possible.

Artisan breads

“The aim was to offer something that combined a mix of food influences with a homemade twist. Really nice serrano ham with Brie, fresh artisan breads, posh sandwiches, antipasti boards and good cakes and scones. We also decided we wanted to have a really good wine list.”

The company’s first outlet seated just 24 people. Earlier this month, the Dún Laoghaire Parlour relocated to a new 80-seat premises on Crofton Road. It did something similar in Swords in 2012 when it doubled the size of its original 45-seater café.

“We’ve never had big budgets to work with so we’ve been comfortable starting small and expanding when there was a clear business case to do so.”

The company began to feel the impact of the recession in 2009 but Heskin says its “slowly but surely” approach has helped. And when other people were battening down the hatches, the Gourmet Food Parlour opened its 90-seat café in Malahide in 2010.

Grounded “Yes, we had to borrow and use leasing finance to open but it was too good an opportunity to miss. That said, we were still careful not to put ourselves under massive financial pressure,” Heskin says. “We are both very grounded and good at managing resources but the downturn has undoubtedly been challenging and we had to look at taking costs

.”

Heskin and Byrne were determined not to lay off staff as part of their cost-cutting but everything else was fair game. They changed bank, renegotiated rents and contracts with suppliers and tightened up their purchasing across the board.

They took a decision not to increase prices and added new things, such as tapas evenings, to keep customers coming. They also invested in customer feedback to ensure their offering was in sync with what cost-conscious diners were willing to pay for.

The partners doubled their marketing and networking efforts and this paid off when pub entrepreneur, Alan Clancy, invited the Gourmet Food Parlour to become his food partner in his Leeson Street and Dawson Street premises in 2013. The same year the company opened a deli bar in the head office of GameStop in Swords.

And all the time, while growing their business over the last five years, Heskin and Byrne have also grown their families and both have three children under the age of five.

Retail sales currently account for around 80 per cent of the Gourmet Food Parlour's turnover, but the company has also been growing its catering division by becoming involved in a whole new area – sports nutrition. Roughly five years ago it began working with Dublin GAA to provide after-training meals for players and it is now the official food supplier to both the Dublin County Board and to Leinster Rugby.

“Some of these teams train four or five times and we work with their nutritionists to develop simple but tasty recipes that meet their specific nutritional brief,” Heskin says.

“This is a very specialist type of catering and we have put a lot of time into researching how teams in the US, the UK and Australia approach the whole area of nutrition for elite athletes. We have always been open to new opportunities, which I think has stood to us during the recession, and this is a whole new and very interesting direction for our catering division.”