It was Bloomsday in 2000 when best friends Fiona Fairbrother and Niamh Healion set up a hole-in-the-wall lunch spot, Soup Dragon on Capel Street in Dublin.
“It was essentially the hottest day of the year and we opened a soup restaurant. People thought we were mad,” says Healion. “But we were determined.”
More than 25 years later, the popular Dublin cafe is due to close, with a new landlady taking over the lease. It is not clear what the plan is for the premises.
The former teachers-turned-waitresses-turned-business owners met in the late 1990s working as servers in Dublin at the newly opened Elephant and Castle restaurant in Temple Bar (an international outpost of the original restaurant founded by George Schwartz in Greenwich Village in New York).
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“The buzz back in the day when Liz Mee ran the place was amazing,” said Healion. “Observing the system and how she ran the business just gave you confidence to consider doing something yourself.”
This environment served as the inspiration for the friends to set up their own business in Dublin.
Fairbrother recalled how, in London at the time, “soup places were up and coming, so we thought we would do something like that”.
She added: “We just kind of went with it. We didn’t have a plan, we had no experience in business and we had no formal training as chefs. We would practise making one soup a week.”
The basic business model of a cheap but nutritious lunch of soup, fresh bread and a piece of fruit remained unchanged in the years that followed.
“When we started off, people weren’t drinking coffee – they were only drinking tea," said Fairbrother. “And they were really self-conscious about walking around with a cup in their hand. I remember my dad being like, ‘but sure nobody’s going to do that’. We sold very few coffees in the early days.”
Healion believes the accessible price point of Soup Dragon meant it always had a wide and varied customer base. “We’d get students from Bolton Street, solicitors and barristers from the Four Courts, tourists – every walk of life.”
Soup Dragon will close and the pair will take the brand with them as the new landlady takes over the lease for the premises.
The decision came earlier than planned, but a number of factors meant it made sense for the friends and business partners.
“Just with the two of us since Covid, it’s been a little bit more challenging,” said Fairbrother.
“We had four or five staff pre-Covid and since Covid it’s only been the two of us. We are wrecked. It’s hard work.”
This became particularly apparent a year ago.
“Fiona had an accident last year,” said Healion. “She was knocked off her bike and broke her collar bone and we were quite exposed then in terms of having no staff and trying to keep standards up. It was a bit of a wake-up call”.
The two had planned to run the outlet for another five years, but their landlady was keen to buy back the lease sooner.
After the closure, Fairbrother hopes to return to teaching while Healion plans to set up something “lowkey, like a food truck or a coffee cart”.
While the duo made all the soups in-house themselves, Healion’s late mother, Mary Sheehan, baked the bread and pastries.
“She only stopped because of Covid, but she didn’t want to stop at all,” said Healion. “She was a real people person. She poured the love into the baking. She just had a lightness of touch.
“She’d make simple things like pastries, scones, muffins and brown bread. People would come in requesting her brown bread especially.
“She was home-taught but she was phenomenal. Her bread-and-butter pudding was like a cloud.”
On her business partner and friend, Healion said: “We have been through it all together – the whole spectrum. Losing parents, getting married, having kids.”
“And still talking to each other,” joked Fairbrother. “The friendship is the best thing that came out of it.
“Some days we are outside locking up and actually can’t close the door because we are laughing so much. That’s special. I don’t think we’ll meet anyone else that has the same sense of humour as us.”
“That’s going to be the hardest part, not working together every day,” added Healion.
She says there is one silver lining in the business’s closure: “We are finally going to take a holiday together.”
Soup Dragon will close at the end of February 2026
