Restaurant and hotel Christmas trade dries up: ‘I had a full house and then everybody cancelled’

"This is the end of the line. I am fighting for my business now, because if I don't it's gone, and what do I do then?" Nichola Dowling, who owns Loko restaurant in Waterford city with her chef husband, Jamie, voices the concerns of many in the hospitality business this week. Widespread cancellations of corporate Christmas bookings, along with a dramatic reduction in reservations made by groups of family and friends, is taking hold in what should be their busiest time of year.

Last month the chief medical officer, Tony Holohan, and the National Public Health Emergency Team said that cancelling social plans in the run-up to Christmas would be a responsible decision and that people should limit their social contacts, amid the ongoing surge in Covid-19 cases and the arrival of the Omicron variant in Ireland. The fallout, for hospitality businesses, has been dramatic.

“We rely on December – every hospitality business does: it gets you through to March – and we’re not going to have that this year. We’ve lost all of our corporate Christmas bookings, 100 per cent of it. The factories, the hospital staff, anyone that we would normally have, they all rang me and said, ‘We’ve been told in work that we can’t be seen to have staff parties – the optics of it don’t look good. We’re really sorry,’” says Dowling. “It is a lockdown, without saying it’s a lockdown, and without all the supports that a lockdown would entail.”

The couple bought the landmark restaurant, opposite University Hospital Waterford, five years ago, and built up a solid trade and a good reputation for the business, which pre-Covid could seat up to 150 diners over three levels. But now it’s not just the loss of their Christmas corporate bookings that is putting their business at risk: personal bookings are also significantly reduced.

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“We only did three tables on Tuesday night. For Friday evening I had a full house – 60 people booked – and then everybody cancelled, and I was left with only a table of three. People are just not going out now. They’ve been advised to cut back on socialising,” says Dowling, who adds that she and her husband are “watching five years of hard work just going down the drain”.

During last year’s lockdowns the couple turned to takeaway, and the business was successful, so they have continued it, moving that part of their enterprise, Little Loko, to another site. “We tried everything to keep the doors open and the bills paid. If everything keeps going the way it is and we lose the restaurant – and it is a possibility: that’s the reality of the situation – we have the takeaway to fall back on.”

No 1 Pery Square

In Limerick city, Patricia Roberts, owner and manager of the boutique hotel, restaurant and spa No 1 Pery Square, has also spent the past week on the phone, taking cancellations. "This time two weeks ago Christmas was looking good: we were in a good position. Then last week, over the space of two days, we lost €55,000 worth of business. I just couldn't believe how quickly it all happened and how it fell apart. It's our busiest month of the year, and it sees us through January and February. It's probably three months of business in one month."

Roberts and her team had a busy autumn, with their Christmas entertainment packages selling well to corporate clients. “We spent September and October managing things very carefully. We are a small business, so our group size would be small, but we had made sure every group had a private space or a private time in the restaurant.”

Then the phone started ringing. “There were two groups that hadn’t cancelled by Friday, and everything else was wiped out. The only reason they hadn’t called was they hadn’t the heart to ring me up to do it, because they’d cancelled last year too. So I made it easy for them,” Roberts says. “I managed every single group booking myself this year, because it needed to be minded.”

The reduction in the support offered by the employment wage subsidy scheme, or EWSS, which came into effect this week in the first stage of a planned gradual winding up of the government initiative, has compounded problems for the industry. The scheme gives businesses affected by Covid-19 a subsidy per employee to help keep them in work. From Wednesday the maximum weekly payment per employee was reduced by 42 per cent, from €350 to €203.

“The EWSS scheme has been a safety net. Some might say it propped us up, and it has at times. But, if it didn’t, the industry would be in big trouble and we’d have lost a lot of great operators. To lose that much business, and not review the support measures that were declining one week later, it’s just like jumping off a cliff, it’s crazy,” Roberts says.

Rascals Brewing Company

It's not just high-end hospitality that has been hard hit with pre-Christmas cancellations. At Rascals Brewing Company, in Inchicore in Dublin, pizza and beer tasting nights, costing from €14 a head plus drinks, had been selling well until the mood changed.

"We have lost at least 800 covers, considering our Thursdays and Fridays in December had been booked to capacity, with groups ranging from 20 to 50," says Joe Donnelly, marketing manager.

“We spent most of September and October working really hard to reach and secure corporate bookings for Christmas parties. We developed a very enticing set of offers for large groups, with optional brewery tours as a fun activity to include as part of their evening here.”

Donnelly can pinpoint the exact time the cancellations started to roll in: mid-November and the chief medical officer’s recommendation that Christmas socialising be curtailed. “This was the nail in the coffin for hospitality in December. Within a week we had lost 90 per cent of our corporate Christmas party bookings.”

Asador and Prado restaurants

For Shane Mitchell, owner and operator of Asador and Prado restaurants, in Ballsbridge and Clontarf in Dublin, and the new Lennan's Yard restaurant and bar, on Dawson Street in the middle of the city, a string of cancellations at Prado led him to decide to close that restaurant for sit-in dining, and turn it into a dine-at-home hub. "We were left with a really difficult call: continue to trade with daily erosion to the pipeline bookings, and lose thousands of euro, or close our doors for dine-in until year end and focus on producing the Asador and Prado at home boxes."

Mitchell blames the Government’s messaging on socialising for the cancellations at Prado.“The big danger is being permitted to trade by the Government but at the same time being left with no customers, due to the constant flow of messaging to limit or stop socialising. It’s killing business. I’m not advocating a lockdown, but being stuck in no-man’s-land is beyond difficult.”

There is strong demand for his dine at home offering, however. “We have seen a spike in demand for the boxes, and we made a call to try and earn some money from them so that we could go again with Prado dine-in for 2022. We are busy fulfilling these orders now, and we have a limited supply of our Christmas boxes left.”

Click and Collection

In the current climate, dine-at-home restaurant meals seem set to make a widespread return, according to Suzanne Rigby, who set up Click & Collection in April 2020 with her husband, Mark Hooper. The couple supply software to restaurants that enables them to sell takeaway meals direct to diners. Over the past 18 months 250 Irish restaurants have signed up for the system.

“We are definitely seeing a shift. It started Thursday of last week and across the weekend. I talked to a good few restaurants, and they have the finger ready to push on them. But they were really hoping that they might not have to, because they want people in their restaurants: that’s their life. But they are ready, in the background,” Rigby says.

Outdoor dining is also proving a popular option for pre-Christmas celebrations, where operators have made their offerings weatherproof. The chef and entrepreneur Kwanghi Chan recently opened a 100-seat Asian food restaurant on Sir John Rogerson's Quay in Dublin 2, in collaboration with Fresh, the food store, and about half of the seating is outdoors. "We are getting a lot of requests for outdoor dining. With everything happening at the moment, people want to minimise their risk while still being able to dine out. We provide large heaters and blankets," Chan says.

In Waterford, eating outdoors in a heated space is also an option at Loko. “When no money was coming in, we put in outside dining,” Nichola Dowling says. But even this option is not improving the bookings numbers now. “It’s devastating. We are close to a mental breakdown. That’s how bad it is.”