THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW - JAY BOURKE: A MEGALOMANIAC, moody, weird, distracted. All descriptions of Jay Bourke by former employees and passing acquaintances, all of whom have strongly held opinions about the high-profile Dubliner. After all this, Jay Bourke in person is surprisingly, or perhaps suspiciously, charming, and part of this charm is his own frank acknowledgment of the same shortcomings others are so quick to point out.
A shameless self-promoter? He’s the one who alerts me to this particular personality trait when he agrees to the interview, advising me that he will likely try to leverage it to “promote his own businesses”.
And sure enough, as soon as he strolls into Eden and introduces himself with that half-open, half-guarded quality that makes him so hard to pin down, he immediately tells me about the “very exciting” new swimming pool at Bellinter House, his Meath-based boutique hotel. It’s difficult to get him off-message as he remains resolutely upbeat about the hotel business even in these beleaguered times. “We’re filling every weekend with leisure business and we’re doing lots of nice things,” he assures me.
Bellinter House – which opens its new 24-metre, geothermally heated outdoor swimming pool in August – is the first hotel to be added to the Bourke business empire, which currently includes involvement in Cafe Bar Deli, Shebeen Chic, Bobo’s Gourmet Irish Burgers, Pygmalion in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, the Pantibar, the Market Bar, Odessa and the jewel in the crown, Eden.
Eden is where we meet, the Temple Bar restaurant which has Bourke back in the media spotlight these days. The 12-year-old restaurant is the reason for a newly served High Court action by the Government-run Temple Bar Cultural Trust, in a dispute over unpaid rent, a dispute which Bourke claims may bring about Eden’s demise.
“Technically they’re right,” Bourke says of the trust, which is looking for unpaid arrears since a 2006 review increased the rent on Eden to €122,000 a year. “Morally they’re wrong, and economically they’re wrong.”
Dressed in jeans and a checked shirt that would evoke a cowboy simile were it not for its negative connotations here, Bourke is all guns blazing. “We can’t . We’re not able to. Otherwise, we’ll lose the jobs and all, including my own.”
NEVER A MAN to shy from publicity, Bourke was quick to alert the media. “I was a bit nervous about it,” he says. “That there’d be a run of suppliers or a run of staff, or people wouldn’t trust us to honour their bookings.” Sure, it could have backfired, but you get a sense that Bourke knew exactly what he was doing. And unsurprisingly, “the opposite happened. We had huge support from the public and from our regular customers.”
If anything, this latest dispute seems to have made Bourke more determined than ever. “I’m going to save Eden,” he tells me, repeatedly, and there’s an evangelical glint in his eye. “I’m going to. I’m going to save it.” Mix this doggedness with the kind of chutzpah he displays in spades, and it’s hard not to be convinced. “I will ring the President,” he says with no hint of irony. “It’s not on that the rent won’t go down. It will go down because it’s the correct thing.”
According to Bourke, the landlords of all his other premises have reduced their rents to reflect the changing times. Yet passing by Eden on a weekend night, it’s hard to see how these changing times are affecting this particular business. Isn’t there an argument to be made that with bookings still coming in, there must be money to pay the rent? “Posh restaurants are not money machines,” he tells me, immediately defensive.
If he “had been taking a huge salary or driving a Ferrari”, he says he could understand people’s assumption that he can afford to pay the rent. “But we have a family car and a bicycle and that’s the end of it.”
Whether or not you accept Bourke’s intimations of ordinariness, he at least admits he is luckier than many. “Doing well at the moment is earning a wage. I still earn a wage and I’m very lucky to do that.”
But this poster child of the Celtic Tiger is now 43, and the wave of economic success that he rode as a thirtysomething young-gun has crashed. When we meet, he is clearly exhausted, rubbing his eyes with weariness even though he swears he’s seen it all before. “I started out in 1989, so I know recessions,” he says.
None of this deterred Jay Bourke, however. After an undergraduate degree in economics at Trinity, and a brief stint as a model for Ralph Lauren, he and Bob Doyle opened Wolfman Jack’s, a burger joint in Rathmines, with a £50,000 bank loan. He was 22 years old. “It was like lambs to the slaughter,” he recalls. “The arrogance of youth – you think you can do anything. I certainly had it then.” And now? “Obviously, life throws you all sorts of fantastic things, but you get a fair kicking along the way.”
Some might find it hard to see the bruises, given the litany of successes with Jay Bourke’s name on them. After Wolfman Jack’s, he teamed up with the man who was to become his business partner for 15 years, Eoin Foyle. Together, they opened the Globe in 1993, followed not long after by the nightclub Rí-Rá. ”We just kept opening things and building things,” recalls Bourke. “We were having a great time really.”
IT WAS DURING the heady days of an up-and-coming Ireland, where a newfound confidence and youthful population were revitalising the capital city. “At that time there was a palpable joy in the city,” he recalls. “There was a freedom and a fun that hadn’t been in Ireland before.”
And Bourke and Foyle were capitalising on it. The success of the Globe was followed by the Front Lounge, Gubu, Odessa: for a time it appeared the duo could do no wrong, tapping into trends and providing discerning Dublin twenty and thirtysomethings with a social context, and some serious cool.
So what happened? Bewley’s, for one, which Bourke got involved in four years ago, in an attempt to turn around the iconic Grafton Street landmark. “We lost a lot of money on that,” he admits of the venture, which still houses Cafe Bar Deli under a franchise arrangement. “But it’s still there, and we contributed to that in some way.”
Bewley’s wasn’t the only venture to bleed money for Bourke, however. “There are loads of failures,” he assures me. “Loads and loads of them. We opened a pub in Sligo that didn’t particularly work, we opened a pub in London that we sold because we couldn’t make that work.” Lessons learned? “Money lost,” is how Bourke describes it. “We opened a club in Cork that was closed down. We lost a fortune on that one.”
Meanwhile, Bourke became the public face of the partnership, the one who spoke up and spoke out, though not always to an appreciative audience. “I think there’s a history of not speaking out about things in Ireland, of never actually saying things, and I’ve a big mouth on me,” he says with a hint of pride. “I’ve been too outspoken for my own good.”
But surely some degree of self-promotion is necessary for a businessman to succeed? “Oh yeah, prostitution!” he laughs, admitting that courting the media is a necessary part of his particular line of work. “That’s just part of the game.”
Bourke was interviewed, feted, and courted in turn, as he had all the ingredients for home-grown celebrity: he was young, handsome and stunningly successful. Along came RTÉ's The Mentorseries, and Bourke became a household name as the man advising new businesses on how to get started. It's hard to ask this delicately, but did it all go to his head? "It was really interesting, but obviously I should have just run my own business," he says, disarming any criticism with his raised-hands admission. "Stop being an eejit and go home and do your work," he says is the advice he should have taken at the time. "You have to keep your eye on the ball, I keep saying that. You have to go to work and make sure your businesses are running, but sure, I was away for two summers! Wandering around with television cameras."
He was also busy lobbying for the nightclub industry as chair of the Irish Nightclub Association. “It was fascinating,” he says of what it taught him about the operation of Irish government. He recalls one particular debate where he claims the nightclub industry planted every single question asked. Did it work? “It didn’t matter a damn because the Government just brought in whatever they wanted.”
You can see he’s still smarting from that lost battle, and the lack of a fully implemented Intoxicating Liquor Act. “There’s no proper law to planning what we do. It’s too hard to understand as an operator, as a customer, as a guard, as an investor, as a bank,” says Bourke. “It’s astonishing.”
Now Bourke is anything but distracted as he articulates his feelings about how Ireland has been managed through the boom and bust. “I’m disgusted with the way we’ve blown a fabulous chance to build a sustainable economy,” he says. He’s not shy to point the finger either. “The foundation of the current bust is 10 years of consistent mismanagement. It’s Bertie’s legacy, really. It’s turning us into a third-world country again”
According to Bourke, the writing has been on the wall for some time.
“For me, five or six years ago, the cost of doing business was going bananas. The indigenous business sector was under pressure, and we were all saying it.”
As well as the high rents and high wages, businesses were operating in a highly regulated environment. “There are so many government quangos and things we have to comply with,” he says with evident frustration. “Oh my God, it’s endless. What do I do every day? Well part of what I do is this compliance.”
Form-filling, meeting with officials, all of these eat into the daily life of Bourke, who also spends much of his time fixing his various premises. “The maintenance is never-ending,” he sighs. “Half my job is repairing buildings. I do it all the time. It bores me to death.”
He is clearly at pains to put paid to any suggestion that the life of a restaurant and bar owner is all parties and glamour. Because despite efforts to keep it all within a regular working day, he is almost always the go-to guy when something goes wrong. “The thing is the phone could ring, you never know. . . We had a murder in a bar once. So they rang me about that.”
These are the kind of daily unpredictables that are still part of Bourke’s working life, even as it evolves with the creation of new business and partnerships and the loss of others. He and Foyle have more or less parted company after 15 years of working together, though they are still co-investors in a number of interests, and, Bourke claims, still friends. “It just became time, I suppose. It had run its course in a way,” he says of the partnership. “In retrospect, if we’d been totally honest with each other we might have decided to do it earlier, but we were just sort of set in our ways. And at the moment being set in your ways is not the way to be because you have to be very adaptable.”
BOURKE, IT’S CLEAR, is determined to keep adapting, though his pessimism about where the country is headed would be enough to drive others into exile. “Are we going to become a little banana republic again?” he asks at one point, and his answer does not inspire confidence. “Yeah, probably.”
So why does he keep at it? Why not cut his losses and find a better place to do business? “I am Irish, and therefore I am building in Ireland. I know about making things for Irish people. I understand being Irish. What else would I do?”
Though he swears he got into the restaurant and bar business by accident, Bourke has clearly found his niche. Over the course of our conversation, he keeps reminding me of everything he’s not: he’s not, he tells me, a property developer. Later, he points out he’s not a cook, and despite heading up Bellinter house, he even says he’s not a hotelier. So what is he? “I’m a businessman,” he says simply. He’s also a husband, to lawyer and journalist Sarah Harte, father to two children, aged 17 and 12, and an avid sailor, all of which occupy any of the limited downtime he finds. “I’ve got children, I’ve got sailing boats, and that’s it really.”
How about a long-term plan? “I don’t really have one. I’m just glad to be able to stay in business really, and that’s it. If we run what we have and stay afloat during this period, we’ll have done really well.”
It’s a grim outlook from the man who was once the unstoppable force that seemed to galvanise the mythical tiger that we were all so quick to climb aboard, but Bourke takes comfort where he can. “I am comforted by the fact that people will always go out and they will always eat and drink,” he says and this time he’s smiling.
But can we eat and drink our way out of this quagmire? “Small business is what’s going to get us out of this recession,” he pronounces. “Little people making little profits and working hard. And that’s the future of Ireland.” It’s profit that will get this country back on his feet, he says, and Bourke, as if addressing the begrudgers, makes no apologies for it.
“Just because you make a profit doesn’t mean you’re a bastard.”
JAY BOURKE
BORN:Dublin
AGE:43
PERSONAL LIFE:Married to Sarah Harte and the father of two children
CAREER PATH:Opened his first burger joint, Wolfman Jack's, in 1989. Followed that with the Globe and the nightclub Rí-Rá and has a whole list of restaurants and bars to his name, as well as Bellinter House hotel
TURNING POINTS:The opening of the Globe in 1993 marked Bourke's arrival on the bar scene, while Eden, pictured above, which opened in 1997, was his restaurant equivalent