Destination uncertain for gourmet luxury food hall

Fallon Byrne became not just a shop but an event. Now an examiner is in charge. What went wrong?

THINGS WERE pretty busy in Fallon Byrne on Saturday. Of course it was New Year’s Eve, a busy time for any gourmet food hall (The Irish Times called Fallon Byrne a gourmet food hall on Saturday, and now is not the time to break ranks).

Whatever you want to call it – and some people would say that Fallon Byrne is a destination luxury food store with the wild hibiscus flowers in syrup to prove it – on Saturday two-thirds of its premises in Exchequer Street was thronged. At one point the queue for the cash desks was a dozen people deep. A sign stuck on the bannisters declared that the restaurant upstairs was closed for lunch but would be open for dinner; and that hot food was available elsewhere.

This arrangement must explain the singular sight of a man getting into Fallon Byrne’s small lift with a baby buggy and two steaming lasagnes.

It was kind of hard to believe that an interim examiner had been appointed to Fallon Byrne just the day before. Most customers would have assumed that the greatest challenge facing the company was the fact that the only lavatories are on the third floor.

However, according to newspaper reports, the examiner has been appointed and he will run the business as a going concern. “This is a very good system,” said the young man who was serving skinny latte slowly – getting a cup of coffee at the Fallon Byrne counter on the ground floor is an unhurried process. Two medium skinny lattes to take away is €5.18. A slice of gluten-free Bakewell tart (delicious) is €1.92.

Like a lot of Fallon Byrne’s junior staff, this young man is foreign. He was surprised and pleased that in Ireland an examiner could be appointed to a business without closing it.

“We’ll continue to trade as normal,” said a manager who identified herself as Jenny. She had been terribly nice to me before I told her I was a journalist. She declined to give her surname: “No, I’m good thanks.” She also declined to discuss how long the examiner had been appointed for: “We have loads of time.”

It is difficult to understand how a shop that charges €10.95 for a guinea fowl – the fashionable bird for 2012 – could be insolvent. But apparently it is so. Lawyers representing Fallon Byrne and its directors, Paul Byrne and Fiona McHugh, told Mr Justice George Birmingham last Friday that it could not meet a tax bill of €1.4 million. The Revenue Commissioners have petitioned to have it closed down.

The company had suffered in the recession, the lawyers said. But turnover had levelled off at €8 million. Fallon Byrne does a small range of household products, and a four-pack of Andrex toilet tissue costs €4.75.

Somewhere along the line Fallon Byrne, which those who know these things say is modelled on the Dean DeLuca store in New York, became not just a shop but an event. Its vegetables seem always to be viewed by very thin young women with hemp shopping bags.

At weekends it has more than its fair share of conscientious and prosperous parents, with just the one child in tow.

Wandering past the Wild Hibiscus Flowers In Syrup at €11.95 per jar – you put them at the bottom of a glass, then add champagne, who knew? – I met someone I hadn’t seen for years, in the nice way that you do in Dublin at Christmas time.

She never bought anything in Fallon Byrne, she said, except the occasional tub of goats’ milk ice cream. Everything else was too expensive.

“I just come in to look at all the lovely things,” she said.

I don’t know about Dean DeLuca, whose flagship store in SoHo was established in 1977, and now has 14 shops altogether according to its website, but Fallon Byrne is a strange amalgam of quite ordinary parts. The restaurant, upstairs, has one of the nicest public rooms in Dublin with good food and less good service. Before Christmas this restaurant was running two lunch sittings a day, and from the beginning of December it was impossible to get a table for four in the second half of the week.

The ground floor has a grocer, a greengrocer, a meat and fish counter and a delicatessen, as well as a sandwich bar where you can get your lunch, and high tables where you can eat it. In the basement is a wine bar that does food, with big tables and photogenic racks of wine.

In recent years Fallon Byrne added a newspaper kiosk, of all things, just inside its front door. It makes its own cranberry sauce, which is €3.95 for a 290ml jar.

How could this go wrong? Fallon Byrne seems to specialise in exquisite detail.

On the windowsills that look out on to Exchequer Street sit little tin buckets of daffodils and hyacinth bulbs. The hyacinth bucket is €9.55. You've got to wonder what the fictional Hyacinth Bucket, as played by Patricia Routledge in Keeping Up Appearances, would make of it all.

And then there are the small pots of basil. They sell for €9.95. In this climate buying basil has always been the triumph of hope over experience. It is sobering to think how much basil we must have buried as a nation in recent years.