HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY TO FIND THE ONE?
At €2,000 to join, The Fine Dining Club is not a cheap way to meet prospective partners, but with strict guidelines, honest advice and eight weddings – so far – it’s an interesting alternative for singletons seeking love
The singles dinner party is in full swing in Dublin’s swanky Shelbourne Hotel. Around the table are equal numbers of men and women – farmers, teachers, politicians, radio DJs, lawyers, Sunday Times Rich List businesspeople. Sitting among them, making sure there’s a steady flow of wine and conversation – and that no one gets drunk and starts banging on about their divorce – is Liz Doyle, owner of one of Ireland’s most exclusive dating agencies, The Fine Dining Club.
‘I’m like their mammy, I’m there to help them put their best foot forward,’ says Liz, 51, when we meet in Dublin’s Spencer Hotel, where she has also arranged to see several prospective new singles for her books. ‘It started as a bit of a hobby ten years ago when I moved back to Belfast from London. Then five years ago I packed in my day job and started doing The Fine Dining Club full time. Now we’re in Dublin too.’
Former merchant banker Liz must be the perfect facilitator at these dinner parties. Warm, smart and chatty she has a great sense of humour despite traumatic experiences in her own life, not least the murder of her father, Catholic judge William Doyle, by the IRA, while he attended Mass in 1983. Liz, aged 16, heard the shots and saw his assassins running past her as they got away.
‘I think that’s the thing that people in the south forget is that the IRA killed an awful lot of Catholics in Northern Ireland,’ says Liz, explaining that her father was seen as ‘working with the enemy’. More family tragedy came when her only sister Frannie died of cancer two years ago – and Liz herself was treated successfully for ovarian cancer in 2013.
There were shocks on the work front too. Having worked for six years in investment banking company Goldman Sachs, Liz had moved to Lehman Brothers in London when it sensationally collapsed in 2008. ‘Life is not about the past. Life is about the future, it’s here to be lived,’ she philosophises. ‘I think that’s why I started dating in the first place. Now people say to me, “I don’t want anyone with baggage”. Well, try and find an 18-year-old so!’ she exclaims. ‘If you don’t have baggage you haven’t lived. I think the point is how you cope with it. You have to pick yourself up and get on.’
But Liz did feel ‘a bit lost’ after losing that Lehman Brothers job, having also decided around this time to end a long-term relationship with her boyfriend, who worked in finance. Her mother Nora, a GP, had died the previous year, and ‘the house had to be sold in Belfast and stuff had to be done’, so she moved home. ‘The plan was to take a few months and a few months turned into a few years.’
Liz had reinvented herself before when the family upped stakes and moved to Oxford following her father’s death. ‘I found it liberating,’ she says, of leaving troubled Northern Ireland behind as a girl to attend an English school. She was free at last to focus on normal teenage concerns, like exams and friendships that have endured to this day. Liz excelled academically and went on to graduate in both economics and law.
Finding herself back in Belfast aged 39, Liz threw herself into her new life with typical gusto, getting a job in a big accountancy firm and joining dating website match.com. ‘It was a disaster for me,’ she sighs. ‘I’m not saying online dating or Tinder isn’t for everybody. People ask me and I say it does work, but I think it gets harder as you get older and I wouldn’t be convinced it works too well for people over 40, 45. There just aren’t enough people,’ she says, likening it to a pyramid.
‘At the bottom it’s great, there’s loads of people. You’ve to plough through a bit of dross to get to them but there’s a few gems. The further up the pyramid you get, you’re not finding the gems.’
One of Liz’s dates claimed to be an architect at a well-known firm. ‘It’s very stupid to lie in Belfast, it’s too small. My next door neighbour works for that architecture firm. So literally I’m taking out the bins and I tell him about this guy and he says, “Oh yeah, he’s a very nice guy, he’s not one of the architects, he just works in the office, he does admin”.
‘I don’t care, but you lied, what else did you lie about?’ she complains. ‘When he turned up one night on a date in a Mercedes it turned out it was his brother’s car. It is a bit sad. Because actually you’re a really nice guy and you’re quite interesting, I don’t really care – but I do care now because you lied about it.’
Another date shaved at least 20 years off his age. When Liz saw the silver-haired man approach her in the café she ‘genuinely thought he was sick and his dad had come to tell me. I looked at him and thought, “But you’re not 40something?”’
Another guy who was witty and charming during virtual communications was monosyllabic when they met. ‘Then eventually he said, “My mate is very funny, I got him to reply to your messages.” I said, “Is your mate single?!” No, sadly he was in a relationship. A complete waste of time.’
Apart from dating, Liz had also ‘done the things you’re meant to do to meet new people: I joined a yoga club, a walking club, a book club, I ➤
“IF YOU DON’T HAVE BAGGAGE, YOU HAVEN’T LIVED, I THINK THE POINT IS HOW YOU COPE WITH IT”
“SOME OF MY CLIENTS ARE DOCTORS OR LAWYERS AND THEY WANT SOMETHING MORE PRIVATE”
played tennis, I volunteered. But a lot of the people I met were married.’
Enough was enough. ‘I said to a single friend of mine in Belfast who had been a headhunter in London, “Come on, we’re going to have a singles dinner party. We’ll have a whole crowd of people and a bit of a laugh together. If nothing else we’ll meet new people and have a bit of fun.” I went around to everyone I knew who was single or had single friends and said, “Will you come to dinner?” We had a dinner in Deane’s Michelin star restaurant in Belfast. We had 32 the first night, 16 men, 16 women, in our own private area.’
A frisson of excitement swept through the table when TV presenters Eamonn Holmes and Chris Evans popped their heads around the door to say hi, having met some of the singles elsewhere in the building. But best of all, love blossomed. ‘We actually have a couple from that dinner who are married with two children now. She was a friend I met in the walking club,’ says Liz. ‘She’s a speech therapist and he’s in business.’
Another of her couples in their 60s recently tied the knot in an ‘Elvis-style chapel of love’ in Las Vegas. ‘We’ve had eight weddings so far. I went to the first two and then I stopped because it’s expensive. A new hat and a hotel stay and a present? This is more than my fee!’ she quips.
As you might imagine, the Fine Dining Club is not for the light of pocket, with a €2,000 annual fee, and an upfront charge for each monthly night out in high-end restaurants including Shu and the Fitzwilliam in Belfast and One Pico and Pig’s Ear in Dublin.
‘People sometimes say, “Gosh that’s a lot of money”. Well, not really because the average dating agency in Dublin charges between €900 and €1,000 to meet three people,’ she claims. ‘So actually we are very good value.’
Can people pay in instalments? ‘Yes but if you come to me aged 50-something and say you have to pay in instalments I might say to you, maybe not. Because at a certain level you have to be able to afford this.’
Many dating apps are free but Liz argues that her clientele choose her service to maintain a certain amount of privacy. ‘I had a lovely lady who was a teacher who taught 6th form. One of the kids saw her profile on Match, printed it off and stuck it up in the dining hall. She laughed it off but she was mortified. Some of my clients are businessmen or doctors or lawyers and they want something more private.’
Free dating apps ask you to share information such as your occupation, whether you are divorced or separated and the kind of person you are looking for. ‘Do you want your clients or your co-workers knowing all that about you?’ asks Liz, whose clients are ‘nurses, teachers, people in IT, farmers, businessmen, I have everybody in between. I think people think we only have Sunday Times Rich List. I have one or two, yes, but they’re certainly not the majority of people. Mostly it’s people who have decent jobs. People say to me, “What’s your average guy?” Yesterday I saw a guy who is a gamer, he makes games for a company, and I saw a guy who runs his own small business.’
Liz pulls no punches when doling out advice to her lonely hearts. ‘I’m quite brutal. I’ve had a gentleman who said to me, “You’re just like your one on the telly”. I said, “Who’s your one on the telly?” He said, “The Millionaire Matchmaker. She can be not very nice either,”’ she says, referring to the American reality TV show. I was saying to him, “You need to stop talking about your divorce. You got divorced three years ago, I’m sure it was very tough, but if you want to meet someone you need to move on. We can recommend someone professional to talk to if you feel the need.”’
The irony now is that Liz herself is still single having initially started organising dinner parties so she could meet someone. Does she still want to find love? ‘I do, yeah. I started this but now I’d rather have their money,’ she jokes. ‘They’re my clients, I can’t go out with my clients, that’s not how it works. So, we’ll see.’
She’s so busy fixing everyone else up ‘that I haven’t fixed myself up yet’, she agrees. ‘But, listen, if it’s for you it won’t go past you. I’m quite sure I’ll meet somebody.’
Now organising dinner parties in both Belfast and Dublin, the Fine Dining Club is ‘doing our bit for cross-border relations. We had a dinner party in Belfast two weeks ago – 24 people, 12 guys, 12 women – and the northern women just thought the southern men were Christmas. Because we think the southern accent is gorgeous and the southern men think the northern women are very nice. So everybody’s happy.’
She says the women who attend these foodie evenings chat easily with each other – ‘Oh that’s a nice dress’, ‘where did you get the lipstick?’ – while the men tend to ‘stand there, petrified, holding a pint. But when you chat to them and warm them up a bit they’re lovely. That’s really what a lot of them are looking for. It’s not the glamorous babe on their arm, they’re looking for someone who will talk to them and who is interested in them. Kindness is a highly underrated virtue,’ she adds. ‘I think it’s the best thing you could look for in a human being. Women don’t look for kindness enough.’
The women she finds easiest to match are ‘not the best looking girls or the high flying girls, they’re the smiley, happy, chatty women, who are interested in people.’
The bane of Liz’s life are her clients’ ‘big, long lists. I keep saying to everyone, “No long lists”. This is not Dunnes, it’s not a Ken doll. “Do you have a dark one?” “I want a taller one”. “Does he come with a sense of humour?” “What about a six pack?” It doesn’t work like that. You’re not in a supermarket. While you can absolutely specify the things that you think are important – intelligence, wit, sense of family – the package it comes in? No.’
Liz vets would-be clients. ‘I talk to them on the phone and I meet them. I tell them about us and I find out a bit about them. I would also say this is not for you for various reasons, like they’re too young or too old. Like, 27 is too young and 74 is too old because I don’t have a lot of people in that age group at the moment. But that might change.’
Liz admits that ‘not everyone can afford’ her service, and she wants to share some tips from the coalface of dating. ‘First of all, don’t rule out chance. I think everyone thinks you have to go out to a pub on Friday or Saturday night and be dressed up and ready to go. You could be walking the dog, you could be standing in Starbucks. Chat. Be open to people.
‘If you’re going to do internet dating, pay for it because those boys [on the free sites] are not serious, pet. If you’re under 35, okay. If you’re over 35 they’re there for one thing only and it’s not your conversational skills. Come on. If they have to put their credit card or debit card down somebody is noticing that they’re using that so the chances of them having a girlfriend or a wife are less. They’re actually interested in meeting someone.’
If you have matched with someone on a dating app ‘talk to them for one week and if they’re not going to meet up with you then move on. Because they are probably sitting at home with either a girlfriend or wife in the background. It’s an ego thing, “Oh look at all these women talking to me”. I also say to people, go on for a month, suspend your membership for a month, go back on. The people that are still there, hmm, why are they still there? Go for the newbies.’
She adds: ‘It can be soul destroying. A lot of men – and sometimes women too, I’ve seen some of the things women have said to clients of mine on websites – can be cruel and harsh online which they would never be in person. But they’re happy to say things on text or on email. Don’t be going there. Save your soul.’
VISIT thefinediningclub.com for details