Gourmet dream grew from Big Apple
The tragic events of 9/11 taught Galwegian Lorraine Heskin how people can thrive through adversity, writes Gabrielle Monaghan
ON a clear, crisp autumn morning in September 2001, Galwegian Lorraine Heskin was on New York’s Whitestone Bridge, transfixed by the sight of a hijacked plane — and then another — flying into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan.
The subsequent collapse of the buildings, and the unfolding realisation that terrorists were behind the tragedy, may also have shattered Heskin’s American dream, which had begun just six months earlier. Instead, Heskin soldiered on with life in the Big Apple, carving out a career in the New York food industry, one that would later inspire the creation of her own business, Gourmet Food Parlour (GFP). Today, the company has seven restaurants in Dublin and Galway, 300 employees, a catering division, and €12m in turnover.
“It was a life-changing experience but I stayed for four more years,” says Heskin, now 43. “I felt that the patriotism they showed at the time was sensational. New Yorkers stuck together and there was great camaraderie.”
The fashion for socialising in Instagrammable restaurants may have eclipsed drinking in pubs in urban Ireland. But when Heskin was growing up in Barna — a coastal village just west of Galway city — dining out was a rare treat. While her parents may have stopped the car at Hayden’s Hotel in Ballinasloe en route to Dublin for the family to get a sandwich, Heskin was in her teens by the time she had a full restaurant experience.
While at secondary school in the Galway suburb of Salthill, the teenage Heskin earned her pocket money by working at a till in Roches Stores (now Debenhams) every Thursday and Friday evening, and on Saturdays. She kept the Roches Stores job through summers between college terms while studying at the University of Limerick, where she met Lorraine Byrne, her future co-founder and finance director of GFP.
When Heskin was doing a post-graduate course in business/managerial economics, IBM recruited her during a visit to the UL campus. She moved to Dublin to work for the company in 1999, but felt she would always be a “small fish in a big pond” at IBM, so she moved to New York.
After spending two years in the food distribution sector, Heskin clinched “one of the best jobs in the food business” — as a broker representing suppliers to the restaurant industry, flying to cities like San Francisco to entertain clients. Her boss at the brokerage became a role model who instilled in Heskin a glass-half-full approach to leadership.
Heskin says: “This amazing woman bounced into work every day, and had an amazing relationship with colleagues and suppliers. She was very solid in her opinions as a businesswoman, didn’t cut corners, and her reputation was really important to her. To find someone in a foreign country who completely stands for everything you stand for was incredible.”
But Heskin was a “home bird” at heart, so she returned to Ireland, spending two years working as a group export sales manager at Jacobs Fruitfield in Dublin. Yet, even though she was only in her 20s, Heskin was itching to start her own food business, as was Byrne.
In 2006, as the Celtic Tiger was reaching its peak, the pair took the plunge by opening a 25-seater café down a “side street off a side street” in Dublin’s Dun Laoghaire, despite being rejected for a loan by every bank they approached and “not having a clue” how to run a cafe.
“There was only one landlord in Dublin willing to give us a chance at the time,” says Heskin, who became GFP’s managing director.
“The unit was the most run-down one we saw, so we put every penny of our savings into renovating it. It was essentially a deli café that used locally sourced ingredients, which remains a strong ethos for us today. We started off doing sandwiches, desserts, wine, locally roasted coffee and home-made soup. When we opened the first day, we had a queue out the door.
“Back then, there wasn’t so much competition and the food business was completely different. But I was passionate about brand design, so we had our logo over the door and a little website.”
Just as the two Lorraines were bedding down the Dun Laoghaire eatery, the recession and credit crunch set in. But rather than succumb to the woes of the economic environment, the duo expanded in the capital, opening an outlet on a side street in Swords in 2008, a café in Malahide in 2009, and a catering division in 2010.
“Every time we looked for a unit, we would always sit outside from 6am or 7am with a notebook and tick off the number of people who walked past at breakfast, lunch and dinnertime,” Heskin says.
“In Swords, we couldn’t afford units in the Pavilions Shopping Centre or Main Street. But we got the second-best thing — a unit right beside the industrial estate. So our outlet had commercial business from people working during the week and, at the weekends, residential business from people who lived locally.
“We were paying bills for a 24-7 business, so we decided we may as well open for dinner as well. We brought in a tapas concept, which few people were doing at the time, and had a lad with a guitar who threw out a few Spanish tunes. We went from doing this once a month to every Friday and Saturday. People loved it.”
But it wasn’t enough. To ensure GFP not just survived the recession but could continue to thrive, it needed to diversify. This realisation hit home after Heskin’s self-employed husband gifted her a six-month consultancy with business coach Jane Hogan in 2012.
“Jane helped me step outside myself and look at our business from afar to see how we could grow,” Heskin says. “I remember thinking that we wouldn’t survive if we didn’t change our business model; we were just a café business with tapas, but there were huge restaurant places opening up in Dublin.
“We went to the banks and presented a new concept, then we rebranded, increased our seating capacity, and our business changed overnight. We moved off a side street to a main street in
Dun Laoghaire and Swords, where we now have private dining rooms, a full bar, and 80 seats and 100 seats, respectively.”
GFP’s mission is to serve a funky style of food in a fun, relaxed way. As well as healthy meals developed with nutritionists, there is bottomless prosecco and classic staples like quesadillas and huevos rancheros. The chefs tweak the menu every few months, based on new trends and feedback from customers; every Monday morning, GFP examines online reviews and immediately addresses any consistent problems.
Last year, GFP opened an outlet in Skerries and one in Salthill — its first outside Dublin. It has also operated the kitchen at House on Leeson Street since the venue first opened. In 2018, the company built a new 4,500-sq ft catering kitchen beside its Santry restaurant and has ten delivery drivers, as well as a food truck for outdoor events. Its catering clients include Google, Salesforce, and the insurer AIG, where it operates one of its two kiosk cafes. GFP is also now the official food partner for weddings and other events at Slane Castle, and even catered for the Metallica concert there in June.
Shortly after opening its first catering kitchen during the downturn, the Dublin County Board in the GAA asked GFP to supply sandwiches to their players and suggested they tender to be the sole supplier to the teams, a bid that GFP won.
“When they asked us to tender, it was like saying ‘you’re flying to Vegas’,” Heskin recalls. “Getting that business was one of the best things to have happened.”
Now GFP is one of the largest sports catering companies in Ireland, providing post-training meals devised by sports nutritionists to all of Dublin’s GAA teams. It also supplies the IRFU, the FAI, and Swim Ireland.
“We diversified into this area because it’s a huge area of growth, from rugby players to boxers to soccer players and gymnasts,” Heskin says.
The expansion of the catering business, coupled with the two new restaurants in Galway and Skerries, helped GFP grow by a total of 400pc in 2017 and 2018. It also created some 150 jobs over the same period. Heskin expects turnover to reach €13m by the end of 2019, compared to just shy of €12m last year, and to post “good profits” this year, after investments led to GFP breaking even in 2018.
However, the MD is taking a conservative approach towards expansion for 2020, when GFP plans to open just one new restaurant — again in Galway, in the fast-growing suburb of Knocknacarra. The global economy sits on the brink of recession and chaos over Brexit has exacerbated concerns about the future health of the Dublin restaurant scene.
There have been a handful of high-profile closures in the past 12 months, including Chameleon in Temple Bar and the Jo’Burger restaurant group, as independent operators struggle to balance the books in the face of rising costs, the Vat rate increase, chef shortages, and greater competition from chains such as the Press Up Entertainment Group.
Heskin says: “I would be extremely reluctant to expand at any rapid rate given everything that’s going on. I think hardest thing is sourcing qualify chefs. We’re lucky to have retained people throughout the years, so there’s a low turnover at the higher ranks, but a higher turnover at a low level because people are just passing through and waitressing is not a career for them. However, we now have our own training facility.
“This year we didn‘t open any new restaurants, because I felt we had expanded immensely last year. It took its toll physically and emotionally. We needed to take stock of what we had created.”