Fired up: O’Kane ready for restaurants to reopen
Entrepreneur knows how hard the battle is going to be for the hospitality industry, but he is ready for the fight, writes
IN 2002, Slane Castle was decked out in white lilies for the €100,000-reception for Brian McFadden and Kerry Katona’s wedding. Hello! magazine had bought the exclusive rights to photograph the popstars’ nuptials. Behind the scenes, entrepreneur Padraic O’Kane had drafted in his mother — a former hotelier — to act as housekeeper for the wedding. O’Kane was just 29 when he secured a contract from Lord Henry Mountcharles to manage the wedding operations and VIP side of Slane Castle’s concert business.
“We operated 10 bedrooms at Slane for Henry at the time and the venue would only be used once or twice a month for weddings,” says O’Kane, now 47. “I conned a young lady — namely my mother — to be the housekeeper for that business for a few years.”
On a Wednesday afternoon Zoom call, O’Kane is in a more sedate form than during the dizzying heights of celebrity weddings. He reports from the study of his Newry home that “it wasn’t a good day yesterday”.
As well as being the managing partner of the Fire Steakhouse & Bar at the Mansion House on Dublin’s Dawson Street, Sole Seafood & Grill on South William Street and the conference and events centre at the Mansion House, O’Kane is joint game promoter of the Aer Lingus College Football Series. On Tuesday, a money-spinning Navy v Notre Dame American football game earmarked for the Aviva Stadium in August was called off, having fallen foul of the Covid-19 restrictions. Some 39,000 US visitors were due to travel to Dublin for the college football season opener, which would have made it the largest number of Americans to travel outside of the US for a single sporting event.
The five-game series will now start in 2021, when the University of Illinois will play the University of Nebraska at the Aviva, and O’Kane, who co-runs Irish American Events, is hopeful the Navy v Notre Dame game will be back as soon as 2022. “It’s a tough pill to swallow,” says O’Kane.
But O’Kane has plenty to occupy his time. At Fire, which he runs with business partner Larry Murrin, the founder of Dawn Farms, protocols are being put in place for the reopening of restaurants on June 29 and the layout of the steakhouse has been rearranged. Hand-sanitising units — costing €300 each — have been fitted, full-time cleaning staff are being hired and the outdoor terrace has been extended for outdoor dining. Guests will only be allowed in small groups and will have to give the restaurant their email and phone details. Staff will undergo temperature checks for the coronavirus.
Both Fire, which once had 180 seats, and Sole, a 120-seater restaurant, will reopen with just one-metre social distancing — in line with WHO recommendations — rather than the two metres advised to date by the Government.
“We will have to take a stance,” O’Kane says. “At two metres, we would lose 60pc occupancy, compared to opening up with a minimum of one metre, which would mean losing 40pc of our occupancy. Someone will have to come in and close it down if we are breaking the law.
“Assuming that we get a half-decent Christmas and the fact that we had a good January and February, we are envisaging that turnover will be 50pc lower this year than in previous years. That has a knock-on effect in staffing, so we are starting back with 35pc fewer staff, which is a crying shame.”
Before the crisis, the restaurant sector was worth some €2.2bn a year and employed more than 72,000 people, according to the Restaurants Association of Ireland. O’Kane believes the industry’s recovery has to be based on lowering its cost base, not just through the lowering of the 13.5pc Vat rate on restaurants but on the 23pc rate on beverages.
“No offence to any of the bodies in the combined hospitality industry, but we are not good at talking to each other so we didn’t lobby strong enough for Vat. I think the tourism recovery taskforce is the place to deal with it. We need to deal with the cost base and look at the domestic market for the next six to nine months — how to get Irish people to visit our cities and towns, and how to make it easier for them such as by keeping visitor attractions and museums open at night-time.”
O’Kane hasn’t forgotten his small-town roots.
He grew up in Longford and attended St Mel’s College, and now sits on the board of the St Mel’s Brewing Company. When he and his four siblings were young, his mother ran a B&B in Longford town and his father ran a beef farm in the countryside. It was in Longford that O’Kane picked up a joint love of beef and hospitality.
During the weekdays, the children would help out with the B&B and weekends were spent on the farm.
“At the B&B, anglers would come back from England every year and you would see the same Americans coming each year,” O’Kane says. “We almost grew up with these people. At such a young age, we didn’t understand that they were tourists — we just thought they were people who came to visit us every year and brought us presents. The hospitality side of me certainly comes from Mum and from growing up in that environment of the famous Irish welcome.”
His father reared Limousin and Charolais cattle and brought his children to livestock shows.
“We might have had an All Ireland-winning heifer and it would be top-end beef but it would still be cooked well done,” O’Kane says. “But I got to learn about good-quality beef and I brought that through to the restaurants with me.”
During the Troubles, O’Kane headed to the north Antrim coast to pursue a diploma at the now-defunct Northern Ireland Hotel & Catering College in Portrush. “I worked part time in Kelly’s hotel and nightclub in Portrush,” he says.
Afterwards, he moved to England to work with the Forte hotel and leisure group, which was later acquired in a hostile takeover for £3.9bn (€4.35bn) by Granada PLC. During his five-year stint with Forte, O’Kane learned the ropes at hotels in Folkstone, Stroud and Nottingham, specialising in food and beverage, and believes he owes his current career to those experiences.
“During those five years, I got promoted and moved along,” he says. “If I had started my career at a provincial hotel in Ireland, I don’t think my career would be where it is today, because back then hoteliers were very family-oriented.”
But O’Kane started to feel homesick and moved to Dublin in 1997 with his now-wife Tanya, a Forte colleague he had first met at catering college. He embarked on a five-year spell with catering company Masterchefs and was promoted to commercial director. But the ambitious O’Kane was keen to plough his own furrow and, in 2002, set up his own events and catering business. After Slane, his next big break came two years later, when he clinched a contract to co-ordinate 350 events on behalf of the OPW during Ireland’s presidency of the European Union.
It was during this time that he met Murrin. O’Kane’s company had used a catering company founded by Murrin’s sister, Fran. The two men got on well, but a twin tragedy deepened the bond between them — O’Kane and Murrin bonded when Fran and O’Kane’s brother-in-law, Mike, both died of cancer.
“It was an unfortunate connection for both of us,” O’Kane says. “But we make a great partnership.”
By 2005, both O’Kane and Murrin had developed an appetite for investing in the restaurant business and submitted a tender to manage conference and events at the Mansion House’s Round Room and to operate a restaurant in the building’s adjoining supper room. Their new venture, MHL, was born.
“We looked at London and the States,” O’Kane says. “In Chicago, we found a restaurant called Wildfire and we ‘plagiarised’ it — well, we got a lot of ideas from it — and we dropped the ‘Wild’ from the name. We realised there was a gap in the Dublin market for a casual steakhouse. After a substantial refurbishment, we opened the restaurant under the Fire brand.”
By 2009, O’Kane’s Dundalk-based hotel and restaurant fit-out business had succumbed to the recession after the collapse of developers “brought down specialist small businesses like ours with them”.
But O’Kane believes it taught him a lesson on how to steer a business through a crisis like Covid-19.
“When last February came, I was able to react quicker and knew how to demonstrate clear leadership, whereas back in 2008 and 2009 it was ‘ah, it’ll be alright, we’ll get ourselves through this’.”
In 2016, when Dublin’s restaurant scene was buzzing again, O’Kane and Murrin went on the hunt for a location for an upmarket sister restaurant to Fire.
When Zaragoza, a tapas restaurant on South William Street, and its long-term lease came on the market, the pair swooped on it. They bought it from a group of high-profile investors, including former Fianna Fáil minister Mary Hanafin, and turned it into a high-end fish restaurant.
“Just like we found Fire in Chicago, we found the idea for Sole in Amsterdam. It was right on track in its business model when we had to close it down in March,” O’Kane says.
When the restaurants reopen, customers will “initially come out and there will be a little surge. The big worry for a city like Dublin is the period from September to November — who is the customer going to be Monday to Thursday? We had 10 million tourists coming last year and that made up a lot of the revenue going into hospitality. To be fair to our domestic folks, they can’t make that up. It’s a new now.”