When David Barry started the Independent Pizza Company in Dublin in 1984, he remembers many of his customers not knowing what a pizza was.
“There were only three places in Dublin that did any form of pizza back then and they were pretty universally awful,” he says. “We felt there was a market for bringing good pizza to Dublin”.
Barry and his wife Jackie Keating went on to set up a second and a third restaurant in Dublin, opening Gotham Café in South Anne Street in 1993, followed by Gotham South in Stillorgan in 2010.
The couple credit their longevity in the restaurant industry to consistency and flexibility. “One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that the saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is complete rubbish,” Barry says. “You have to keep adapting and changing.”
The success of Gotham Restaurant Group, which employs 70 people, hasn't been without its share of challenges.
The business had already lost 15 per cent of its turnover from its peak in 2007 when the couple decided to set up the third venture in Stillorgan, never imagining that the slide in sales would continue until it reached 30 per cent.
“If we had thought the recession was just going to go on and on and on, we wouldn’t have done Stillorgan, but once you’ve committed to something, you don’t have a choice but to see it through,” Barry says.
“It took four or five years for it to reach the bottom, so to speak. It was extremely difficult to deal with that. It has worked, although not without growing pains”.
The menu has evolved to reflect both food trends and those in the economy, and the couple worked on fixed prices and menu offers such as early bird specials to encourage business.
The company hit another hurdle in 2011, when the new restaurant in Stillorgan was badly damaged by a fire in a neighbouring vacant building only nine months after opening.
“It was incredibly traumatic,” Keating says.
It reopened five weeks later but was “in the middle of a black hole beside a burned-out shell,” she says. On either side of the new restaurant were two empty and badly damaged premises.
It took an enormous amount of effort to get the restaurant back up and running again, says Barry.
“You feel like you’d been partway up a mountain only to fall down to the bottom and have to start again”.
The name Gotham refers to an old journalistic nickname for the grittier side of New York City, rather than the fictional city home to superhero character Batman as is often assumed.
“It came from our love of New York City more than anything else,” Keating says. The pair say they have always travelled for new menu ideas, to keep up with trends in the industry and to gain a fresh perspective.
The biggest difficulty the business faces these days is the rental arrangement in their city-centre location where they have a 35-year lease featuring an upward-only rent review, the likes of which have since been prohibited.
“We’re now competing with people who have come in on new leases and who are probably paying 60 per cent of what we’re paying, and that’s really difficult,” Barry says, adding that there are many business owners in a similar position.
“It is a constant overhang but there’s no point in that dominating your day to day; you either have to park it and get on with it or you go out of business.”
The couple attribute their success as partners in life and in business to having separate roles, with Keating’s principal role in human resources and managing the day-to-day staff communication, while Barry focuses mainly on strategy, finance and forward planning.
“We try not to interfere with each other, and we’re rarely in the same restaurant together,” Keating says.
The pair have no current plans to expand the Gotham Restaurant Group and are hoping to find time to take a step back from the business to reflect and consider other opportunities.
“The recession has been really tough and I think we need a bit of time to recover from that,” Keating says. “We had two restaurants when business was at its peak and now, with three restaurants, we are only now just a tiny bit ahead of where we were in terms of turnover versus what we were doing with two,” Barry adds.
Keating and Barry believe that an awareness of the market and a focus on casual dining rather than occasion dining has helped the business to weather the challenging times of the recession.
“Not many places survive for five or 10 years. It’s just not that common in the restaurant industry,” Barry says.
“To do what we’ve done has been trickier. The restaurant business in Ireland has changed enormously in every sense since we started. If you’re going to stay in business as long as we have, you have to change with it”.
