If food is the way to a nation's heart, the restaurateur class has us eating out of the palm of its hand. Where 10 years ago, finding a great restaurant was almost a novelty, these days the challenge is deciding whether to go for Tex Mex, Italian, Spanish, Thai, Cal-Med . . . Then you have to get a table.
To be sure of a place - whether it be at Peacock Alley, where a starter could set you back £14 - or amid the burgers-and-cocktails in Temple Bar's Thunder Road Cafe, where a burger costs £6.95 and you often have to book as much as two weeks in advance.
"It's very busy, very full all the time," agrees Piero Cosso, who works in Botticelli's of Temple Bar, which opened in September. Originally From Milan, he has been living in Ireland for 15 years, thriving on the income brought in by his two shoe shops.
The trattoria has set him back between £150,000 and £200,000. "It will be the end of next year before I have made that money back," he says, but he "saw the restaurant business was doing well".
The number of restaurants opening across the country has more than doubled in the last five years. In Temple Bar, for instance, where there were 27 restaurants in 1993, just five years later there are 56 restaurants and 24 cafes. The "entrepreneur restaurateur", as Henry O'Neill, chief executive of the Restaurant Association of Ireland (RAI) describes the new generation of restaurant owner, is catering to a demand born of a Celtic Tiger whose cubs have a greater disposable income, have travelled more widely and have watched more eccentric cookery programmes than their parents ever did. Into the stew-pot add the concentration of people now living in the city, and returned emigrants, and you have a melting-pot of spend-happy eaters.
While the consumer may face queues, the proprietor faces the heart-ache of whether he or she has the staff to cater to the demand. Both owners and managers describe the business as enormously stressful, with staffing the greatest source of this pressure. Many are obsessed with the question of having to go abroad to recruit staff; others tell of good staff being poached overnight, with cash offers. Some say they have had to put up with bad tempered and inadequate staff to keep them sweet, so reliant were they on the pair of hands.
CERT's Employment Survey of the Tourism Industry In Ireland 1998, which was launched earlier this month, records a 16 per cent increase in the number of restaurants in Ireland since 1996 - from 1,619 to 1,890 - a 29 per cent increase in the number of registered restaurant employees - up to 33,587, and what it describes as "an acute skills shortage" in the industry. It estimates that there is a restaurant-employee shortfall of 5,632.
This "acute skills shortage" is put down variously to anti-social hours, low wages and burn-out - all of which, in turn, contribute to the increasingly prevalent perception of the industry as a short-term, transitory career option.
As restaurants - particularly the cheap and cheerful variety - proliferate, their owners are often more likely to be propelled by a love of money rather than food and increasingly the kind of employee who is wanted is the short-term, transitory one, willing to put in the hours but not necessarily looking for professional training and a secure, pensionable job. They might be students, young people saving to go travelling or foreign travellers looking for a few months' work to stay on in Ireland. Where the greatest expansion is going on in the restaurant industry, the work is definitely best suited to the young and the single. Frank Fitzpatrick, whose family who owns four Fitzer's restaurants in Dublin, a restaurant in Powerscourt, Co Wicklow and a film catering company, says that he is not as "hands-on" as he used to be when the family opened their first restaurant, La Fiesta, in Camden Street in 1981.
"Being a waiter involves working late at night, worrying about whether the cutlery is clean, the food is hot enough, the wine is chilled enough, the suppliers will bring the right order, whether a booking for 20 people will show up, whether your colleagues will show up, dealing with drunks, handling difficult customers. And everyone wants their food at one o'clock if it's lunch, at eight o'clock if it's dinner - so much can go wrong, you are just running on pure adrenaline and on top of that trying to keep it all together and looking as if you couldn't be more relaxed. By the time you've finished - at say 3 a.m. - there is a great temptation to have a few drinks. I've seen that turn into a very bad habit.
"You get burn-out after about five years at the front line. It's not a job to be in if you're middle-aged, with kids and hoping to get to sleep at night."
Fitzpatrick is now in the management end of the family empire. He says Fitzer's has not poached staff from other restaurants but admits that he has had his staff - particularly chefs and managers - approached with offers of more money and, indeed, that one of his managers was approached at a wedding last year and an offer was made. That employee was running a trendy new restaurant within a few weeks.
Fitzpatrick says that his staff comes from France, Spain, America, England, Australia, Italy. "I'm happy with them as long as they can do the work and they have the necessary language skills."
Hotels and restaurants are coming to rely on the international labour market more than ever before. Conrad Gallagher has even bought a five-bedroom house near Dublin's city-centre as a base for the workers he recruits from abroad.
Connie Rothschild, director of MTR Recruitment in Dublin, says that her company is increasingly going to the UK to recruit. She has advertised in France and Germany as well. "Over the last 12 months to two years, our trips to the UK have increased. We'd be going over about once every two or three months now, and we'd be serving, I'd say, something like 4-500 clients between hotels and restaurants." One might suppose that Frank O'Malley, secretary of the hotel and catering branch of SIPTU, would be out with open arms to greet the new restaurant workers. However, the greatest expansion has taken place in the non-unionised sector of the industry. This, he says, is hastening a diminution in the quality both of the product and of the job-image. "The industry is shooting itself in the foot," he says.
The vast majority of restaurants offer no training of any kind to their employees, he says. According to CERT's survey, only 37 per cent had a notional commitment to training their staff, and just 33 per cent of that 37 per cent had any planned programme of training. Further, 45 per cent of the people who do opt to get some kind of training are doing so on their own time and with their own money.
"The new breed of employer," says O'Malley, "has no commitment to training and gives no indication that he or she wants to invest in employees. The problem is that this is grand in the short-term. Employers get away with paying low rates, often relying on the tips to pay the wages; they get away without investing in training and, even though the service might be sloppy or the waiters unable to talk English, everyone is happy while the industry is booming.
"But when the tourists find somewhere new to go, or the economy goes into a downturn, the amount of damage done could leave tourists not coming back and young people seeing the industry as a no-go area."
The tourism industry currently employs 188,000 people and is set to overtake agriculture as the number one industry by 2000.
Henry O'Neill of the RAI also notes with regret the passing of an era when restaurants, by and large, were run by lovers of food, and all who worked in them were there for the long haul. However, he says, "every capital city needs a buzzing, fast-moving restaurant scene. Consumers' standards are going up all the time and any restaurateurs who don't keep up with them will quickly find themselves without a place at the table."
