Breathing life back into Bewley's was just another day's work for Jay Bourke, a restaurateur and publican whose ascent coincided with Ireland's rise to prosperity. He tells Shane Hegarty how he did it - and about not being the new Alan Sugar.
Jay Bourke arrives outside Bewley's, on Grafton Street, shakes hands somewhat distractedly as he looks at the building, thrusts a thick wedge of files into my arms - "Hold this, will you?" - and shifts a blackboard advertising a breakfast that ended half an hour ago. Then he grabs the cafe's doors and opens them wide. All the while people glance at this denim-clad, long-haired chap acting as if it's his place. Fiddling with an institution. Putting his paws all over Bewley's.
Earlier, he proposed postponing the interview. Is time short this morning? "I'm just recalcitrant, to be honest," he says. "I've been all over the media recently. I'm not a media man. I'm a restaurateur. I sell food." People have started to approach him of late, strangers offering their opinions on the job his company has done of Bewley's. It's mainly "well done" or "good man". Occasionally, he says, it's "ya bollix". "I just want to let people know what's happening here. If you go up the street there and ask people what's happening, they don't know. We just need to get it out there. So I'll prostitute myself."
He is brusque but good humoured. And although he says he is recalcitrant, he comes across more as uncomfortable. In his younger days he modelled for Ralph Lauren, but today he is as self-conscious as any novice in front of the camera. As the photographs are being taken, a customer approaches me and asks for a table for one. It's just past midday, but the place is filling up already.
When, eight or nine months ago, Campbell Bewley Group approached Bourke and his business partner Eoin Foyle about managing its famous but failing cafe, it was perhaps the one right move it made in a sorry chapter. With Café Bar Deli, Bourke and Foyle had already turned the former Bewley's on South Great George's Street into a buzzing restaurant. But this one, Bourke knew, carried with it a most burdensome cliche: the weight of history.
Still, they refurbished the place in double-quick time. Bentwood chairs from the Czech Republic. Red lino from England. Hand-printed silk wallpaper. New lighting for the Harry Clarke stained-glass windows. A huge branch of Café Bar Deli was to take up most of it, with Mackerel, a fish restaurant, upstairs and coffee served just inside the main door. So Bewley's was added to a roster of venues that includes the Globe and Market Bar, Odessa Restaurant and Club and Rí-Rá nightclub.
Yet when he opened the doors and invited the Lord Mayor of Dublin in, he was more than a little surprised to find himself welling up. "There was a lump in my throat. I felt quite emotional. I didn't expect to. I just did. I don't know why. Perhaps I just thought: 'We had this unbelievable task, and we've done it; we've made it.' I was very emotional. And I haven't told anyone that." He points at the tape recorder. "But I suppose I've just told you."
Why does he think that, in the middle of the biggest cafe boom the country has seen, when coffee is taking over from tea as the national pick-me-up, the original Bewley's failed? "It was very successful until the late 1990s. We forget that. In the mid 1990s it was very, very successful indeed. And tastes just changed. Offering the sausage and beans and so on just wasn't working any more, and all of sudden we became more aware of our bodies and health and so on. And it didn't change quickly enough. That's just my own view. But for most of the 20th century it was very, very successful."
As he walks through the restaurant he straightens forks, pushes in chairs. It's the details, he says, that make a place and a career. "I really believe that idea that it's all about the small things. If you look at all the great businesses around the world it's never about people's global ambitions. With an airline it's about how you're greeted, or how good the food is or how easy it is to get to the airport. It's never about strategic ambition. I think that stuff they teach you in universities . . . Frankly, I studied business, and I never learned a damn thing."
Some time ago he returned to Trinity College, his alma mater, to talk to its business students. Did he tell them this truth? "That everything they were learning was tosh? Not really." He remembers Feargal Quinn, the Superquinn founder, giving a talk when he was a student. "And with the questions coming from the floor, Feargal looked at us in disbelief. These are bright young business students, but they haven't got a clue about the real world. About running a small business. We didn't learn anything. OK, they helped us to learn big words or to go to the bank manager and pretend you know something. In truth you'd be better going out there. I think the universities should teach the nuts and bolts of small business. Most people go in like lambs to the slaughter. They should be taught what really happens."
Bourke is to get his chance in The Mentor, which starts shortly on RTÉ. In it, he and Dr Jeanne Bolger, a businesswoman, will guide new businesses through difficult waters. He will not, though, be doing his best Alan Sugar impression - telling people they're fired, that kind of thing. He prefers to be positive about Ireland's new enterprise culture, would rather applaud than attack the programme's proteges.
He looks up to Feargal Quinn and Michael O'Leary. "I'm also a great admirer of U2, the business. I think they're extraordinary businessmen. And I wouldn't like to admit it." They are competitors of his. "Their sense of moving the product on all the time, their sense of self-development along the way, is hugely impressive. And I remember being a young fella of 16 or 17 and really liking their sense of can-do, that we can be good, that just because we're Irish doesn't mean we're crap. And that was a very prevalent feeling in the 1980s. I was very inspired by them."
He was a competitive child, the one always trying to burst the back of the net at football. He had a few schemes, selling Christmas trees at college, repairing boats and teaching sailing. The modelling money went towards his first restaurant, when he set up Wolfman Jack's, in Rathmines, in 1989. He admits that he would look at Slattery's, an old pub across the road, and disregard it, until it gradually dawned on him that experience beat youthful arrogance any day. "I remember, when I started, I thought that I was going to reinvent the wheel a bit."
In 1993, Bourke and Eoin opened the Globe and Rí-Rá, the symbiotic bar and club on George's Street and Dame Lane in Dublin. Foyle was the music man, Bourke the business head. "Dublin was desolate. There was nothing for young people, really. Property was relatively cheap. We just came out of an interest-rate crisis. I mean, to be my age and have a little bit of experience, the timing couldn't have been better. That's just luck. For a young fella starting today, if they wanted to open a pub or restaurant, that's so much more difficult. Properties and rent are so high. And you end up working for a landlord. A lot of people approach me, and I say, well, maybe you should just wait for a while, until this whole thing cools off. It's not a good time in that sense."
The portfolio grew. The Front Lounge pub and Eden restaurant in Dublin, the Roundy and Bodega in Cork, Garavogue in Sligo. This is a good country to do business in, he insists. There are worse countries, far worse cities. In London, where he opened a bar five years ago, there was danger that went beyond just annoying the bank manager. "Ireland is a safe place to do business. All that protection-racket stuff; that's an urban myth, really. London is much tougher. The murky stuff, it exists over there. And it's much more serious and frightening. So I don't do business over there any more. I was really happy to come home."
Besides, Dublin had its pluses. As president of the Irish Nightclub Industry Association, perhaps he can be expected to talk up this country, but he refuses to be as cynical as others about Dublin's brief spell as "club capital of Europe". "It wasn't exaggerated. At the time John Reynolds opened the Pod - and it became European club of the year - U2 opened the Kitchen, and we opened Rí-Rá. They were really exciting times. Dublin was an undiscovered city with a really young population, and that was really exciting. By any standards it had an energy, seven nights a week. So I think it was deserved." We should celebrate ourselves a bit more. Stop complaining so much.
He has just come back from Paris, where a beer cost him almost €7, and he insists Dublin is not as expensive as people think. "You think drink's expensive in Dublin? Try trebling it. People here still complain, but hang on a minute. Dublin in a club sense is really good value. And I'm not just comparing it to London. I'm comparing it to Barcelona, Ibiza, you name it. It's brilliant value. And it's friendly. There's a lot to be said for it." But then, if some are to be believed, publicans and nightclubs owners are "just a shower of robbers, apparently". We are, he believes, too hard on ourselves. "I don't know why. Why do we keep doing it to ourselves?"
With understated class and inclusive door policies - VIP lounges are not part of the Bourke and Foyle package - their bars and clubs not only survived but thrived. But everyone always mentions the successes, he says. There have been failures. Such as? "Have you got an hour? Not every business we've opened has been super-successful in the first place. For example, we opened Café Bar Deli in a particular location in Cork, and we closed it. It didn't work. And we moved it to another location, and it did work. And it's only 350 yards away."
It turned out that older customers didn't want to walk in a badly lit area. Bourke hadn't considered that problem. "That was an unbelievable lesson in business. You couldn't rationalise it at all. That was a complete failure. We lost all the money we put in, and the trading loss, too. A big loss."
Next comes Bellinter House, a five-star boutique hotel in Navan that will open next spring, following a €10 million investment. It will be their first hotel. Isn't that something of a risk? "I think what we have to offer will be great. And it will be unique. So I don't see it as a risk. But that's what entrepreneurs do, isn't it?" He's imbued with "eternal optimism, or foolishness, or whatever you want to call it".
Bourke, who turns 40 next year, is married to Sarah Harte, a journalist and former corporate lawyer, with whom he has a 13-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. Both have declared a lack of interest in turning their father's business into a family dynasty.
Bourke follows a maxim of the businessman Gerry Robinson - "If it can't be done in seven hours a day, then don't do it" - and so finds time for both family and sailing. As a child, he and his family would sail to France with his father, John - a former chairman of Irish Permanent and a former director of Bank of Ireland - at the helm. Last year Bourke was part of a crew that won its class in the Coupe de l'Armistice, in Cannes - a race so big its starting line was a mile and a half long. "Eight members of royalty!"
For now, though, Bourke's ambitions are immediate. It's about the details, about one place at a time. Establish Bewley's, get the hotel up and running. See what happens after that. He really doesn't look beyond the next venue, he says, or the next project. Surely he has a long-term plan? "Yeah. I want to win a few boat races."
The Mentor starts on RTÉ 1 on September 8th, 10.15pm