It is bucketing rain when I leave my interview with Peaches Kemp at The Commons Café in the basement of the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) on Stephen’s Green. Take one of these umbrellas by the door, she urges me – she has noticed it unclaimed in the stand for ages, no one owns it.

Kemp has weathered upturns, downturns, and a pandemic over her 25 years as a food entrepreneur by always being across the details.

“The computer can’t always tell you what people want,” she tells me, stressing the importance of being on hand to listen to her staff and customers. “I still work shifts…because you’re seeing stuff on the ground.”

And she makes sure to eat at her own restaurants. “I wasn’t happy with one of the sandwiches,” she says. “We tweaked it, we changed it, we put a bit more cheese in it, we took something else out, put less butter in it, toasted it for longer… boom.”

Peaches and her sister Domini have been a force on the Irish culinary scene since their first restaurant, Itsa Bagel, opened in 1999. In the years since, they founded several other establishments.

“It’s been a 25-year journey… and something that we absolutely love doing,” she says.“I think you have to be half mad,” she adds, tongue in cheek. “There is so much risk with what we do. You are the person who’s putting yourself out there and employing people and putting, very often, your own savings into something to get it started.”

This week has been something of a new start for Kemp – or a return to the very beginning. She reintroduced the original branding for Itsa Bagel, which had become just ‘Itsa’ after the recession.

“We took the bagel out years and years ago because we were doing other things,” she said, but customers missed it. “There’s so much loyalty to it, so bring it back.”

Cutting your cloth to fit the times

Kemp’s story is one of constant reinvention.

“If you don’t innovate, you’ll evaporate,” she tells me. “So for us, it was really a lot of diversification over the years.” 

From the sisters’ early days in a 276-square-foot kitchen unit, they branched into a number of different directions. In addition to Itsa and The Commons Café, they also have a catering company, Feast, with partnerships with Powerscourt and RCSI.

Previous ventures include Joe, a coffee concession in Arnotts, Editions Café in Brown Thomas, Alchemy, a café on Grafton Street and Hatch and Sons, a restaurant which had branches in the Hugh Lane Gallery and the Little Museum of Dublin.

Some of those were concessions which ran their course. Hatch & Sons fell victim to the pandemic.

“The company… is really quite condensed from what we were,” says Kemp. “We would have had about 15 different branches pre-pandemic.”

The pandemic was “incredibly challenging” and she’s glad to be safely through it. The business as a whole survived because they kept the prices really tight and made necessary changes, based on the bottom line.

“You cut your cloth according to the times,” she says, adding that “holding on to a business or running something for sentimental reasons is a fool’s errand.

“I remember post-Covid really slashing the menu that was in [Itsa] and the choice that was in there because footfall was down in the city centre.”

However, “I’m looking at my sales,” she says, “and they’re really strong, and they’re stronger than they were in 2019.” So she doesn’t rule out expanding the Itsa Bagel franchise “if I found the right location”.

Last year, she decided it was time to reexamine the menus, expand them again.

She experimented with adding different flavours to the menu: Mexican and Cajun worked. It makes sense, she says, for her to offer a range of chicken bagels because it’s a versatile ingredient.

However, a pizza-themed bagel (named Itsa Pizza) flopped. 

“Okay, that was a dud,” Kemp says, “But you have to try those things, you just never know.

“We were so conscious of footfall, waste, food waste, all those things. It’s constant analysing those figures and the team that I work with, they know exactly what I’m looking for with regards to, what are the sales there? What’s the waste? What is the labour cost? All those margins are so tight.”

She says the brands for the other offerings which closed are also still live and she would consider relaunching them under the right circumstances. 

Calculated risk

Kemp has grown the business in such a way that she can benefit from economies of scale, producing much of her food in a centralised kitchen in Sandyford. “We are a supplier to ourselves,” she says.

“I have a model that is very much based on not having too many costs in individual branches,” she says.

Although all of the meals in her restaurants are assembled on the spot, the ingredients and soups are made in the Sandyford kitchen. “The driver goes out overnight and has a key, gets into everywhere, drops the food off in the fridge and leaves. So it’s a well-oiled machine.”

I ask whether this also offsets her risk. “I think what’s really happened for us is that we’ve been in the game, in the business, for so long you get to know the things that work and don’t work very quickly, and the risks that you’re going to take, what’s a calculated risk and a risk worth taking, and what’s just foolhardy,” she said.

We’re speaking at a time when the headlines are full of restaurant closures. Recently, Duncan Maguire, the founder of recently-closed restaurant Ukiyo, told The Business Post that he doesn’t advise opening a café or restaurant in this climate.

“It’s breaking my heart seeing all the closures, it really is,” says Kemp, who is sympathetic to Maguire’s position. “That’s the thing, too many people go into [this] and think, ‘oh what a lovely thing to do’…It’s bloody hard,” she says. 

She thinks that a big part of the problem is that people aren’t coming back to the city centre in the numbers that they were pre-pandemic. Using the example of The Commons Café in MoLI, she says, “this is great because it’s daytime and it works because we’ve got tourists, we’ve got office workers… would this work as a nighttime restaurant? No, you know, I don’t think it would.”

Even though the courtyard at the back, which leads to the Iveagh Gardens, would be beautiful on bright summer evenings, Kemp doesn’t see people travelling into town like that in the evenings.

When Kemp is asked for advice, her first question is: “What’s the rent?” Because if that’s too high, it’s never going to work. “It’s so important in our business, in any business, everyone has to get a slice of the pie,” otherwise “it disincentivises people to work”. 

“Everyone’s entitled to [a slice]: the landlord’s entitled to his share. I’m entitled to my share as the person who’s taking the risk. But if that imbalance is there, then, it doesn’t work.”

“I wouldn’t say never [open a restaurant], but I’d say, know what you’re getting into.”

As it happens, Kemp is often asked for advice. She has been a formal mentor at Entrepreneur Experience in Cork for the past decade, with the event taking place again next month. The Currency is the media partner for the event.

“Very often, I think we all go on autopilot,” she says,” and we just keep going and just do everything we do automatically.”

“When you ask questions of other people, you actually start asking those questions of yourself,” she explains. “It doesn’t matter if I’m in food and you’re in tech, the same fundamental business rules apply to any business, and they are the basics, the fundamentals: profit, loss, costs, people… risk, expansion, growth, scale, and all those sort of things.”

Costs keep increasing

Despite having confidence in her ability to calculate the risks, “one thing that I am concerned about, is just how much more everything keeps going up,” says Kemp.

“Wages are up by seven per cent and food costs up by four per cent on last year,” she tells me. Insurance and energy have gone up too.

The pandemic was one of the toughest times Kemp had experienced in business but “the supports the government gave, they were great”.

“Paschal Donohoe … I’m a huge fan,” says Kemp. “I think what he did for our industry was incredible. He listened, he really did listen.”

She wants the government to listen again. Although Kemp supports measures like the rising minimum wage, she says it can’t be looked at in isolation: “The minute that goes up, everyone above that goes up”.

She wants Vat to go back to its pandemic levels too and “it can be split out from hotels, and they say it can’t, but it can,” she insists.

Kemp insists that restaurants aren’t price gouging: “they’re trying desperately to make a living.”

Given all that, does she stand by her statement that people should still open restaurants?

“With good planning,” Kemp emphasises, “there’s nothing to stop people doing that. Like in anything, go into something being prudent and doing your homework. And I don’t think any of us should ever say never.”

The 2024 Entrepreneur Experience™ will take place on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th October 2024 in Ballymaloe, Co. Cork. The Currency is the media partner for the event. It is organised by AxisBIC alongside their other event partners Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Grant Thornton, Broadlake and William Fry. Applications are open until 5 pm on Friday 6 September via the Entrepreneur Experience Website.