Since it opened seven years ago, Dublin’s Forest Avenue has developed a reputation as one of the country’s finest restaurants. But its success – and the demands of the industry – has also had an impact on the couple behind the eatery – John and Sandy Wyer. Fearing burnout and operating in an “unworkable industry”, the couple were looking at ways to reinvent themselves and their business – and Covid-19 has given them a chance to do just that.

Within days of the lockdown, they had transformed their property into a high-end food store, a move that allowed them to retain staff, maintain relations with suppliers and keep paying the bills. In this podcast with Sam Smyth, they talk about their journey to date, why Forest Avenue is “full of contradictions and juxtaposition” and how they prefer happy customers to awards.

Sam Smyth (SS): Hello, I’m Sam Smyth, welcome to my podcast with The Currency. I’m speaking to John and Sandy Wyer, who turned one of Ireland’s finest restaurants into a high-end grocery store. In what seems like overnight, Forest Avenue became Dublin’s version of Harrod’s food hall in London. I drove by on Saturday morning before it opened and there was a queue already around the block. Tell me John, when did you make a decision to close Forest Avenue and when did you reopen it as a grocery store?

John Wyer (JW):  Well, we closed the restaurant and we did our final service on the Saturday when it seemed like all hell was breaking loose and we just seemed to be entering the first stage of the crisis. So, we had lost a few tables that evening, I think we lost about 50% of the covers. So, it was clear that the restaurant business was pretty much finishing up. So, I think it was after the service that evening, we kind of decided immediately that we were going to be a grocery store and within two days we had opened. So, from Saturday to the Tuesday, we opened as a grocery store.

SS: So, three days.

JW: Yeah. I remember Sandy coming in that evening. She had just done a bit of shopping and she came back to say that the supermarket was packed, she was queuing up for a half an hour to get in. This was mid kind of panic buying and stuff like that. So, instinctively I knew what to do and I got the team around on the Saturday and said, ‘I’ll see you guys on Tuesday, we’re going to be a grocery store’.

SS: Sandy, I must ask you, you married what is now something of a celebrity chef and now you’re married to a star-spangled grocer. That a sort of change in your life. Tell me, what makes it different? What sort of exotic groceries are you selling? What makes you different from Fallon and Byrne and the other high-end shops around town?

Sandy Wyer (SW): Well I think people trust what we do, especially our customers and people that live around the area. So, while there are Fallon and Byrne and places like that would have existed before we did this. Our customer base, I think we have a very strong connection with the customers that come into the restaurant and they know us personally and they trust in what we do. What we tried to do was, so when we decided to close the restaurant and open the grocery store, we contacted our suppliers, we contacted Jenny McNally on the Sunday night, Seán Hussey and a few other people and just said this is what we’re…

SS: Sorry, is that like your fish supplier, your vegetable suppliers?

SW: Our food, vegetables, yeah. They both have farms and we just said – look, this is what we’re doing can we count you in on being on board and being able to supply us and they were delighted to be able to help and delighted with the idea that we had come up with. So, people would enjoy their ingredients or the ingredients that we source ourselves. John spends a lot of time sourcing ingredients when we had the restaurant whether it be meat, fish or vegetables and making sure that it’s, you know, super in-season and so now we’ve just taken that philosophy and applied it to a grocery shop. And so, people come in and they’re like – Jesus, the vegetables are incredible and it would have been the vegetables they would have enjoyed in the restaurant anyway. So, I think it gives them, you know, something a little bit special like because it is coming from a small farm and all that kind of thing.

SS: So, does it cost more to buy goods that come, are specially grown like that, than what you get say in Tesco or in a big chain of grocery?

SW: I mean Jenny McNally is a certified organic farm so, there’s costs that go into that and then there’s cost that come into the product when we buy it. But then when it gets to us like any business, we have our own costs that we have to factor in to make it viable to be able to continue to pay the staff and keep us afloat during this time like, so that’s how we kind of judge how much to charge for certain things.

“We haven’t had backers. From the beginning we’ve always done it on our own.”

SS: Well just looking back, John on that night when you made that decision, how many staff had to be let go?

JW: At the time we didn’t leave anybody go. So, the idea was that we would design a new business in order to facilitate paying the rent and facilitate continuing to pay their wage. A couple of staff, I think it was two in total just decided to bow out themselves, you know, with simply the fear of the virus. So, they decided to leave and we kept on everybody else.

SS: And so, can I ask you were there bankers, were there backers, were there financiers involved like who you were responsible to?

JW: No. Well, you know, we still have to continue paying the rent. We have three properties in total. So, the objective was ultimately not to have a conversation with our landlords and not to have a conversation with the banks. We did call the bank at one stage but that seemed to be a lot of passing the buck. So, we just, we just dropped that immediately and said – okay, we’re on our own here, let’s just make this work.

SS: Yeah, but you’ve no Shylocks there that put money into at the beginning that now you have to pay off, that sort of thing?

JW: No, no. It was a very simple process. I mean we called a few friends. We put some shelving into the restaurant, a few fridges. There was negatable investment in turning it from a restaurant to a grocery store.

SS: Yeah, well I remember you opened when, what 2016?

SW:     ‘13.

SS: Oh, ‘13 it’s that far back. I think I was there on your first New Years’ Eve actually.

SW: You were, yeah.

SS: Well it was a tremendous success, the restaurant I think wasn’t it?

SW: Yeah, it has been a success, you know, like you were asking about backers and things like that. We haven’t had backers. From the beginning we’ve always done it on our own. Now we have taken loans out of the bank which with Forest Avenue we’ve paid off. We do have loans still with Forest and Mercy but we’ve always kind of done it on our own.

Whatever money we made through the restaurant we put it back into the restaurant. So, we’ve continued to invest in what we have and to improve upon it as we went along. We started on a shoestring budget, money that we had saved and a bit of help from our family but other than that it was the two of us that kind of did it. So, there’s a nice feeling in that that you know, especially at this time that there isn’t anybody that we owe anything to, except for the rents and things like that, you know.

SS: Yeah, your running costs that you would. John, tell me, are you selling what you would like to think of as Michelin star quality, pre-prepared quality for the price of a takeaway Chinese?

JW: No, we’ve no interest in trying to recreate the Forest Avenue dining experience for people at home. That’s not what it’s about at all. This is more of a Forest Avenue interpretation of a modern grocery store, you know. It’s a fundamentally a mom and pop establishment, community driven, farm to fork grocery store. So, I think we just weren’t interested in the whole idea of saying this is a Forest Avenue takeaway or this is you know, an opportunity for customers to recreate Forest Avenue dishes at home. That just didn’t float our boat at all. So, we consider it a back to basics approach. An opportunity for customers to come to the grocery store and buy incredible quality ingredients but ultimately very simply executed ready meals. It’s comfort food really but executed at a high-level.

SS: Well, you have for instance ragu and various, very well prepared.

JW: Exactly. They’re well prepared but I suppose I don’t consider the stuff, you know, high-end gastronomic. That wasn’t what I wanted to offer but I did want to offer people just very good quality comfort food. I mean the food that we like to eat at home isn’t restaurant food and I honestly don’t enjoy cooking super-gastronomic food at home. It’s just not our bag. But we do enjoy the experience of sitting around the table as a family and tucking into just very good ingredients and a really considered meal.

SS: So, you ate at home what your customers ate in Forest Avenue is that?

JW: Well, what we’re eating at home now in the evening times is, we’re just going around the shop before we leave and we, just like the customers we take some stuff of the shelves and we go home and then Sandy, you know, prepares it, you know. So, we get to taste everything that we’re doing. So, it’s a version of quality control. So, we might have a beautiful you know, dressed salad with Caesar dressing, some beautiful braised potatoes, a lovely ragu, maybe some pasta, a nice dip, a beautiful sourdough bread or some focaccia. So, it’s good quality home cooking without the pomp and ceremony.

“It’s not that easy running a restaurant like this and we found it getting more and more difficult.”

SS: Oh, you did now, I’m just remembering back to when I first went in your restaurant. Many of your clientele at that time were like Googlers or techy sort of people. They’d money to spend on food but they didn’t particularly dress up for the experience, would that…?

JW: Yeah. Well the accessibility was a big thing for us. We wanted to offer people a high-end gastronomic experience in slightly different surroundings, you know. We wanted a restaurant that was approachable, a very natural, organic style of restaurant. Now we’ve been refining it over the last six years, there’s no doubt about that. It started like Sandy said, you know, a very, very simple mom and pop restaurant on a shoestring budget but we’ve you know, slowly been evolving that to a point that it has been getting, you know, a little bit more high-end. And you know, even with that, that’s been not without its challenges. So, I think six years later we’ve been, you know, fairly tired. It’s been a very difficult process albeit extremely enjoyable and satisfying but certainly the last year we’ve been, you know, to the stage of burnout almost. It’s been a difficult challenge and the first three or four years were certainly amazing but it’s not that easy running a restaurant like that and we found it getting more and more difficult. So, ultimately, I think, I know it’s an unusual think to say but this has come as a new challenge for us to reinvent ourselves.

SS: So, you would have had to be making changes anyway, I think?

SW: Well, we were considering it. Like we were in the process of talking about what Forest Avenue looked like…

SS: And you were opening a new restaurant I think too.

SW: Yeah, in Blackrock we were in the process. Well, we have been in the process of doing that for a while. So, on a personal level we’re speaking to each other about what Forest Avenue and the things that we’ve created will look like in the next few years and where we saw it all going and we didn’t have all the answers yet. But definitely we were thinking about it being more, kind of going back to the start and stripping it back and making it simple again.

JW: I mean, we just found it slightly unworkable, you know. The restaurant business in general, in my opinion, was getting to a point of being a little bit unworkable and we were a busy restaurant, you know.

SS: Yeah, you were. I mean you looked like a successful restaurant.

JW: Yeah.

SS: All the seats were full and you know…

JW: And even at that, you know, at the end of the year you’re still looking at you know…

SS: That you’re not making what you…

JW: What we were putting in, yeah.

SS: A good return from what you put into it.

SW: From the yeah, efforts that we were putting in.

JW: I think so.

SS: Wow. Now I’ve got a line down here I see and that is you have amuse-bouche but no tablecloths, you know, which is true, you know. You would go into your restaurant and you would get served an astonishingly different amuse-bouche but there was no tablecloth there, people paying the prices and you did charge the going rate for shall we say Michelin starred restaurant. But you didn’t have the tablecloth, you didn’t have a lot of the props that they would have in other restaurants.

JW: Yeah and I think, well, Forest Avenue was full of contradictions and full of juxtapositions and that excited people, you know. They talked about the fact that there was no art on the wall and the walls were bare and concrete and the floor was timber and the austerity of the restaurant and then juxtaposed with, you know, creative high-end gastronomic food and like you said the amuse-bouches and stuff like that. I think that excited people, ultimately. I think they considered it fresh and a new approach, you know.

“But it’s clearly the right decision for Sally-Anne and Derry Clarke. They seem very comfortable and happy with that decision and you know, we’re delighted for them.”

SS: Tell me, how did you two meet? You met in Germany I think, didn’t you?

JW: Yeah, we met in Heidelberg. A beautiful little town in Baden-Württemberg in South Germany. So, we were both just travelling around Europe and we ended up connecting with the same friends and fell in love.

SS: In an Irish bar, I think?

JW:Y eah.

SW: Yeah, so I was working in the kitchen in an Irish pub and then Sandy was working behind the bar and then she eventually came to work in the kitchen.

SS: And did you then decide to move back to Ireland or?

JW: Yeah, we spent three years in Heidelberg and then moved to Cork.

SS: Yeah, well you’re originally from Cork.

JW: Yeah, a small town called Glanmire.

SS: So, you decided Dublin was the place to open a business?

JW:  We had moved back to Europe actually for a year. We went to Spain and after that we moved to Dublin. So, we came back to Dublin, I can’t remember the year but there were exciting changes…

SW: In ’07 I think it was.

JW: Yeah and there were exciting things happening in Dublin at the time. We were working in a restaurant just up the road here in Baggot Street for almost four years.

SS: L’Ecrivain.

JW: Yeah, you know, an iconic Dublin restaurant.

SS: Well you were the head chef there and Sandy was the pâtissier.

SW: I was the head pastry chef, yeah.

SS: Was New York ever a possibility for you Sandy? You’re originally from New York.

SW: No it wasn’t. I left New York when I was 20, as John said I went travelling and ended up in Germany and then once I’d come to Europe, I didn’t see myself going back to New York. It wasn’t something that I saw for myself. I enjoyed the pace of life in Europe, you know, New York can be a hard city to get on in and it can be superficial, it can be a bit of a rat race. There are loads of positive things. It’s very creative, there’s an abundance of things for you to discover there but I just felt more comfortable and more at home in a smaller setting than a big city. So, Heidelberg was there.

SS: And there’s no Irish in your background at all?

SW: No, no, both my parents are from Egypt so no Irish at all.

SS: No. Fascinating, yeah. So, tell me about L’Ecrivain, you were there. You must have been surprised to say the least when Derry and Sally-Anne Clarke, they in February I think it was, they decided to close after 30 years.

JW: Yeah.

SW: Yeah, that was a big decision to close, yeah.

JW: Yeah, it certainly was a big decision and when you hear of you know, an iconic restaurant like that deciding to close, it’s big news. But it’s clearly the right decision for them. They seem very comfortable and happy with that decision and you know, we’re delighted for them.

“We are more preoccupied with the success of the business than with Michelin stars”

SS: Well, I know that now for instance when you go on holiday you always go to, well they’re busmen’s holidays. You go off to eat, generally.

SW: Yeah.

SS: I mean you enjoy a good feed clearly.

JW:We do yeah, yeah. Well we like, there are busmen’s holidays so we like to go to London a couple of times a year and then we go to Italy most summers for a couple of weeks and they’re more just relaxation holidays, you know. We like just to hang out and tour the area. So, it’s not all about restaurants, you know, there has to be downtime as well like.

SS: Oh sure, but then tell me when you got going well in Forest Avenue, which of course that’s called after the avenue you grew up in New York, Sandy.

SW: Yeah, it’s names after the street that I grew up on.

SS: Yeah, which everybody would know. Actually, I remember a taximan taking me down your road going to Kennedy Airport once. It’s on the way to the airport. But yeah, then you decided to open up in another restaurant in Forest and Marcy.

SW: Yeah, well John had always kind of looked at the unit where Forest and Marcy is in now and he said if that ever becomes available, we should, we wanted to open up a wine bar that served food. And he said if that ever becomes available, we should pursue it and he’d sent the landlord a few emails and I think it was reserved and then they came back to us to say that the deal hadn’t gone through and were we still interested. So, we said we were and it just seemed like a natural thing to do. It’s just around the corner from Forest Avenue. We didn’t have to travel to look after it. We could go back and forth between the two restaurants. We took staff from Forest Avenue, we put them in there. We hired a head chef to run it. So, it just seemed like the next natural thing for us to do. We had kind of a fine dining restaurant if you will without kind of all the formalities and we’d always wanted to open up a wine bar that served food as well and the space you know, was perfect for it like.

SS: Is it a different clientele that go there that go to Forest Avenue?

SW: Yeah, it can be. I mean there are overlapping clientele. People who have been for Forest Avenue would go there. But I feel in general it’s probably a slightly younger clientele because of the bar seating, than we do have in Forest Avenue.

SS: Yeah, now I was going to say, one of the things was, John, an irony from your point of view. I remember a headline in a paper, I looked it up actually before I came here today and there was a headline and the food critic, Katie McGuinness saying, I think it was 2016. ‘No Michelin star for Forest Avenue is inexplicable’, she said.

JW: Yeah.

SS: She seemed to think you were a thing. Now and also, I remember someone I actually happen to know in the Financial Times also wrote very positively about your restaurant. How important to you was it to get that recognition?

JW: Well, you know, that review was you know, it was very significant from I think Nick Lander in the Financial Times, that was a big deal for us because he hasn’t reviewed many Irish restaurants. So that was lovely, and I was a big fan of his anyway. So, even having him in the restaurant was a big deal for me. You know, and you know, we enjoy having many of the food critics in, you know. The fact that they want to come to the restaurant we’re happy with that. But the recognition from Michelin I suppose, after a while we became indifferent to that, you know. We just, we’re more preoccupied with the success of the business and you know, trying to manage the business and as long as the customers were happy then we were happy fundamentally, you know. I felt that I didn’t need that pat on the back from Michelin, you know. I was just happy with what I was doing and comfortable with what I was doing and comfortable with the progress and the evolution of the business, you know.

SS: Yeah, one of the things I heard last week was that apparently you know, people are prepared to put up with home cooking Monday to Thursday but they’re ordering carryout gourmet meals at the weekend. I don’t know if you’re aware of that at all?

JW: No. But probably rings through for us to, you know. I think we’re…

SW: Yeah, it makes sense like you’re cooking all week and you don’t have the luxury of being able to go out to a restaurant, so it’s nice to you know, to be able to ring up a restaurant that you have visited before. Number one to support them and number two to have the experience at home. I don’t know how many of those, like with Forest Avenue as we talked about before we didn’t feel like the whole experience. Number one, like Forest Avenue is not just about the food. We feel like it’s about the experience as well when people come to the restaurant it is an experience because we’re there, we’re interacting with them and there’s a certain energy in the room that you can’t, you know, you can’t say it’s this or that it’s just the whole amalgamation of what we do that comes together, you know. And so, trying to get people to have that experience at home I think would be kind of, for us, just silly on our part. It wouldn’t translate, you know and we don’t know that our food would translate into somebody’s kitchen at home. But I think that people are appreciative of the other restaurants that are doing it because they want to be able to still enjoy eating out even though they can’t.

SS: Yeah, well now this change when you consider the life that you chose, I mean you’re volunteers in the restaurant business, you know. They don’t make you do it. Your family life, now you have a daughter, was there, you know, difficulties there with childcare with all the rest, being in the restaurant business?

SW: We were lucky. We had a neighbour who has a gorgeous daughter-in-law and she suggested, I said we’re opening up a restaurant, she suggested her daughter-in-law to mind Ruby and she’s still minding Ruby. Not currently because she can’t, but she’s minded her since she was about two or three years of age and now, she’s nine. So, we’ve had the same childminder the whole time and they’re more like family now than, you know, Ruby considers them family, we consider them family. So, we’ve been very lucky in that sense that we were able to do what we wanted to do and to achieve what we have but that came with help. So, we didn’t do it on our own.

“A big fear in restauranteurs actually is that we do return to the way things were because in my opinion it’s simply unworkable”

SS: Now, you’re in a position where your life has changed. Now, do you think maybe if not this time next year, or maybe this time next year, can you ever see yourself opening for instance Forest Avenue again?

SW: I wouldn’t say no. But I don’t think it would be in the capacity that it has been.

JW: Yeah, we simply don’t know, you know. We believe in the brand Forest Avenue as a restaurant, we think it’s also conducive to, I think the strength of the brand is conducive to what we’re doing now. That’s the beauty of the whole process really like. Now ultimately, we’re chefs, we’re hospitalitarians and that’s in our blood, it’s in our soul and we would like to return to that, you know. So, we do see Forest Avenue the restaurant reopening maybe next year. It could open in the space where Forest and Marcy is, for example in a smaller capacity. We’re doing a lot of thinking at the moment and we’re…

Now, being a shopkeeper as you are now I don’t if you’d remember but what was it, they said about the English? England was a nation of small shopkeepers which as far as I can see basically an insult, I think to mean petty minded people or something which is a bit unfair. Do you see yourself moving on in retailing, grocery, whatever you want to call it? Will you continue in that?

JW:      I think so.

SW:      Yeah.

JW:      I think we’re using this time to certainly learn the trade, you know, to do our best to become good at it and we’re using our skills as hospitalitarians to offer a slightly different take on food retail. I mean the pivot from the restaurant business to food retail wasn’t a huge one anyway. I mean, over the last decade you’ve seen so many of the classic food retail outlets borrowing so much from the restaurant business, you know. They’ve in-house chefs, they have bread programme, they have coffee programmes, they have pastry programmes, pizza, you know. So, I think yeah, the retail has been borrowing so much from the restaurant business so it’s prepared us immensely to pivot into food retail and I think, you know, if we put our best foot forward why not become good at it. Continue refining what we do, continue improving and become a bona fide grocery store.

SS: Yeah, tell me are you happy with the government’s response to this pandemic? Is there anything else that they could do to help you that you can think of?

SW: Well, I think before this happened with restaurants, you know, myself and John have often talked about this that restaurants tend to get the raw end of the stick and VAT goes up, rents went up. So, all of these things were kind of crushing people and they were putting an immense amount of pressure on people’s shoulders and that would attribute to the factor of at the end of the year you look at the work that you’ve put in and what’s left over is very minimal. And those pieces of the puzzle were you know, factors of that, of why the bottom line was what it was. So, I think you know, for restaurants to even be able to open after this, those things will definitely have to be looked at, you know. Restaurants won’t be able to, the ones that are able to survive this and reopen will be opening with very, very little capital, you know.

SS: And now I heard Brody Sweeney saying last weekend there are 80,000 people involved I think in the restaurant business.

JW: Yeah.

SS: 50,000 or 60,000 in the bar business.

SW: Yeah.

SS: All of whom are out of work at the minute.

SW: Yeah.

JW: I was reading something in the Guardian last week and there was a very interesting point at the end where the journalist stated, ‘The problem won’t be the total annihilation of the restaurant business, the problem will be if we return back to the way things used to be’, and that’s a very interesting thing. I mean, I think that’s a big fear in restauranteurs actually is that we do return to the way things were because in my opinion it’s simply unworkable, you know. So, a change needs to happen.

SS: Well, a lot of people presumably were making a good living out of restaurants before this, were they not?

JW: I think the disparity between the work they were putting in and what they were getting at the end was pretty enormous. I think they were making a living but you know and possibly…

SW: But there are costs for that, yeah. The living, it’s not like, I remember showing my sister the figures at the end of the year and she is in promotional marketing and she was like, ‘I make the same as you make and I’m at home on my own, in front of a computer and you’re there every day slaving away and your bottom line is exactly what I’m doing’, you know. So, you’re like okay am I doing something wrong.

SS: I speak to you this time next year what do you think you’ll be doing at that time?

SW: I think we’d like to see where the greengrocers takes us. One of our fears is that other people will see the greengrocers and say ‘Oh, I can do that as well’ and then we’ll be in a scenario where we were with the restaurant business where the market will be saturated. So, the work that we’ve put in will end up being, you know, kind of obsolete in the end if everybody decides to open up a greengrocers. So, I wouldn’t like to see that happen. But I think we would like to focus our energies on the greengrocers and put time and effort into it and make it the vision that we have in our heads and we do have a vision for it. And I think what people like about it when they come in is it’s our customers and they trust what we do in the restaurant business and they trust what we’re doing now with the greengrocers. So, it’s you know, they go okay, I trust them before, I still trust them. And then I hope that there’ll be a day where we can open up Forest Avenue again and go back to some sort, I don’t know what that looks like, but some sort of restaurant scenario.

JW: Yeah, what we definitely don’t want to be doing is working in some sort of hyper restrictive restaurant scenario. Like I do not want to be going into a restaurant, you know, with masked waiters, you know, Perspex shields between the tables etcetera, you know. Enormous 2-3 metres between the tables, that just would not be my cup of tea and that’s not why I got into this business. So, unless we can return, you know, in a years’ time to the normal style of restaurant, then I’m all ears, you know. I’d like to put tables and chairs into the grocery store for example and run it as a grocery store/restaurant, you know. I think that would be an interesting…

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