Vincent Pettit was always going to be a restauranteur. It’s in the blood. 

His late father Brendan owned the Clonmel Arms Hotel; along with his brother Michael, he worked there as a young man. Vincent left for the US in the 1990s where he worked in the restaurant industry. Michael went to Holland, where he opened a bar and restaurant. 

The brothers returned to Ireland within six months of each other in 1999 and took over their first restaurant together – The Mill in Dungarvan. Since then they’ve sold one restaurant at the top of the market, opened two delicatessens and, in the depths of the recession closed one of them. Cookhouse 360, a Dungarvan restaurant, is their latest venture.

Now Pettit finds himself in the thick of the fight against FBD Insurance over business interruption cover. Cookhouse 360 has joined the long list of businesses pursuing legal action against FBD for refusing to honour their business interruption policy. It was forced to close for around three months in compliance with lockdown restrictions.

“Nobody saw this coming down the line. It is an existential predicament for a lot of businesses, and I’m quite sure for insurers as well,” says Pettit.

“But the reality is that this was very, very explicitly covered in their policy wording, and therefore they have an obligation to at least meet the claims to some degree and hammer it out. But blanket refusal, we feel, is desperately unfair. 

“When faced with a threat of this nature, which could indeed be existential for them, we understand why they would have to take the route they’re taking. Having said that I don’t think they’re right. But we’ll see. It’ll all come out in the wash,” he adds.

Not just an eatery

Cookhouse 360 in Dugarvan in Co Waterford. Photo: Cookhouse 360

Even though he is running a business in the middle of a pandemic and taking legal action against a listed insurer, Vincent Pettit is a man who radiates calm.

Dressed in a crisp white shirt, navy trousers and tanned shoes, he strolls around his spacious restaurant explaining, in his softly spoken tone, the purpose of each section from the Castle Room, where functions and events are hosted, to the pet-friendly roofed extension area where people can dine while with their four-legged friends have their own menu to order off. 

Along with his cool demeanour, you can tell he doesn’t miss a trick, especially when it comes to his business. He held a pen in his hand for the duration of our meeting as if at any moment he needed to take down an important note, and intermittently played with it so much it must be out of habit.

While touring the restaurant, he points out pieces of artwork on display ranging from sculptures to puppets and paintings created and supplied by local artists. His restaurant is not just an eatery, he has built it into a dining experience. 

That experience has somewhat changed now. There are transparent partitions between booths, sanitising stations set up at the front door and just outside the kitchen, a 105-minute dining rule are among the Covid-19-friendly modifications that have been introduced.

“When faced with a threat of this nature, which could indeed be existential for them, we understand why they would have to take the route they’re taking. Having said that I don’t think they’re right.”

Vincent Pettit

“There is an onus on us to ensure that we comply and that we facilitate compliance as far as we can,” says Pettit.

Some €20,000 has been spent so far on modifications to the restaurant to create a safe dining experience while Covid-19 still looms around the country.

Opening up with these changes in place has been positive overall for business, says Pettit. People have been particularly gracious about the assigned dining time. 

“Everyone knows in our game that, yes, we sell food and drink, but it’s almost like we’re in real estate. We sell space. If I have five people sitting at this table all night long I can’t resell it,” he says, adding that you need a good table turnover to cover the biggest cost in hospitality – labour.

On average, Cookhouse 360 employs between 45 and 50 people, however this has increased to 65 as the restaurant has had to hire additional cleaning staff to ensure high levels of sanitisation during the pandemic. 

Pettit has also noticed a rise in alcohol sales in his establishment compared with last year. Alcohol revenue jumped from 24 per cent in 2019 to 35 per cent in the last few months of 2020. He attributes this to people coming in and ordering cocktails, which you can’t typically buy from an off-license.

Cookhouse 360 was allowed to open in Phase 3 of the government’s phased roadmap, so the restaurant has now been open for around three months.

“When people asked us, did we enjoy the break for three months, there was no way you could enjoy it. Not for a moment with the worries and the concerns that you have for your business, for your career and for your employees and for your family, too. There was no enjoyment because there was never any guarantee that you were going to come back again,” says Pettit.

Pettit says he has sympathy for the government at the moment, but when it comes to the hospitality sector, he says they should have addressed the Vat rate to help businesses through this uncertain time.

He believes that the government is “clinging to an arbitrary number” when it comes to Vat. He adds that it should not return to nine per cent – Ireland should instead go as low as 5.5 per cent Vat as the UK recently did.

Before Covid-19 hit Ireland, the hike in Vat rate was already wreaking havoc on the hospitality industry and forced many to pull down their shutters for the final time at the start of this year.

Cookhouse 360 origins

After they sold their interest in The Mill restaurant in 2008 and before they set up Cookhouse 360, Vincent and Michael Pettit decided to start a side business.

They developed Jitterbeans – a grab-and-go delicatessen shop – in 2002. They set it up just down the road from their restaurant in Dungarvan.

“So, in 2009, we opened up Jitterbeans down in Cork city. And again, life is all about timing and in that instance, our timing was awful,” he says while laughing. 

“The recession was really kicking in at that point. God knows we made our mistakes, we overspent and maybe our location wasn’t great. That didn’t work for us,” he adds. 

The brothers got out of that operation within eight to nine months of opening in the rebel county. 

“So we said, pull the plug, take your medicine and move on,” says Pettit. 

When the country came out of recession, the brothers wanted to develop another business alongside Jitterbeans. Having both worked in the restaurant trade and grown up in the hospitality business, it made sense to go down that route. Yet, they both did not want to operate the same set-up that was in the Mill Restaurant.

“The big thing had to be size. We knew we weren’t going back into another 50/60 seater restaurant,” says Pettit. He adds that he wanted to create a casual but premium dinging experience.

While in America, Petitt says his eyes opened to how restaurateurs could cater to big numbers. The restaurant he worked for could cater for 800 people on a typical Saturday night. Cookhouse 360 was the product of this new thinking.

A new insurance policy

After closing the Jitterbeans in Co Cork, they were left with one business, the original Jitterbeans shop in Co Waterford. Yet, just as one door shuts, another one opens. In walked someone involved in school canteen contracts who offered a gig to the Pettit brothers. They fed 450 school children in St Declan’s school in Co Waterford. 

They lost this Education Training Board (ETB) contract five years ago but tendered for it again and were successful.

The brothers tendered at the start of summer, while Ireland was still being gripped by the lockdown brought on by the pandemic. Cookhouse 360 was shut in accordance with Covid-19 restrictions and they were looking for a safety net that would ensure they could make some money this year. 

“We realised we had no idea what our business would look like, we had no idea if we were re-opening or when we would re-open. So we said we need to get something that will be a good insurance policy to have,” he says. 

The fight over clause (d)

FBD has been embroiled in controversy in recent months as it has emerged it is refusing to grant business interruption cover to some establishments who were forced to shut their doors to stop the spread of Covid-19.

A standard FBD Public House Insurance Policy Document cites that:

“The Company will also indemnify the Insured in respect of (A), (B) or (C) above as a result of the business being affected by:-

(1) Imposed closure of the premises by order of the Local or Government Authority following:-

(a) Murder or suicide on the premises

(b) Food or drink poisoning on the premises

(c) Defective sanitary arrangements, vermin or pests on the premises

(d) Outbreaks of contagious or infectious diseases on the premises or within 25 miles of same.” 

FBD is a popular insurance company in the hospitality trade. More than 1,100 pubs alone have taken out cover with the insurer. 

The insurance provider is just over one month away from facing into a test case brought against them by the Leopardstown InnLemon & Duke, Sinnott’s Bar and the oldest pub in Ireland Sean’s Bar, over its refusal to grant business interruption cover for the lockdown period. 

Further reading

Abandoned: A war is brewing between pubs and insurers over closures

FBD has agreed to cover costs in Covid test case. But just how much money is ultimately at stake?