‘The most incredible stress ever’: What it’s like to open an Irish food business in 2026

“I swear to God, the night the reviewers were in, I had no staff; there were three fridges broken in the kitchen, as well as the dishwasher,” recalls Damien Ring, chef and owner of the seafood restaurant 505 in Dingle, Co Kerry. He was working the kitchen solo when two restaurant reviewers arrived, and he happened to see them coming in the door. His first thought was: “Oh, f**k: this is a very stressful evening that I have ahead of me here.” The review ended up being sparkling. “It was all positive anyway, but it’s like some weird sign that every time there is a food journalist around the building, a dishwasher breaks.” Ring, who previously worked at Kingdom 1795 in relatively nearby Killorglin, is speaking from his rented flat in Dingle. Surrounded by paper, he is drawing up new menus, relishing being his own boss. READ MORE“I had a great employer, but your hands are tied,” he says. “Every time you needed to write a menu, there were restrictions. You played within them, but it ended up feeling limiting.”In 505, Ring’s first self-owned restaurant, it’s entirely his show. The joy of running it how he wants and doing things he “would never have gotten away with before” is audible in how he talks about having no beef main but always including a raw seafood dish on the menu. Opening 505 was “the best decision ever”, says Ring, adding that he wouldn’t hesitate to do it all again, “but by God, it was not easy to get through the first year.”Damien Ring at his 505 restaurant in Dingle. Photograph: Matthew Murphy Inside 505 in Dingle. Photograph: Matthew Murphy 505: 'Everyone in Dingle was like, this is a terrible time to open a restaurant.' Photograph: Matthew Murphy Ring is part of a cohort of first-time independents who have recently opened food businesses in the Republic. Over the first nine months of 2026, nearly 6,707 new food businesses registered with the HSE, making it likely the 2025 figure of 6,861 will be topped by the end of the year. These businesses include restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, delis and takeaways. Some, but not all, are led by ambitious creatives, bootstrapping their dreams and persevering despite the statistics that indicate they are more likely to fail in their first five years than to succeed. These new owners describe sleepless nights in the run-up to opening day, routinely working 16- or 17-hour days and living with the constant threat and turmoil of losing staff. The freedom of operating on their own terms is traded for financial worries, admin and bureaucracy.The first few months of 505’s existence were spent battling “extreme licensing issues”, and a May 2025 opening date was pushed further and further back until it felt to Ring like every Dingle local was telling him how bad his timing was. “We didn’t get open until that September, and everyone in Dingle was like: ‘You are nuts. The season is over. This is a terrible time to open a restaurant.’ That was just lovely,” Ring recalls with a laugh, and there were challenges yet to come. Ring originally opened the restaurant with his fiancee, 505’s restaurant manager. The relationship ended, and it took a long time to find another restaurant manager to be the face of the business. “I closed on January 4th and didn’t open again until April 16th. So in my first year of trading, I’ve been closed for four and a half months.”After hiring a great new front of house manager and getting the place back open for the spring season, things were going well but then Ring’s team of chefs dissolved over a few days in early summer 2026. “I had a young lad who’d been working with me for a while, and he just disappeared off the face of the Earth. I have no idea where he went,” says Ring. The remaining chef, who was fresh out of culinary school, stabbed his hand with an oyster knife a couple of nights later and ended up in A&E. “It was 8pm on a Saturday, and we were fully booked. If it happened at 9pm, we would have been fine, but he couldn’t do service any more.” The young chef got his stitches and never came back to work. Ring ran the kitchen solo for most of June and July, during the height of the tourist season, doing up to 26 covers a night, including the fateful night featuring the two food reviewers. “It wasn’t totally perfect,” Ring says, “but it’s good to know if things get iffy, you can still function.”Finding staff to commit to a new food business is a challenge whether owners are flying people in to work, as Ring has done with his new Yorkshire chef, or recruiting international students, as chef Eojin Lee is doing at Baked & Bottled, her bakery, cafe and wine bar in Ashtown, Dublin 15. “We get a lot of CVs every week,” says Lee. “But there aren’t many people with experience on the baking side. It’s difficult to train and explain, and then it is a very physically hard job, so often people want to quit after a few months.” Lugging 25-kilogram bags of flour and sugar around a hot bakery kitchen has proven too taxing for many. “It’s hard to find people who really have the motivation,” says Lee.Originally from South Korea, where “bakeries are as common as pubs in Ireland”, Lee ran a Korean market stall and a cake-making business for years before opening Baked & Bottled in January 2026. She had already moved to the area with her boyfriend, Thibaut Harang, formerly of Piglet wine bar in Temple Bar (recently closed), when they spotted an out-of-date commercial space to rent nearby. It has been hectic since they got the keys. The interior designer they were working with disappeared after two weeks, so they designed the space themselves, using Pinterest for inspiration. The couple had to hold their nerve as neighbours were asking questions daily about their plans. [ How Irish restaurants are changing to stay afloat: ‘Less people are going out. Thursday is the new Friday’Opens in new window ]Now Lee runs the kitchen and Harang runs the floor. He’s taken to saying that whenever everything is going right, enjoy it, because something is about to go wrong. “We always say the trouble starts when they give you the keys. I’d been managing places for 10 years before creating my own, and it’s a big step; people think it’s glamorous, easy cash, easy money, but it’s a lot of stress,” says Harang. “Two weeks ago the engine and the pump of the washing machine started to leak. It was Friday lunchtime. It was so busy. Of course it happened then.”Eojin Lee at Baked & Bottled, her bakery, cafe and wine bar in Ashtown, Dublin 15 Baked & Bottled, Lock Keeper’s Walk, Ashtown. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times Baked & Bottled: In a busy setting it is 'difficult to train and explain', says owner and baker Eojin Lee. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times The Irish weather has played a surprising role in their first year. Continental staff, spooked by the cold, have suddenly departed for Spain, but the heat has brought its own problems too. “The heatwave was stressful because we didn’t have air conditioning here. So the staff were really suffering, and in my baking kitchen the production wasn’t coming out great because the butter was melting during lamination,” Lee sayss, recalling messages from staff saying they couldn’t come to work because of the heat. So Lee put in air conditioners and kept going. “It was a difficult moment, for sure,” she says. But the good parts are plentiful too, as Lee and Harang have seen their neighbours fully adopt Baked & Bottled as their own, bringing camping chairs to the cafe’s monthly wine nights and hanging out on the pavement, treating it as their everything local.Being a local spot run by locals is part of the charm with Dandelion, a market kitchen, and deli in Howth village, Dublin 13. Chef and owner Aoife Barker, who grew up in the area, is known for her commitment to a top-notch sandwich, having created the 147 Deli sandwiches at Chubbys in Clontarf, Dublin 3. She had tried to open on her own once before when she moved back to Ireland from Australia in 2007, but kept getting outbid by big chains and couldn’t find a location for the “deadly sambo place” she’d always wanted. When Country Market, a former deli and lunch spot in Howth, came up in late 2025, she jumped on it, freshening the place up and putting in new downstairs seating.[ 14 great new restaurants to try in Ireland: From a Dublin roast to Tramore seafoodOpens in new window ]“I think it means a lot to the people out here that it wasn’t being turned into a big conglomerate,” she says, speaking during a rare quiet moment at Dandelion. While the work was being done, Barker spent a month with her “head in the books, trying to work everything out.” The bookkeeping and business courses she had done in the past became less important than calling her friends for advice, including the women in the hospitality Whatsapp group she’s part of. “It’s called Square Peigs, and it’s brilliant for asking questions and making contacts.” In the middle of Howth village, Dandelion doesn’t capture as much of the tourist trade as the harbour businesses, and so Barker set out to bring in excellent suppliers, such as pizza bases from the Dough Bros in Galway and organic chicken from Rings Farm in Kilkenny, as an added draw for people to visit.Aoife Barker at Dandelion on Main Street in Howth, Co Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times Aoife Barker in her market kitchen and deli, Dandelion. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times Aoife Barker in Dandelion: 'I love it.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times With 30 years of cheffing experience behind her, including eight as head chef at L’Gueuleton in Dublin city centre, Barker was used to long days and high pressure. But she had the most stressful weeks of her career in the fortnight leading up to Dandelion’s opening. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I just think it was all that apprehension about whether it was going to work. All the deliveries were coming in, and the money was going out, and you’re not trading. That was the most incredible stress I’ve ever known.” Simultaneously worried they’d be “hockeyed out of it” and scared no one would come, she didn’t do much promotion for the opening. But people came anyway, and it was seamless until the rotisserie Barker had imported from Germany broke down, taking with it an essential part of the business. “It lasted about an hour and didn’t work again for three months. I was fighting with the company to send someone to fix it, and eventually I just had to sort it myself.”Barker is now taking things as they come and is sleeping much better. She has plans to open the top floor of the premises as a restaurant when the time is right. Knowing all the work that was to come, would she go back and do it again? “Yes, I most definitely would. I love it. I’ve always worked 150 per cent in everything I do, so I figure I may as well work for myself. No regrets.”