An award-winning Waterford eatery couldn’t attend this year’s Irish Restaurant Awards in Dublin on account of the impact of rising energy costs.
Demera Levacic and Przemyslaw Muszymski from the Old Couch Café were recent winners of Best Emerging Irish Cuisine in the country. However, due to the rising costs of running their business - they could not afford to actually attend the awards in Dublin’s Convention Centre.
Speaking on the Hot Desk on WLR, they said they would have liked to attend but it would have proved impractical.
“We we’re not able to afford to go to the Restaurant Awards. We didn’t think that it was the right move at that moment. The price of everything has just skyrocketed, the energy crisis is out of control. It was just not smart for us to go at the given time.”
Demera says it was a bittersweet occasion to be acknowledged but not able to celebrate as they should have been.
“We just stayed home. We got all our congratulations through social media. It was nice that everybody reached out and all. Hopefully we will be able to go next year, but this year it was really bittersweet for us. It just makes you think ‘Best Emerging Irish Cuisine’ with things how are they going, what will it be like afterward.”
Przemyslaw highlighted that it is costing the Old Couch Café €100 a day for something as simple as turning the lights on.
“The last electricity bill that we got - we calculated that it cost us around €100 a day just to keep the lights on. That means that one table is just paying for lights. So for us, it was very hard to not be able to go because it was the first big award that we got. I’m not sure how the small businesses will survive the Winter.”
Demera outlined that they have learned to factor in potential adversity in their long-term plans but was frustrated that the situation is no fault of the business itself.
“You can’t calculate will this be over in a few weeks time or will this be over in a few months time, will this be over next year? There is absolutely no certainty around it. When you have a business, you kind of have to plan in advance. You cannot live one day to another. You must have some kind of projections with how things are going now and you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. We will open another envelope, there could be a few more zeros on something else. Will we have enough customers? Will households be under even more pressure than they are now? The worst thing is that it is none of our fault. This just happened.”
Recently, the Old Couch had to make the difficult decision to leave some staff go, but they were left with no viable alternatives.
“That was the first big change that we had to make. It happened maybe a month ago, when we came to the realisation after the first big energy bill that we will not be able to stay open if we have any staff, so we had to let two full time staff go. It was horrible for us. It was horrible for them. It still is. We just thought at the given moment that we would see what happen in two or three months time and maybe we would have to close in November. So, it was either letting those people go or closing completely, maybe.”
