How to get cooking - and stay cooking

Surviving in the restaurant business is notoriously, punishingly hard. Here, we meet the chefs, owners and managers behind several of the country’s most long-standing eateries, to find out what it’s really like to work in the sector

Graeme Dodrill, head chef of Peploe’s restaurant on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2 Pic: Fergal Phillips
Barry Canny, owner of Peploe’s on St Stephen’s Green: ‘The Luas works were a disaster for us’ Pic: Fergal Phillips

Colin Dickson wouldn’t describe the experience of opening a restaurant in 2009 as exactly easy. The IMF may not have arrived just yet, but the country was experiencing the early stages of what would turn out to be a devastating and lengthy recession.

But one thing that he and his brother Adam certainly didn’t have ...