Restaurant review: Oscar’s working hard to find recipe for success in Cork City

Whatever about the décor, Blathnaid’s area of expertise, and the area in which Daragh needed the most help, is food and service. Daragh, with a background in retail, came into the café business with no experience of the food industry.

This is something that Bláthnaid encounters all the time in her work troubleshooting pubs, restaurants and cafés. Since the recession she’s seen an upsurge in the numbers of people who decide to try their hand at the café trade with no experience or training, often investing their own savings as start-up capital.

“They don’t realise how complicated a business it is. It’s vastly different to anything else. Selling clothes is very different to selling something that rots within three days,” she said. “If I was going to be an engineer or a dentist or hairdresser, I’d need to learn about it, and yet people think they can open a café or a restaurant without so much as a day’s experience.”

When Daragh opened three years ago, it was as part of the Streat franchise. “Not knowing enough about the food side of things, I thought a franchise would give me a menu, advice and access to suppliers,” he said.

The result was that Daragh had to pay a crippling 8% of his takings to the franchise and was obliged to order all his produce through the Northern Irish company. “We used to get in pre-cooked bacon and sausages and reheat them,” Daragh said. “I used to stand behind that counter and see the girls serving the breakfasts and it wasn’t something I was proud of.”

He had already left the franchise and was determined to plough his own furrow when his mum persuaded him to enter the competition on RTÉ. Choosing a name for his café was simple compared to the other choices Daragh has faced in his quest for success: “My wife and I had our first child in January of this year, a little boy called Oscar.

As she has quite a good job, she was paying everything. I still wasn’t making a penny. Now a family, we had to have a big rethink. I kept coming back to the idea that Oscar had been the reason why we broke from the franchise and started doing our own thing, so what better name?”

To help Daragh design a simple crowd-pleasing menu that made business sense, Bláthnaid enlisted the help of Dermot Gannon, award-winning chef at The Old Convent in Tipperary. Dermot’s focus on locally-sourced produce has seen Daragh ditch packet soups and frozen muffins in favour of bread from the Arbutus bakery, Gubbeen cheese and handmade fresh soups.

The result is a pared-down menu of sandwiches, a couple of salads and a selection of in-house sweet treats. They also have a breakfast option with wild boar bacon and sausages. Ordering from the menu, however, highlighted another concern for Oscar’s; an order of a chicken and pesto sandwich took just under 15 minutes to reach the table.

The sandwich, when it did arrive, was on good bread, with nice fresh salad; perfectly tasty, but with three staff on, a sandwich order shouldn’t take nearly a quarter of an hour to arrive. In Cork city centre, there are countless cafés competing for the lunch trade, and time is a crucial factor for office workers.

“There are weaknesses there that I see all the time in that profile of business,” Bláthnaid said. “To make sure it’s going to last, he’s got to get some systems in place. I’m hoping to get back to him in January, but really it’s up to him now. Fingers crossed! He’s a lovely person and the people of Cork seem to be supporting him.”

Daragh has a struggle ahead of him if he’s going to pull through the next year. “Normally you rely on that bit of money in the bank to help you through January and February but I’ve been finding it a bad Christmas,” he said.

He’s determined, though, and remains optimistic; the café window has “EST’D 2014” emblazoned on it and when I asked him about it, he smiled: “I thought, that’s a bold statement, that means we’re here for the long haul.”