'We've made a lot of mistakes. Learning from each of them is the reason we're still here'

IT HAS BEEN five years since we opened Dela, our restaurant in Galway’s west end, and there have been times I thought it wouldn’t work out.

When we started, I was director of operations for Mulranny Park Hotel, a job I had been in since 2009 and stayed at it until 2016.

The role took up a lot of my time and required a lot of commuting from Galway city to Mayo, so it was hard on the car and the family.

So that’s why we decided to look for something a bit more local, and when the opportunity to open the restaurant cropped up we grabbed it.

Margaret, my wife and business partner, had a background in hospitality due to her years working in the hotel with me.

Before that, she cut her teeth on Quay Street in Galway where she ran Fat Freddy’s restaurant and did some catering as well.

To be honest, I only wound up in the hotel industry due to a family investment. The hotel was owned by two Galway families and my father and his business partner invested in it, which is how I got involved.

I wasn’t front of house, I worked in the back office and took the opportunity to learn something new by doing an executive management diploma through Cornell University, one of the Ivy League colleges in the US.

It’s not something I always wanted to be involved in or something that was in my career goals, it was just one of these Celtic Tiger things we got swept up in, made the best of and got the hell out of.

Joe Bohan (left) and Margaret in Dela's polytunnel

Getting out

I was an IT manager before all this. I had a masters in the field from NUI Galway and was working for one of the Smurfit plants for about eight years up until 2007.

I worked in the family property business, and still do, which went through a particularly tough time up until recently.

Compared to IT it was very different, but like any management job, 80% to 90% of the work is similar to other roles where you’re in charge. You deal with people, set targets and make sure they’re done.

Splitting my time between the hotel and Dela, when it was taking its baby steps, involved a lot of really long days.

I would get up at 5.30am and, if I was in Mulranny, I wouldn’t be home until 10pm. If you had more to do, you just got up earlier – there were no days off.

Something had to give, so in and around 2016, we seized on an opportunity to get out of the hotel game completely. We had small kids and it was just too hard to commute back and forth – there is more to life than constantly chasing the book.

Mulranny is a fantastic place with great people, but it’s not where I’m from or where I want to move to. That said, I learned more in my seven years at the hotel than I did in the three decades up to that point.

It was a nice challenge, but it was too far away from where I lived in Galway. That’s one of the disadvantages of living in Galway – you never want to leave. They call it the graveyard of ambitions because not too many people move away.

New chapter

Myself and Margaret always wanted to own a restaurant. In the hotel, we were working for other people, albeit our family, and we wanted to put our stamp on something.

Margaret has been focused on Dela since we opened in 2012. She puts in the hard grind and runs the show from front of house, and we have a great team in place now which takes some pressure off.

She was always involved in the trade, so she knew it inside out. We originally, probably naively, thought because it was on a much smaller scale than the hotel that she would be able to manage it 100%.

A lot of 70-plus hour weeks later we are getting to a better work/life balance, thankfully. It proved to be a lot harder than we thought, but at the same time, it’s much easier to work for yourself.

We probably put in more extra hours in Dela than the hotel, but you don’t tend to count them when you’re working for yourself.

We’ve taken Dela from something very small to something that’s booming, but it was a struggle for a while.

We were still having a rough time of it two years in, so one January we sat down with everyone to have a chat about where it was all going. We were treading water, so we needed to pare back.

We looked at every night we were open and saw we were trying to be all things to everybody. So we made a decision there and then that if we’re not making money on a Tuesday night, we’re not opening.

We ended up trimming back to opening Thursday, Friday and Saturday night and then doing brunch over the weekend. And we made sure that everything in our operational week was perfect.

Given we weren’t open on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, it gave us a bit of headspace to plan what we wanted to do more.

Since we drew that line in the sand, business has only gone upwards. We’re extending hours every season since and now we do brunch seven days a week.

We’ve made an awful lot of mistakes and learning from each one of them is the reason we are still here.

Growing our own

Sunday brunch has been colossal for us. We can do up to 350 people on a Sunday, and the revenue we take in gave us a bit of confidence to extend to Friday.

And when Saturday and Friday were rocking we extended to the full week. We took it in baby steps. At that time, in January 2015, when we decided something needed to be changed, we also talked about what type of restaurant we wanted to be.

A lot of people talk about being local and sustainable – it’s nearly a throwaway comment at this stage. But you can’t be more local and sustainable than actually growing your own produce, so that’s what we did.

We put about €6,000 into building our own commercial polytunnel and it’s starting to pay for itself. It’s huge – about four times the size of the restaurant, and we grow three times its size again outside.

We’re now getting our vegetables for a fraction of the cost, and customers know where it’s coming from. Now admittedly during the winter we can’t be 100% sustainable, but we’re still getting some yield from our own-grown supplies year round.

The tunnel extends the growing season by six weeks either side, so we can work with this extended seasonality and still have produce that wouldn’t be commercially available or affordable otherwise.

Sensibly expanding

The biggest high we got was when Connacht Rugby won the Pro12 league on the Saturday and every single one of the team were in for brunch on the Sunday.

That’s been the highlight of it all. These guys are big into nutrition and eating well, so we think it’s fantastic reflection on what we do that they come into us week in week out – Margaret would say the exact same.

Also, I like to feel we’ve got a positive vibe in the place all the time now. People say to us the whole time, “You’re so busy and have outgrown your unit.” But at the moment we wouldn’t have any plans to open a second Dela. We’re really happy where we are.

There are queues out the door for brunch, and our Dela farm-based evening menu is very popular, but I think it’s a classic potential mistake to expand right now. We’re just not ready.

Brunch is busy but we can’t count on it lasting forever. I don’t see 350 people coming to our restaurant every Sunday for the rest of my life.

Other places will open up with a different offering, so we have to get to a stage where we are always offering a good product, always improving.

So I would be more into consolidating our position right now – it’s tough to run one restaurant let alone two. If you open a second restaurant, your eyes are off the first one and we’re not ready to do that just yet. We’re enjoying where we are right now.

We’re constantly getting people asking us to open in Dublin, but that would be something we would never do. That would be a Mulranny episode all over again.

It would be a fantastic idea, but I don’t want to be back and forth all the time. We’re ambitious people but it’s not all about chasing the dollar.

Our five-year plan would be to open something up near the polytunnel, which is located on about 10 acres.

With the proposed ‘Connemara Greenway’ running right through it, what we want to do is have an offering and even a little brewery on that plot.

Key to that plan would be the 30-second commute in the wellies and shorts in the morning, mug of coffee in hand.

We may not get there, but we are confident by having that as our target it will keep us focused. I want to build a sustainable business in Galway, something that’s real, genuine, something I’m proud of and something I can pass on to my kids.

Joe Bohan is the co-owner of Dela restaurant in Galway. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.

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