'Basically, the Luas shut my restaurant. I was left with ever-dwindling cash supplies'

MY PASSION FOR Thai food all goes back to one evening in Los Angeles. I was living in the city and tried a local Thai restaurant called East Wing Café one evening.

At the end of the meal I marched into the kitchen and essentially told the chef I wanted to start work the following day.

Blown away by the food, I ended up working there for over two and a half years. The love affair had begun, but I came back to Ireland for reasons completely unrelated to Thai food.

One day I got a call from an Irish band that was called In Tua Nua. They asked me to join them as the new bass player, tour the world and get paid for it. I said yes, of course.

At 22 years of age, I was living the dream. Playing gigs around the globe, recording music and seeing the world on someone else’s dime.

I ended up living that life for around five years and all the time as I travelled, I missed Thai food more and more each time I came back home, because there wasn’t any.

Leaving the rock star life behind

Inevitably, the rock star life petered out and I returned to my roots as a chef. Joining forces with a friend, we opened PadThai in Portobello in 1995.

We ended up opening another store on Howth pier at a time when very few restaurants were taking that risk. Now it is restaurant after restaurant up there, but back then, in 1998, I had the only one.

There were a lot of lonely winters and we didn’t make it because we had a small season to try and make a living.

Kanoodle co-owner Matt Spalding

I licked my wounds and went back to Portobello and continued there for another few years.

In the mid 1990s, however, the work to build the Luas began. Businesses in Portobello ended up being literally ring-fenced away from custom. My revenue went down by 70% overnight when they started building the lines.

So basically, the Luas shut my restaurant and for the first time in my life I was twiddling my thumbs with nothing to do and ever-dwindling cash supplies.

Consultancy

I rang up a good friend of mine, Dave Murnane, my current business partner, and said, “I’m looking for a job. I’ve got to earn some money.” He said, “This is ridiculous. I’ll call you back in 20 minutes.”

He rang me back and said the Asian fast-food chain Diep wanted to open a new branch in Blackrock and they need someone who knows how to build a Thai food business.

After I did that, the consultancy work snowballed. I never picked up percentages of the businesses, I wish I had, but at the time it was more about earning money to live on.

I was brought on board to open these restaurants because first and foremost I’m English speaking, but also there probably isn’t another white person in this country that knows as much about Thai food as I do. I’m not banging my own drum, I’m a chef and I just know how to do it.

I’ve also done it before and quite often the reason why you hire someone is because they have made all the mistakes already. So I was employed because I knew what to do and what not to do.

Working as a consultant, I ended up opening six Thai fast-food chains for various different brands including Diep, Kanum, Sanuk Thai, Camile and Neon in the greater Dublin area. Then, with my current business partners Dave Murnane and Damon Crowe, we decided to open up our very own chain called Kanoodle.

Kanoodle’s origins

The name behind the company has an interesting back-story. One day I was on the phone to a friend of mine in the US and we were discussing a party that had happened the previous weekend and they were asking after so and so.

I said, “He was down the back kanoodling.” Mid-sentence, I just put the phone down and went straight online to find it wasn’t registered – and that was it. It was a bit of a eureka moment in terms of the name. To me, it’s a brilliant name. It’s the one word in the English language that has the word ‘noodle’ in it.

Once I thought of the name, I rang Dave Murnane and the first thing I said was, “kanoodle”, and he said, “Come on into my office.” We’ve been at it ever since.

I think it’s probably the most important asset of the business and we have spent an awful lot of money trademarking the name worldwide because we are setting this business up with a view to expansion and sale. At our age we don’t have as much left in the tank as others.

We’ve been doing it the right way from the start. Nobody is dipping into the coffers of the business and we reinvest virtually every penny. We’ve built our own state-of-the-art central production kitchen, so flavours are guaranteed across all the stores.

We have always said that we want to do to noodles what McDonald’s did to the hamburger and there have been people approaching us from day one saying they would like to open a Kanoodle because it’s a nice-looking brand.

We’re opening our fifth shop shortly and the business is only three years old, that’s impressive in my books and we’re pleased.

Bigger and bigger

We have dreams of global domination. We have signed a deal with a big US company recently and hope to expand in a big way over the next few years in Ireland and the UK.

We have done a lot of work on how to bring the Kanoodle brand to other territories like the rest of Europe, Asia and America. It sounds odd to be bringing Kanoodle to Asia, but in that region, nobody has marketed it right towards their increasingly brand-aware population.

We hope within the next couple of years we will be able to sell the whole business off, then maybe I can retire and go back being a rock star.

Matt Spalding is the co-‎owner of Kanoodle. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on business mistakes and what can be learned from them.

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