From restaurant to fish shop: Cork business reinvention under Level Five restrictions

GOLDIE Restaurant, on Oliver Plunkett Street, has reopened as a fish shop to adapt to the Level 5 restrictions.

Goldie first opened in September, 2019, and has experienced two lockdowns in trading for just nine months.

Co-owner and chef at Goldie, Aishling Moore, said that they traded for six months before closure in March and reopened for another three months, before closing again under Level 3 restrictions, as the outside seating area “isn’t huge”.

Ms Moore said that the fish shop, which opened on October 28, was something she was thinking of doing before opening the restaurant and that the latest restrictions gave her no choice but to open as a fish shop, offering click and collect.

“It’s definitely a challenge, with other things to worry about, like packaging instead of plating, but we were able to get everything compostable, which is very important to us,” Ms Moore said.

“There’s me and two other chefs in the kitchen and it’s great to have them back and to be working with each other again,” she said.

Goldie takes a whole-catch approach to sourcing its fish by taking whatever is caught from the fishing boats in Ballycotton.

“We still buy fish the way we always have,” Ms Moore said.

“We never really order anything; we just take whatever they have and that’s worked out really well for us.”

“We call it the whole-catch approach, so that we’re not putting any pressure on stock or supplies of fish, because what you’ll find is a lot of places will want 15kg of the same fish each week, whereas we print our menu every day here, so we have the luxury to be able to change it.”

A squid ragu was on the menu on Thursday, with Ms Moore explaining that squid is “one of the most sustainable fish that we can eat, because there’s so much of it in the Irish Sea”.