Starting up a restaurant is never fun, well I will qualify that, it can be tremendously exciting and one does, when it is going well, spend a lot of time on an adrenalin high.
But ,it is a lot of hard work and it can be extremely scary to realise for the first time that there are no safety nets, that when you are running your own business there is no-one between you and disaster.
Within the first six months of “Dwyers” I got hepatitis.
First disaster.
Because this is a communicable disease I was out of the kitchen for six weeks.
Somehow we survived, my assistant at the time muddled through and, as we were still very new, it wasn’t that busy.
In the spring of the following year, when the business was still just 15 months old disaster struck again.
This time it was more serious.
I had a brain haemorrhage.
But by this time we had excellent staff in place.
I had as assistant in the kitchen young Eoin Wall from the Nire Valley (he now runs his own place Hanorah’s Cottage there) and he stepped into my shoes with great skill.
The waiting staff were excellent and the whole incident passed without any disasters.
I made a remarkably quick recovery, and was back cooking within a month.
It was tough though, tough on my family and staff probably even more than me.
By the time we had got through a busy summer we were all ready for a holiday.
We headed to Dingle for a week with the children.
On the way we stopped in Waterstones in Cork to get some holiday reading and there I noticed that the new, 1992, Good Food Guide was out.
This guide, produced by the Consumer Association in England, the people who produce Which magazine was the only truly independent guide of that time and the one I had most respect for.
It would have had only about 50 entries for the whole of Ireland and, up to this time, none for Waterford.
I picked it up and found the following write up of Dwyers.
It truly made my heart sing.
This was not just a good review but a kindly and most encouraging shot in the arm.

I think it kept me buoyant for about a year.
You can never thank guides. There is always the fear that you are trying to bribe these impartial mentors of taste into favourable reviews.
Now it doesn’t matter any more.
The restaurant has been closed for nearly three years.

So thank you Good Food Guide and editor Tom Jaine for providing me with great encouragement just when it was most needed.