Ask any owner who has run a restaurant since before 2020 and they'll tell you the same thing in different words: it's a different job now. Same trade, same craft, same Friday night rush. Different economics, different guests, different maths.
At Resk (formerly Elyx) we spend our days inside those numbers with Irish operators. This post is our attempt to lay out what actually changed between 2020 and 2026, without the doom headlines and without the vendor gloss.
The cost stack got taller
The pressure on Irish restaurants over this period wasn't one thing. It was everything at once, stacked.
RTÉ Prime Time called it exactly that in October 2024: a perfect storm. Food costs up. Energy up. Wages up, through minimum wage increases and a labour market where you compete for every chef. Interest rates that made warehoused debt and refits more expensive to carry. Each line item on its own might have been survivable. The stack was the problem.
The Restaurants Association of Ireland put formal numbers around the human cost in its April 2024 report on the economic and financial impact of restaurant closures. The pattern that kept coming up in coverage of those closures is worth sitting with: businesses that looked busy right up until the week they closed. Full dining rooms and empty bank accounts. Turnover was never the issue. Margin was.
That's the single most important shift of the whole period. Before 2020, a busy restaurant was usually a healthy restaurant. By 2024, busy and broke could describe the same room on the same night.
The VAT rollercoaster
No policy lever got pulled more often, or argued about more loudly, than the hospitality VAT rate.
The 9% rate arrived as a COVID-era support and gave operators a few years of breathing room. Then it went back up to 13.5%, and the sector spent the following years campaigning to reverse it while closures mounted. In Budget 2026, announced on 7 October 2025, the government cut VAT on food and catering services back down to 9%, effective 1 July 2026, with no announced expiry.
That date matters as we write this: the new rate took effect three days ago.
The RAI welcomed the return to 9% but attached a warning worth quoting in spirit: the labour cost increases arriving in January 2026 would eat much of the benefit. That's the honest read. The rollercoaster carriage went down again, but the track it runs on has been rising the whole time.
For an owner, six years of rate changes taught a hard lesson: you cannot build a business plan on a number the government might change in the next budget. The VAT rate is weather. You dress for it. You don't control it.
Delivery, and who takes the margin
The 2020 lockdowns pushed everyone onto delivery platforms, and the commissions came with them. For some operators the platforms were a lifeline that became a habit that became a cost centre. A dish that carried a healthy margin across your own counter carries a very different one after a delivery commission, and plenty of owners only worked out the true per-order economics years after signing up.
The quieter shift was ownership of the guest. An order through a platform is the platform's customer, the platform's data, the platform's relationship. By 2026, the operators doing best on delivery are the ones who treated it as an acquisition channel and fought to move regulars onto their own ordering, whether that's web, QR at the table, or a kiosk at the counter.
Labour changed shape
The labour shortage wasn't only about headcount, though the RTÉ reporting covers how hard hiring became. It was about predictability. Experienced staff left the industry during the closures and many never came back. The people you could hire cost more and, understandably, wanted saner hours.
That collided with a rostering habit built for a different era: staff by gut feel, based on what last year's Tuesday looked like. When wages were your third biggest cost, a slightly wrong roster was annoying. When they became your first or second, a roster that doesn't match actual bookings and walk-in patterns is a leak you can see in the P&L, if you look weekly instead of yearly.
Guests changed too
Somewhere in the middle of all this, guest behaviour quietly rewrote itself. Guests book later. They cancel with less guilt, and no-show rates made deposits normal in Irish restaurants in a way that would have felt confrontational in 2019. They order at the table from a QR code without blinking. They expect the phone answered, and if it rings out at 7:40pm on a Friday they don't leave a voicemail. They book somewhere else, from the same phone, in under a minute.
That last one deserves its own line. A booking call landing during the rush used to be a nuisance. Now it's a coin flip on real revenue, because the guest's fallback option is instant.
The software shift: from recording to acting
Here's the part we care most about, and where we'll declare our interest openly.
The last decade gave restaurants systems that record. The POS records sales. The booking system records bookings. The accounting package records, months later, what it all meant. This generation of software is genuinely useful and nobody should rip it out. But it shares one design assumption: a human will look at the records and act.
That assumption broke somewhere around 2023. The owner who was supposed to review the reports is on the pass, or fixing the dishwasher, or doing the eleventh hour of an eleven-hour day. Underneath the cost stack, the closure research keeps pointing at quieter drivers: poor cashflow visibility and owner burnout. The data existed. The hours to act on it didn't.
So the need shifted. Not another dashboard that describes last month. An operator that acts on this week: notices the unpaid deposits before service, catches the supplier price change before the menu quietly pays for it, answers the booking call that lands during the rush, and hands the owner one daily brief with the moves already prepared.
That's the product we build, so weigh our opinion accordingly. But the diagnosis stands on its own. Between 2020 and 2026, the margin for error disappeared, and software that only records what happened stopped being enough.
To be plain about the limits: no software fixes rent, energy, wages or the VAT rate. What changed is that the leaks you do control now decide whether the macro pressure kills you or merely hurts.
If you want to know what your own leaks add up to, run the free audit at resk.ai/leak-audit. Five quick answers. One clear number. Or book a demo and start a 30-day trial.