Erwin Pollard and Simon Moore were ahead of the wave when they opened their first speciality coffee shop more than a decade ago. Pollard tells Jordan Mooney the three key ingredients behind their decisions, why they took their time to expand...and why they’ve just opened two new outlets at the same time
When is a cup of coffee not just a cup of coffee?
Well, when it comes from Grindstone. The company is the result of over ten years of work that’s seen its owners Erwin Pollard and Simon Moore grow their business across Dublin.
While we might now consider Dublin to be a haven of great speciality coffee mixed with plenty of frappuccino-slinging caffeine giants, if you cast your mind back to just over a decade ago, you might remember that things were a little different.
In 2012, Pollard was in the midst of managing his hospitality staffing agency Venue Angel that had ballooned to about 200 casual staff when Moore returned from a stint working in Australia.
The duo had previously worked together, with Pollard giving a then 15-year-old Moore his first job — washing glasses at a nightclub.
“When I first met him, I knew that this guy had a huge future ahead of him. He went on to study hotel management at Shannon, then travelled around a bit,” Pollard says.
“I have a background in hotel and bar management, so I always wanted to do something myself — my end goal was to open a bar of some sort.
“So when Simon came back from Australia in 2012, he told me coffee was insane over there and that we had to open a coffee shop.
“Speciality coffee wasn’t really a thing here then — you had the big ones like 3FE, Badger & Dodo and Cloud Picker Coffee by the time we opened — but we weren’t even sure if it was possible to do it here.
“Simon insisted that coffee was where it was at, so we started to really consider a proper coffee shop.”
According to Pollard, the pair spent a lot of time expanding their idea and exploring various locations.
Eventually, in 2016, a unit just above the Balally Luas stop in Dundrum, Dublin, became available and Grindstone was born.
The space was formerly an off-licence and it came with a bar and restaurant space next door, as well as a big kitchen.
It was a bit of a two birds, one stone opportunity, as it meant Pollard would be able to open the bar as he’d dreamed.
Even better, they initially leased the space from the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), which meant they were able to lock in a 25-year lease — something Pollard says is hugely important, as it allowed the duo to truly establish their business, which can be tricky with shorter leases.
The coffee shop opened in early 2017, with Brickyard, its gastrobar sibling, opening later in the year.
At the same time, Pollard liquidated his event staffing business.
“It grew far more than I thought it would, but eventually cash flow killed me. To close my first business after building it from scratch, to have to tell that many loyal employees that it was over was very tough.
“I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I lost so much weight. It hurt a lot, but I learned a valuable business lesson from it, which is that you learn from your mistakes.
“We’re a much stronger business off the back of it,” Pollard says.
“When we started looking at the Dundrum space, we decided what we needed were three key things: natural footfall, local trade and commercial trade.
“The Luas obviously gives us natural footfall here, far more than it does for Brickyard.
“Then there are offices and businesses around us, so that covers the commercial trade, then the local trade comes from the community, who we’ve really tried to engage with.
“Our first few years were difficult. Then Covid came along, which was of course very di cult, but it made people look at coffee differently, which I think really helped us.”
Competing with “cheap pushbutton coffee” from the nearby convenience store made it initially challenging to convert people, but with its naturally advantageous location — you have to walk directly past Grindstone to get to the Balally Luas stop, which brings in a lot of people traversing to and from the nearby Dundrum Town Centre — Pollard says people really came around.
Now, Grindstone in Dundrum is a truly all-day business, open from 7am to 6pm.
It serves treats made by their in-house pastry chef, overnight oats and sandwiches made by the Brickyard team, patisserie from popular bakery Medialuna, a range of local, innovative soft drinks, as well as, of course, coffee, tea and speciality beverages.
You’ll even find cans of Two Sides Brewing on the shelves, their own beer that is brewed in Bluebell and also served on tap in the bar, alongside 30 other craft beers, cocktails and a very tasty food menu, all powered by Irish ingredients.
Over the years, Moore and Pollard had considered expanding and opening another Grindstone location, but didn’t really find one that satisfied those three key tenets — natural footfall, local trade and commercial trade.
Moreover, in Dundrum, things like sponsoring the local football team and serving mulled wine at the area’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony have further endeared them to the community, something the duo were conscious they might not be able to replicate in another location.
However, the pair recently checked all their boxes and two new Grindstone locations have joined the family within the past six months.
After resisting expansion for so long, what changed their minds actually ended up being the idea of doing two at once — which might sound a bit mad, but in actuality is another example of the two birds, one stone mentality that successfully started Dundrum’s Grindstone and Brickyard.
“One day, someone from CBRE, a real estate company, arrived into us and said ‘Google want to know if you’d have a look at opening a coffee shop in Boland’s Mills’.
“We’d actually already looked at the space previously, years before Google even took over the space, and decided against it.
“But we’d done a lot of homework on it, so we went and looked again,” Pollard says.
“Then they told us they also had some units available on the other side of the water at Dublin Landings. We looked at both, saw they had the top three things for us — natural footfall, local and commercial trade — then told them we wanted both spaces.”
“The reason we did it this way is because opening two coffee shops is not twice as hard as one — if we’re going to the city centre from Dundrum and creating new systems, we might as well do two in one go.
“We ordered all of the same equipment, used the same designers, contractors, plumbers and electricians. It made it easier.”
The Dublin Landings café opened in December and Boland’s Mills will follow in late spring. There was a learning curve but Pollard and Moore finally felt ready.
With neighbours like Fresh supermarket, The Grafton Barber and Dry & Fly at Dublin Landings, which was developed by Ballymore and Oxley, there are also 268 apartments on-site, as well as offices housing the likes of Central Bank of Ireland, the National Treasury Management Agency, and A&L Goodbody, making it an ideal location.
As for Boland’s Mills, which is at Grand Canal Dock and owned by Google, Grindstone is among the likes of Don’t Kill My Vibe hair salon, a new bar and market from the hospitality company Animal Collective (which also owns the bars Caribou, Kodiak and Bonobo), and Barrow Street Bakery.
Now with more than 50 members of staff across the business, Pollard looks after nearly all of the purchasing and business management, while Moore does most of the admin, HR and oversees the food, splitting operation management between them.
Without investors, they’ve done it all themselves with the help of the bank.
Overall, the two new locations have cost about €500,000.
“We blew our budgets massively immediately, but the equipment itself is expensive and the units needed a lot of work,” Pollard says, adding that it was worth it in the end.
“Of course, there have been challenges along the way, but I think I’m learning all along the way.
“We’ve had to figure out more stock control and management, but we’re still so passionate about great local products and brilliant coffee.
“We’re also lucky that we have a really strong team — Magda, who now manages both city centre locations, started in Dundrum, she’s great,” Pollard says.
“Quietly, I think Simon and I would say that we would like to open more cafés in the future, but while we’re dealing with these projects, making sure they fit both our business practices and with our family lives, I think we’ll see where we are after the next while.”
