Day in the Life - Pat Crotty, Paris Texas & Kilkenny Tradfest

Pat Crotty is a man of many hats, from being a baker, a politician, a publican and a restaurateur.

Pat went to study Bakery, Technology and Management in London at the age of 17 – the same school where his Grandfather learned his skill. Pat returned home to run the family bakery on Rose Inn Street at 20 years of age.

Five years later in 1986 the business moved to High Street and became a bakery with one of Kilkenny’s popular cafés. Ten years later the premises morphed into a bar and restaurant, known as 'Paris Texas'.

Paris Texas on Kilkenny's High Street

As a Kilkenny businessman there hasn’t been a board that Pat Crotty hasn’t been involved in. He is currently Chairman of many boards, such as Kilkenny City Centre Task Force, Kilkenny Tourism and The Watershed, while also being on the Board of Kilkenny Tradfest, Kilkenny Employment for Youth.

As a former President of the Vintners Federation of Ireland, Pat still helps the vintners around Ireland.

Here is a glimpse into Pat’s straight-to-the-point world…

You come from a very important business family in the city. What are your earliest memories of your family business? 

Back then there were two Crotty’s Bakeries as the family was so big. My grandfather came to Rose Inn Street and took over Rohan’s Bakery in the mid-1920s.

As soon as I could walk, I was inside the bakery, and as soon as I was allowed to work, I was always doing something inside the place.

I remember Rose Inn Street was a busy everyday shopping street. With Henderson’s Supermarket, Elliott’s Corner all the way down to Bourke’s newsagents and everything else in between. You had the bakers, two butchers and the first supermarket – Henderson’s.

I returned from college in 1980 and made the argument to my parents that the old concept of baking couldn’t survive, and we needed to be getting into value added food, i.e. we needed to be getting more than the price of the slice pan for our product. Basically, we had to get into the food business. You can sell a cake over the counter, but you can sell a slice of cake or a sandwich with a cup of coffee and get nearly as much.  

So, we changed our thinking and bought Woolworths on the High Street in 1985. A year later we turned it into the best bakery and coffee shop in Kilkenny.

I was only 25 years old and borrowed up to my eyeballs with this state-of-the-art German style coffee shop. It nearly broke me, by the end of 1986, we were paying 20% interest on top of the borrowings.

Are you amused by the new styles of baking that have emerged in recent years, with sourdough and gluten-free options? 

I think it’s fantastic as its proper bread. It’s not your factory-made slice pan that killed a lot of small bakeries here in the 80’s. The big supermarket chains opened their own bakeries and were selling their slice pans for 29 pence, whereas the real price of a slice pan was 80 pence. It killed every small bakery in the country as supermarket chains and used a staple product of bread as their loss leader in a recession.

This left a gap in the market because there was no choice in bread, you only had factory bread. There was an opportunity to refill the gap and that’s what artisan bakeries are doing – making old style sourdough bread, that’s baked for an hour with a proper crust.

Factory bread is processed bread, but artisan bread uses sourdough with natural yeast and time, that’s the best bread you can possibly eat. I go out of my way to buy a nice loaf of sourdough bread and there’s some fantastic ones available in Kilkenny.

You followed your father into the political world. What was the pull into politics for your family?

My father was never interested in politics and technically neither was I. We were probably never good politicians either, because if you ask me a straight question, you’ll get a straight answer, and you might not like it! My father was the same.

We were never interested in politics, but we were interested in Kilkenny. When you had a corporation that looked after the city, there was an absolute point and purpose in being involved in it and having an input in the shaping of what was happening in Kilkenny.

If you own and run a local business where you are employing a lot of people, you need Kilkenny to be prospering. When we had the bakery, we employed 40-50 people and Paris Texas today has between 70 to 80 people collecting wages every week. So, the business must work, and Kilkenny must work.

There’s no point in us being here doing a great job, if nobody comes to Kilkenny. The health and well-being of Kilkenny is always top of my list.

What was the most difficult part of your political life? 

It was time and the amount of paperwork involved. You had to be well read on all subject matters and have your research done, I never turned up to a meeting without being fully read and studied on every subject that was going to come up.

That took a huge amount of time, but as my father used to say; ‘if you sign up - you soldier’.

Your Dad, Kieran, passed away last July. Which of his many achievements are you most proud of? 

He never took on being Mayor, without at least taking on one project to complete during the year of his term. He was Mayor several times, so there were lots of projects including the Parade Tower etc.

It probably has to be ‘Keep Kilkenny Beautiful (KKB)’, which my father started. KKB is how Kilkenny won the Tidy Towns competition and won it very soon after KKB was established. We had never won it before that.

There are so many good people in Kilkenny and goodwill and all you must do is harness that, which my father did.

You entered the pub business in recent decades. What do you like most about being a publican? 

There are two levels. I really enjoy people who are enjoying themselves.  If you have people walking away with a smile on your face, you know you have done your job right.

Secondly, I have always been project driven. We reinvented Paris Texas ten years ago, which was a massive project. We are not finished at all yet. The day you think you are finished; is the day you are and it’s time to retire!

Paddy Cully playing at Kilkenny Tradfest

What do you do to unwind and get away from your business life? 

I took up learning to speak French during the lockdown and love it. I spent a week in Sancerre last year in a French school and I due back in another French school this year. I also love to watch a good rugby game.