Buba moves to burgers as owner wrestles with fall in city workers
One of Belfast’s best known restaurants has rebranded from Mediterranean cuisine to a burger restaurant that also offers takeaway service.
Buba owner Tony O’Neill, said he’s made the change at the Cathedral Quarter venue as trade had “disappeared” because of the pandemic, with many city centre workers operating from home.
“Not everybody is back, so we couldn’t get enough turnover. With the rising costs and the limited amount of turnover, we had to do something to change it.
“It gives us more options and hopefully we can sustain the business and keep all the staff happy in their jobs.”
Rising energy bills and food costs are a big challenge for the hospitality sector, as they can only pass so much on to customers in the form of higher prices.
“We have to work a lot smarter now to keep the businesses profitable,” added Tony.
“Sometimes you have to take a lot of it on the chin yourself because if you increase your prices too much to where they should be, people won’t come out.
“We’ve now changed direction with Buba and made it a lot more casual and accessible. We felt we had to really adapt or die. We have a really great team here and wanted to keep them in jobs and drive forward so we sat down and decided to go in the direction of burgers, using our big flame grill barbeque.
“There are a lot of other places doing smashed burgers but I love flame grilled so I really wanted to bring that to the market. We’re confident about this move and two weeks in, it seems to be going very well for us.”
