Skip to main content
Home » Interviews » Episode 19: Shane Smyth

Keeping his five restaurants afloat through the COVID-19 crisis has given Shane Smyth unique insight into the role immigrant entrepreneurs like him play in the restaurant industry. Irish-born Smyth also discusses how immigrants make up one in five food prep and service workers and two in five agricultural workers. We have a full-length video interview here.

Transcript

Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed and this is JobMakers. Immigrants from Ireland were vilified and discriminated against when they began moving to the U.S. to flee the Irish Potato Famine, which saw 1,000,000 Irish die and 1,000,000 more Irish migrate. It was a sad but common story of former immigrant groups looking down on new immigrant groups, but those Irish immigrants back before them and since persevered, worked and built dreams that those who came after them could build on. For Shane Smyth, the path built by Irish immigrants before him helped him to start Hugh O’Neill’s Irish Pub in Malden nearly 20 years ago and he’s the co-owner of five more restaurants in Newton and Boston, Massachusetts, even launching one during the pandemic. Shane went on to find more odd jobs to survive and live out his adventure in California. Here, as his visa was about to run out, he and his friends heard about something called the Morrison Visa, one of the few immigration bills in U.S. history that sought to increase immigration out of the Immigration Act of 1990 signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. Through this program, he was able to apply for permanent residence, submitting hundreds of applications, presumably to increase his chances. It worked and within months he had a green card, he moved to Chicago, continuing his string of odd jobs, but it wasn’t necessarily as hard as it was for other immigrants. Shane sees how immigrant workers are the backbone of the restaurant industry. They are more than 40 percent of our agricultural workers and one-fifth of our food prep and serving workers. And he also sees the tremendous skills and drive they bring. So Shane has some strategies on how restaurants can survive crises, and he says it cannot be done without immigrants. As you’ll find out in this week’s JobMakers. Tell us a little bit about your journey to the U.S. You came from Ireland many years ago. What was that experience like and why did you do it?

Shane Smyth: It was a very exciting experience for sure at the time. I came first 30 years ago, in 1991. I was a student in college and a friend and I were discussing what we would do for the summer and plans for working. We needed to make money for the next year and he had been to Cape Cod the previous summer and loved it, on a J-1 student visa and I decided I’m going to apply for one also, and we came up with the idea to move to California. I’m not really sure why. Maybe watching too many Beach Boys videos or something, but we decided California was the place and we chose San Francisco. I remember you arrived that first night and the program puts you up for your first night and then after that you’re on your own. You leave in the morning and you have to make your way and yeah, it was definitely intimidating, but I think the first impression was all the yellow cabs, so it definitely looked like it did in the movies. But you know our experience was I suppose, the typical immigrant arrival experience. We got an apartment, probably just something advertised on a window. We had a studio apartment that we shared with three other people, so there were four or five total in a studio for the first six months and also a colony of cockroaches that shared the place with us. We tried to find work. Our first job was putting an earthquake foundation into someone’s garage, which was pretty crazy for us. I think being from Ireland you have the advantage of speaking the language here obviously, so that was a big plus, but then also we had another advantage in that many, many people came before us from Ireland and then so many immigrants emigrated to America and so while I didn’t know anyone specifically, you would meet Irish people through sports and things like that and it would help you a little bit along the way. But they blazed the trail, the people that had to leave hundreds of years before us and so that would have helped with that experience.

Denzil Mohammed: Quite remarkable that you just 30 years ago were able to apply for a green card, whereas thing is today it’s so much harder, not just thinking about the backlog that we’ve seen in the past several years, but how many hoops people have to jump through. And it was relatively easier for you 30 years ago. Coming from a place like Ireland, I remember Larry O’Toole talking about just the sheer diversity that he encountered versus the lack of diversity in Ireland. You must have seen a lot of that in Los Angeles, in California.

Shane Smyth: Yeah, for sure you know, and that was definitely another eyeopening part of it. As I said, I grew up in a farm in the country, and never, even when I went to college in Dublin, you know, my siblings and I were the first generation of our family to ever go to college and I think even then, 30+ years ago there was no diversity in Ireland. No one wanted to come to Ireland. There was nothing there to attract them. There wasn’t any work. The weather wasn’t great. It still isn’t obviously, but it wasn’t the kind of country that people came to. It was a kind of country that people left unfortunately, and that was my experience. It certainly wasn’t as much needing to leave as kind of wanting to maybe, but I think yeah, there was very little diversity in Ireland then and it’s great to see it now when I do go back, how it’s changed and how it has become a place that’s desirable to go to and the economy has boomed in the years since, and it has given a lot of people a lot of opportunities from other countries to come there to make a life for themselves. It’s nice to see that reverse migration where we sent our people to so many nations for literally hundreds of years out of necessity and now we can welcome people to Ireland and offer them something where they can make a better life for themselves. That’s something for us to be proud of, I think.

Denzil Mohammed: You mentioned about the Irish immigrants who blazed the trail in the U.S., those who came before you. What is the legacy of that and how do you feel about those immigrants? Who came before you from Ireland?

Shane Smyth: Well, I think the legacy is unending. I would say it started from the beginning, during famine times in the 1800s, where people had no option but to leave because it was either that or die. And unfortunately, a lot of people died on the journey. But when they came to foreign lands they were treated as third class citizens and began in the very bottom rungs of society and did all the jobs that no one else wanted to do, very common with immigrants nowadays too, that we see in this country anyway. But I think when you look back at the experiences of my own ancestors and everybody else’s ancestors in Ireland where everybody knew someone who emigrated, it was a sad legacy really, in a way that they had to do this. It really came from colonization from the British and them stealing our food, stealing our land and our language and making it a thing where people had no other option but to get out of there to be able to feed themselves and feed their families. And now, in in the couple 100 years since then, specifically speaking about U.S. history but this applies to almost every country around the world where Irish people made a life for themselves, they created a legacy and they broke through those barriers that were there and broke down those prejudices that were there through hard work and perseverance and they really created a future for the generations like myself that came after who emigrated. Those people had already broken down those barriers and had shown, particularly in the U.S., that they could work hard and they could make something of themselves so that Irish people were no longer stigmatized like they were in the beginning. The pinnacle of that was John F. Kennedy becoming president here, and every household in Ireland had a picture of him and the Pope or the Virgin Mary in the front room.

Denzil Mohammed: You bring up some really interesting points, and one of them is the discrimination that they faced when they first arrived in the 1800s and it’s something we’ve seen over and over again in U.S. history. Every group that comes here faces this similar discrimination and then the group that comes after them faces discrimination from the prior group, so, Italian immigrants were discriminated against by the Irish immigrants who came before them and it’s a constant legacy. And then you spoke about taking the jobs that people weren’t doing, the most menial jobs. And as someone who is in the restaurant industry, I’m sure that you see that very, very starkly. You know, Hispanic immigrants are probably single handedly responsible for holding up the restaurant industry, being behind the scenes as cooks, as chefs, as cleaners. What are your thoughts on today’s immigrants? Do you see that they are any different to the immigrants who came before them?

Shane Smyth: No, I don’t. I think they have the same stories. They have the same dreams and goals and aspirations as the generations of immigrants before them. 99 percent of people are coming here or moving wherever it is to make a better life for themselves and for their families, and there really isn’t any difference. The times changed maybe, the countries that they’re emigrating from change, maybe the reasons change, but at the end of the day, everybody has the same goal. They just want to make a better life and I don’t see any difference. And that’s something for me personally then, it’s hard for me to understand how people who are here today, who are mostly, let’s face it, most people who are in the U.S. are descended from an immigrant, most of them, if they’re not American Indian anyway. And it’s interesting and sad to see how people can treat immigrants so poorly and think so poorly of them. It’s not everybody, of course, but those that do. You wonder, why? Because in reality they had the same background. It just might be a few generations ago. It might be one, might be two, but like you said, we have different generations who discriminate against those who came before them, and that’s mystifying because you would think that they would have more empathy, and you would think that they would be looking to support immigrants more. That’s ironic, it’s sad, but yeah, it seems to be history repeating itself in that regard. But I do think that immigrants today work just as hard as immigrants before them. You mentioned the restaurant industry and yeah, we are the restaurant industry, it would never survive without immigrants. In fact, immigrants are not only creating jobs in the restaurant industry, but doing those jobs, and I think It’s an incredible industry for immigrants to get involved in because you can become something from nothing without any background in the industry, without any formal training. I know personally, that’s my own kind of background, but also people who work for me currently or have worked for me maybe started as a dishwasher and worked their way up to being a head chef. Or people who started out and are now owners creating jobs themselves. In terms of immigrants holding up the industry, I don’t see how we would survive without them, and it’s a big challenge right now, obviously there’s a huge staffing crisis in the restaurant industry and across a lot of industries right now. We need more immigrants to come here now, I feel like. I wish we had more people who were able to get visas and were able to come and work. Immigrants are making the country run and we need to continue giving opportunities to immigrants to come into the country legally, to work, to pay taxes and to help the rest of the economy.

Denzil Mohammed: You remind me of someone who’s actually across the street from you, Douglas Tran, who started out as a busboy and now he owns All Seasons Table and multiple other restaurants. Similar story to yours. Your first restaurant is located in Malden and just taking a walk down Main Street or Pleasant Street, you see so many immigrant-run businesses, particularly restaurants and food services. When I’m talking to young people in schools, 5th graders, I remind them, don’t take for granted that you have access to all these different kinds of cuisines. Thai food, Mexican Food, Irish food, the haven in J.P., Scottish food because of immigration. There are parts of the country where they don’t have that luxury. They don’t have that variety of cuisines that enriching of our cultures. But I want to talk about your restaurants now. First of all, give us the overview of the spectrum of restaurants and cuisines and locations and clienteles, and then tell us what it was like starting your first restaurant.

Shane Smyth: So I’m involved in, a pretty diverse group of restaurants in that we span everything from Irish as you mentioned to American and then to some Asian cuisine as well. A lot of the food is influenced by European cooking techniques, French and Spanish. I’m very lucky to have a business partner in the Newton locations who is a chef and classically trained, and has great skill in terms of bringing those flavors to people. In Malden, there’s an Irish pub that was the first one started 20 years ago and then in Newton we have different restaurants that are kind of going from bistro style to a ramen shop that’s in Newton Center as well. So, Little Big Diner is that one. We opened a pizzeria during COVID, Jimmy Pizzeria, and then we have two more, more classic restaurants, Buttonwood and Sycamore, that are as I said more kind of bistro style. Then in Boston, I’m calling it Brasserie. That’s an American Brasserie, and that’s kind of like an all-day type experience for lunch, dinner and late night, which unfortunately, we’re still closed post pandemic, but we’re working on our reopening there at the moment. But it’s kind of a little bit about maybe trying different experiences, and as you were talking about, giving people the experience of trying different types of cuisine no matter where they are and you can’t really try and replicate the same thing. It maybe doesn’t make the most sense. It kind of works for some certain concepts, but we always wanted to offer something new each time we opened a new place. That’s kind of something that makes it maybe a little bit more interesting for us as well. You’re not repeating yourself.

Denzil Mohammed: But what was it like starting your first restaurant? I venture to suggest that you didn’t have the intention of starting an Irish pub when you first came here, did you?

Shane Smyth: No, definitely not. To be honest when I came first, I really had no idea what I wanted to do, how to kind of live my life as they say, or professionally anyway. And I’d studied business management in college. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, it was during one of those times when I was living in Chicago. I had an injury from work, I couldn’t work for a couple of months and I really needed to make some money. I had no income, but you’re on your own as an immigrant and I didn’t have any family or support system so I got a job working on the door at a place in downtown Chicago. Kind of like a bar restaurant just checking IDs and things like that and that was my first ever experience of hospitality in the U.S., and then a friend of mine who I had met in San Francisco from the same part of Ireland as me, we played football together, had moved to Boston and he was opening a bar in Cambridge and he had reached out to me and asked, would I be interested in coming to work from when he opened it? I said sure, why not? I was in Chicago at the time. I moved to Boston and the rest is history. I started there just working the door again and serving tables and kind of bar backing and working my way up the chain until I was bartending full time and then did some managing and at some point I just kind of realized that I was good at it. I guess maybe the business management course actually stuck to me at some point. I realized that I was fairly decent at what I was doing and I worked a lot of shifts. I worked seven nights a week some weeks, just trying to save as much money as I could and luckily was able to do that with the tips that I earned along with that friend who I owned the place with and another partner. Then we chipped in together and opened Hugh O’Neill’s in Malden, coming up 20 years ago. And that was the first place that was kind of an Irish pub. Obviously what we knew of it was the experience that we had grown up with, an Irish pub being the place where three to four generations of the family would gather for all kinds of celebrations or events, parties, and even the sad times of a funeral. At the time was kind maybe a little bit underserved in terms of having options for dining out and places to go to get a good drink and we tried to fill that need and here we are, we’re still there.

Denzil Mohammed: What was the downtown like in Malden 20 years ago?

Shane Smyth: It was very quiet to be honest. There were a few stores there, there were no other restaurants on the street. There was a pub up at the top of Pleasant Street that didn’t even serve food, so there were literally no dining options on Pleasant Street in Malden. And now, as you mentioned, just to see the difference today, where almost every second building is a restaurant and most of them ethnic restaurants, most of them immigrant-owned and all serving amazing foods that give you flavors from their home countries. I try to support them myself personally, as much as possible and send our customers to them, and their customers come to us and it’s a really great kind of a community, the restaurant community in downtown Malden.

Denzil Mohammed: But I know that you had like 180 employees total before the pandemic. What happened last year, to your businesses?

Shane Smyth: Well obviously, last year when COVID hit was just like pulling the handbrake in the car going 70 miles an hour on the highway. It was just a complete stop we came to. We had to shut down by state order so it was pretty traumatic to be honest emotionally, financially like all of those things. And not just for myself and my partners of course, but for the staff as well where people’s livelihoods were pulled from underneath them in in one day. It was very challenging to halt your operations immediately. First thing was to shut down your facilities and we obviously got a lot of perishable product. A lot of that was lost, but we were able to give a lot of it to our staff that now had no job and then we were able to start, a few weeks later, start cooking it, cooking meals for staff that didn’t have any work. But we had to furlough our staff, which was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do professionally and personally, but luckily for the staff, the state started an unemployment scheme. People were able to get unemployment right away, but then of course there’s staff who weren’t able to get unemployment. And that was one of our biggest challenges, was trying to figure out how we could help our staff that weren’t able to get unemployment. And like I mentioned, cooking for them is one thing. We had a GoFundMe at one point that one of our regulars started up. Our industry is still going through a lot of challenges created by that, and I think they’re probably going to last for quite some time. Our businesses look very, very different today from what they did back last March.

Denzil Mohammed: Talk a little bit about that. How does the business look different today?

Shane Smyth: Yeah, so I suppose some of the more obvious things that you could see, or anyone can see from the outside is we have outdoor seating, which most of my locations didn’t have. Hugh O’Neill in Malden did. That was the only one that outdoor seating. A lot of them didn’t even offer any takeout, which, now takeout sustained us through the winter, and that was kind of like your new business model, a takeout restaurant. Little Big Diner actually completely flipped from 100 percent dining into 100 percent takeout over the course of about six weeks last summer. So those are some of the more obvious things and also, our hours have changed dramatically in that we haven’t been able to get back to full operation yet. Some of the restaurants were open more than seven nights a week and those are only open five nights a week currently. It’s not just as simple as being able to ramp back up to full operation, but also so many challenges in terms of staffing and still having a little bit smaller menus and we had to adapt to having a lot less business, so you couldn’t offer the same amount of offerings as you had before. Like Hugh O’Neill, for example, had 36 beers on tap. Well, now we couldn’t. When we reopened, we couldn’t reopen with 36 beers because we just simply didn’t have enough business to justify that. You would never keep them fresh. We’ve increased the use of technology, simple things like QR codes, you’ve seen them everywhere during online ordering. You know, really your strategy was just survival at the time, so you know it was a case of take on whatever projects you could. Sycamore started subscription service during the winter. Buttonwood became takeout only for three months during the winter, these are some of the things that we had to do. Each place was different, but we just had to adapt to survive.

Denzil Mohammed: By the way, Shane, you’ve been living in the U.S. for over 30 years. You moved here almost on a whim. It was adventure. It was uncertainty. You had to be scrappy. You had to end up in every possible industry before you started this career. What are your thoughts about America as the place that allowed you to come here and eventually flourish? What is your thoughts about America as a home for immigrants?

Shane Smyth: Ah well, I will be eternally grateful. That’s the first thing I can say, for the opportunities that were allowed to me by this country. And also obviously having the opportunity to get a green card back 30 years ago, which I know was incredibly lucky at the time, with whatever programs were there in that day. I was able to do so and able to become legal. I would never be able to have the opportunities and have the things happen for me that have happened without that. I wish that more people had those opportunities. Today it’s so much harder for people to get a green card. That that needs to change. I do think that this country needs immigrants to replenish the workforce. It needs immigrants to bring that diversity of lifestyle to the country and it’s important that this country continues on that path. It’s important that we continue to be that country. It’s important that we continue to give people those opportunities to build up our own communities, to build up the people around us, because if the people around us are successful everyone else will be successful and I think we all see that. You talk about Malden Center and walking up Pleasant Street, if you didn’t have immigrant immigration policies, you’d never have that. Look at all the jobs that are created by immigrants. That’s been going on for hundreds of years. We need to continue that. I hope that people get back to realizing that immigrants are a positive and not a negative, and that immigrants bring so much to the table.

Denzil Mohammed: Shane Smyth, I couldn’t have said that better myself. Thank you so much for joining us in JobMakers. This was a really fascinating and insightful conversation and I really wish you the best of luck as we come out of this pandemic.

Shane Smyth: Thank you Daniel. I appreciate you having me on and this was a great experience too. All the best, keep up the good work.

Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you for joining us for this week’s inspiring story of another immigrant entrepreneur. If you know someone we should talk to, email Denzil. That’s Denzil at JobMakerspodcast.org. Leave us a review on your favorite streaming service too. I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers podcast.