Sprout founders on why they are adding a Cork restaurant to their empire

After ten years of building a cult following in Dublin, Sprout is coming to Cork city. Founders Jack and Theo Kirwan talk to Shamim de Brún about the power of customer loyalty and paying it forward

Sun, 16 Nov, 2025 - 09:02

Shamim de Brún

In Dublin and soon Cork, two brothers, Jack and Theo Kirwan, are reconceptualising what it means to be modern millennial moguls in the spotlight.

Their company, Sprout & Co’s origin story, is now Irish food lore. They began with a Ballymaloe-stoked obsession with seasonality as a juice wholesaler, popping up in Avoca before opening a salad bar on Dublin’s Dawson St in 2015.

On Monday, they’ll open their first Cork location at 17 Winthrop St.

Ten years in and almost nine restaurants later, mythology has settled around them. The brothers. The farm. The punny salads. The book. The recipe videos. The queue at lunchtime. The app to skip the queue at lunchtime.

But the empire, such as it is, still runs on the human scale. For the Sprout brothers, it is people who are at the heart of their restaurant network — a network that brings in a cultish following.

That following includes designers like Lara Nagel, whose family co-owns Dede in Baltimore. On any given day, Lara can be found evangelising Sprout’s Charred Chicken Taco bowl to almost anyone who will listen.

“I just love it so much,” she tells me. She’s quick to cite the same trifecta of influences as many a seasoned reviewer: The fresh ingredients, the aesthetic combinations, the virtuous glow it gives you, because “you know you’re not eating rubbish”.

In the mythology of business, moguls build power by extraction: from labour, from land, from luck. The Kirwans’ trick has been to invert that and build by retention.

After 10 years, they still retain their willingness to get on the floor and do a shift; they retain staff for years.

They retain goodwill among their suppliers, customers, and internet users (just don’t ask them about a northside Dublin location in the comments; they know, they’re working on it).

Sprout’s move to Cork will be a test of whether their model of trust can travel outside this Dublin-centric bubble of fandom.

If the love for Sprout runs deep, so too do its roots. “It’s definitely in our veins,” Theo says.

Jack and Theo come from a long line of hospitality monarchs. Their granny, Gogo Kirwan, was the legendary woman behind the iconic Beaufield Mews.

Their cousin, Simon Pratt, stitched himself into the fabric of Irish food culture by co-founding Avoca.

Their late uncle, Liam O’Dwyer, practically invented Dublin nightlife with a portfolio that included Café en Seine, The George, and Zanzibar.

“He was an amazing man. Incredibly humble. Very creative and a huge inspiration.”

All of this has informed who they are as people, entrepreneurs, employers, and chefs.

Along, of course, with their mother, Siobhan — a woman who always puts a salad on the table. Who would have thought that little seed would sprout (pun intended) into a salad empire spanning the breadth of Ireland, with a farm and everything?

The brothers are a welcoming pair, who talk quickly and over one another; the cadence is affectionate and competitive but never combative. Their inheritance also shows up in how they fight. Theo doesn’t blink.

“You’re so open with each other because you’re family, so you can have brilliant, passionate arguments,” he says.

Jack nods. They agree on the important things; everything else is contested in good faith.

“In the kitchen, we both challenge each other … that can sometimes be difficult, but ultimately we both want the best thing for Sprout,” Jack says.

Rising star

Theo & Jack Kirwan, founders of Sprout, at Sprout on Dawson Street, Dublin. Photo: Gareth Chaney

They extend the friction beyond blood and to their staff — on purpose. “You don’t want yes-men,” Theo says. “You want to be surrounded by people who are passionate and able to have arguments with you if they believe in something. That friction is where great stuff comes from.”

Gratitude is part of their infrastructure, so it’s no shock when Jack lights up as we get to talking about their Rising Star initiative. The initiative is an internal development programme designed for employees to upskill so they can progress to higher levels within the company.

They talk to me about Kevin Santana, a man who started as a kitchen porter with no English. “Now he works hand-in-hand with Theo to create all our food.

“We want the person who’s starting as a kitchen porter to be supported on a journey to rise up to be a manager, managing 30 to 40 people if that’s something they want,” Jack says. “We want to have it so that a restaurant manager can buy a house in this city.”

What keeps Sprout growing this succinctly is loyalty — an old-fashioned word in a new-economy mouth. Five of their team of “people from Dublin are moving to Cork” for the grand opening on Winthrop St.

Jack and Theo maintain that “the most important person in our business is our manager”.

They each feel really privileged to be opening Cork with Nathalia Dorigan, affectionately called Nat by the brothers.

Nat, a Sprout veteran, is progressing to manager of Cork thanks to the Rising Stars programme. Nat was with the brothers when they “opened Camden Street and opened Monkstown”.

So when they were looking for volunteers to upend their lives and move to Cork, they were chuffed when she volunteered.

In a sector notorious for burnout and turnover, they’ve built a sustainable moguldom where loyalty from staff like Nat is the defining metric of success.

The logic of reciprocity has guided them since they opened, and they’ve played a hand in planting the seeds of success for other businesses too.

When Sprout had spare frontage on Dawson St, they loaned it to Fable Bakery founders Elyse Clarke and Kate O’Sullivan. The pair had been selling pastries at markets in the city before launching as a pop-up in one of Sprout’s busiest outlets in 2022.

“They launched their business at the front of our restaurant for less than five thousand euro,” Theo says, with “a rent-free period at the start and in the final six months”.

The bakery functioned like a concession, paying a percentage of its turnover instead of rent. In October, they opened their own place in Dún Laoghaire.

“It’s very cool. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?” Theo says.

They’re keen to be as helpful to up-and-coming founders as their family was to them. Hand physically on heart, Jack encourages people to reach out if they want to talk entrepreneurship in the hospitality field with him or Theo.

Dreamlike

When they start detailing their expansion into Cork, the depth of the work they’ve done shines through. They’ve been looking for the right property “probably for about two years”, Theo says, refusing to treat Cork City like a fait accompli.

They sought advice from many natives and spent real time in the city trying to get a feel for it.

“Every place is different; we’re kind of going in and assuming nothing other than we gotta give it everything,” Jack insists. “It’s more similar to when we opened Dawson Street for the first time than any other opening.”

To prepare, they’re running 10 mock services before the doors properly open, where “the customer doesn’t have to pay”.

For context, most restaurants run one family-and-friends night, maybe three max. They’ve gone for 10, so the team can get a feel for the venue — and so they themselves can help the new staff and remember what a real lunch rush does to a station and to your pulse.

“First impressions are everything,” Theo says. “We’re really just thinking about making sure that we nail it.”

They’ve picked a central site, “an old Irish bank” on Winthrop St, a street people in Cork reference by muscle memory. “Anyone I speak to in Cork talks about [it],” Jack says, amused by the ubiquity. “There’s no street in Dublin as talked about.”

The space is smaller and brighter than what you think when you read old bank. “It’s not one of the giant banks,” Jack is quick to clarify. They wax lyrical about the natural light that gives the space a dreamlike quality.

“It’s a beautiful space,” Theo says. “When we saw the glass windows, we thought, this just lights up — this is the one.”

They’re just as diligent with the product as they are obsessively precise with the location.

“We work on new offerings for months and debate every grain of salt,” Theo says of menu development now. That wasn’t the way in the beginning. “We basically developed the initial menu in about, what, five to 10 days,” they remember le chéile.

In 2015, on the cusp of their first brick-and-mortar location, Theo and Jack had moved into an apartment, “put the names on the wall”, and went wild hurling metaphorical spaghetti at the literal wall till a few solid options stuck.

Only later did the process get industrial. The ‘Supergreek’ ran for two weeks on Baggot St to gather feedback.

The popular dishes that have “stood the test of time” include the Kale Caesar and the ‘Sataysfied’ Chicken bowl (they refuse to choose their own favourite despite my prodding).

But the brothers distrust comfort. “If we ever feel satisfied by our menu, then we should quit and give up,” Jack says. “There’s always something to make better.”

Their cousin Tom Kelly’s maxim, “If it’s not broken, break it”, still governs. However, it can backfire. A cult favourite recently yielded its slot to the Supergreek. “There are a lot of upset people … calling for its return,” Theo admits, half-wincing, half-proud.

This procedure is, in many ways, pragmatic, but what they’re describing is devotion. Constant tinkering and refinement of a product shows love, care, and affection for it — more than coasting on a laurelled menu ever could.

Names matter, too. “We spend so much time on the names,” Theo says. “They can make or break a dish.”

Even the way a bowl looks at the pass is part of the show. “We spent a lot of time making sure our bowls look a certain way,” Theo says.

Then, he shrugs, the internet happens. Every day, they see people giving the full Kardashian salad-shake treatment to their obsessively aesthetic bowls till they emerge as “monstrosities”. He laughs.

“It’s supposed to be eaten in the way it arrives; every bite is layered. But as long as they’re enjoying it, who am I to tell them how to eat?”

The Cork menu will be glutted with these familiar Sprout classics and seasonal signatures to start, but the brothers expect the menu to evolve as they tune it to a city they’re still “getting to know” bowl by bowl.