Kenny and Armelle seek weekend team addition

Kenny Rorie and Armelle Soimboing are looking for a local person with their own suitable vehicle to join their Armelle’s Kitchen team catering for Sunday morning markets, writes Brian Byrne.

The duties of the successful candidate will include collecting all equipment and cakes from the shop in Kilcullen and transporting them to market, setting up a stall and displaying products to be sold at the market, packaging and serving of the products to customers, and then at the end of the day dismantling the stall and returning products and equipment back to the shop.

The ideal candidate will be customer focused and have an attention to detail, will ideally be HACCP trained, and have their own large vehicle or van to transport goods to and from market (including 3 metre x 3 metre canopy and associated equipment). They will, of course, also be passionate about selling the Armelle’s Kitchen products.

Wages for the day will be €100, and there is potential for joining a sales bonus scheme.

Kenny and Armelle are extending their Sunday market operations following the closure of the Tramyard Cafe in Dalkey, beside which they’d had a shop since February of this year. The alley off Castle St in Dalkey was a popular weekend location for a number of craft and market operators, and the Tramyard Cafe was a key attraction. However, when it had to close temporarily to deal with fire safety regulations, footfall dropped in the nearby Armelle's Kitchen shop.

“We ended up serving coffee to try to attract more people down the alley,” Armelle says. “Then the hammer came down before Halloween weekend when the court ordered the whole Tramyard site to be closed from the following Friday. So we were left with no choice but to pack our cake stands and close the door sadly. We had to shut a shop that we thought was going to do very well in the future.”

Kenny and Armelle will be looking for a suitable location to open a new second shop in the new year, but in the meantime are looking at joining a second market on Sundays and maybe another lunchtime one during the week.

It’s been a busy year for the duo, they were involved in a number of special events as well as their regular operations. They were finalists in the SME Awards sponsored by Blacknight Solutions in early April. They participated in the 10th birthday celebrations in Whitewater in Newbridge in the same month. as well as the BofI Enterprise Town Expo in Kilcullen (above), and also Kevin Dundon's cookery demo in the Westgrove Hotel in Clane. They were also at the Laya City Spectacular festival on Merrion Square in Dublin in July, and through the summer were very busy with the Dalkey shop.

Markets they operate in have included St Anne's Park, Clontarf on Saturdays, Marley Park Market, Rathfarnham on Sundays, and the Merrion Square Lunchtime Market, Dublin City Centre (March till September) on Thursdays.