No one is going to pretend that 2020 has been a great year for retail – at least not for bricks-and-mortar outlets. And apart from pubs, which remain closed, the restaurant sector is perhaps the hardest hit.

Lockdown, in particular, hit hard. One Central Statistics Office (CSO) report into the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic noted that: “More than three in every five (62.2 per cent) of enterprises in Accommodation and Food Services had ceased…