Restaurant Review: Campagne, Kilkenny

AS someone obsessed by the idea of catching impossibly large and beautiful salmon in impossibly large and beautiful rivers I have had to come to understand that the hoping and wishing may almost be as exciting as the arriving and doing. 

The months of anticipation can be as absorbing as the days of adventure — especially as success is far more easily imagined than realised.

Even though there are as many businesses endorsing restaurants today as there are ways to cook a chicken, a Michelin star remains the holy grail, the most-envied and disproportionately influential gong in the industry. Some Michelin judgements seem perfectly rational and fair, others idiosyncratic. Some very good restaurants are repeatedly ignored but, in a typically stuff-’em Irish way, this unevenness seems to fuel the must-have-bragging-rights obsession.