The Menu's annual food awards
THIS is not a definitive guide or a ‘best of’, simply random examples of fine Irish hospitality establishments this writer has happened upon in the last 12 months or so. It would be nice to think the preceding sentence will be sufficient to stay the inevitable brickbats that always seem to follow publication of this list but that is never the case, so, once more, with feeling, please, don’t take any omission as a professional slight: this is simply a personal and entirely random recollection of belly-bustin’ gustatory pleasures that have added yet another notch to the belt over the last year. Given more time and more space, it could easily have been twice as long.
When this annual review began five years ago, the country was in the eye of the recessionary storm but it appears the hospitality industry at least has come through the worst of it. The money tap is flowing once more and investment in high-end hospitality ventures is evident all around the country, not just in Dublin. (Over the last decade, Dublin, in dining terms, has become a state within a state, its large population and massive share of the tourist market enabled a food sector that has long outstripped the rest of the country to the point where comparisons are increasingly redundant.)
