Cork take all three Michelin stars awarded in Ireland this year

Only three new Michelin stars were awarded in Ireland this year, and all of them went to Cork restaurants. Joe McNamee meets the men behind the stars.

For quite a spell, you’d have found plenty of gleeful takers beyond the Cork county boundaries willing to subscribe to the notion that Leeside’s self-anointed tag of ‘Food Capital’ was now a boast ringing most hollow indeed — and one particular yardstick used to quantify such parochial hubris was Cork’s lack of Michelin stars, the last having been ‘extinguished’ in 2001.