Restaurant review: I went to Adare Manor for a €185pp Michelin-starred dinner at The Oak Room
The Oak Room at Adare Manor
I anticipate an especially bellicose media framing of next year’s Ryder Cup clash at Adare Manor as a proxy war in this Trumpian age, with Europe now cast as US foe rather than friend. Last year’s outing in New York lit the touchpaper, gleefully abusive US fans aping current presidential etiquette. Come September 2027, the golf world — and probably most of Ireland — will be laser-focused on the luxury five-star Co Limerick hotel.
Mind you, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to storm the ramparts of lavishly pristine Adare Manor, and its dreamy, almost Hollywood-like restaging of ‘Ye Olden Days’, especially in The Oak Room, home of the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant. Soaring ceilings, wood-panelled walls, and a period sensibility to the decor seems to instil an awed and hushed reverence in fellow diners every time I’ve visited, leading to a very muted atmosphere. I’d imagine it also fuels certain Downton Abbey fantasies, not least when we are greeted on each return from the toilet like long-lost knights returning from battle. (By charming and impeccably drilled staff, I hasten to add.) It is a restaurant where I have come to very much detach the space from what is served up on the plate.
We kick off with bread: Pillowy, soft sourdough of superb quality, and onion seed and potato bread decadently drenched in preserved wild garlic butter. Two fine iterations of Abernethy butter, one salted, the other seasoned with dulse, are only required for the sourdough.
Next, snacks. Stewed vegetable and saffron consomme with olive oil is delicate in its delivery of punchy flavours. Venison tartare with caviar and wasabi tops deep-fried triangle of potato rosti — criminally addictive. Briny meat of Flaggy Shore oysters (natives) is elevated by delightfully refreshing concasse of apple and mooli, spiked with yuzu kosho and gooseberry. Doonbeg crab salad with trout roe and lemon confit sits in a buttery pastry tart made with dulse seaweed butter, a marine umami echo of deliciously dressed crab.
First course is hot-smoked sea trout (Royal Belgian caviar supplement, €35). Delicious sweet-smoky fish is buttressed by muscular and herbaceous gribiche and preserved lemon. Onion seed croutons add allium crunch, warm potato foam is a closing hug.
Hand-dived scallop is a tender treat, seaweed and lime dressing, a crisp counterpoint, kosho and shellfish butter sauce, a comfort blanket interwoven with citrus and spice.
Cod is pan-roasted, served with lots of foaming butter and mussels, white asparagus, Royal Belgian caviar, finished with a classic white wine velouté.
In an ‘atmospherically’ lit (dark) room, on a menu printed on beige card, a 9pt font is tricky enough to read, meaning I miss entirely a 7pt addendum advertising a €45 supplement on wagyu. Instead, I read it as a simple either-or choice between the beef and guinea fowl, and order both for Captain Foley and I to share.
Higgins’ 35-day dry-aged Irish wagyu is cooked in rendered beef fat, adding further succulence to already succulent meat. Alongside, slow-braised oxtail wrapped in Alsace bacon and a piquant sauce of Madeira jus.
Yet we both prefer the gamey depths of the roasted fowl with chicken mousse and foie gras and a boisterous boudin stuffed with black pudding and guinea fowl trimmings and offal. Fresh truffle, sherry cream, and jus gras complete what some might view as the gourmand’s guide to gout to which we can only reply: “Bring it on!”
The side dish for both is lush, buttery mash with crispy ‘puff potatoes’, a combo which would score very highly were I told to select a solitary dish for the remainder of my days.
Of the two desserts, a roasted vanilla parfait, with rhubarb, stem ginger, yuzu wins out over an also excellent 68% São Paulo chocolate marquise, vanilla’s intensity adding floral sweet potency to creamy parfait, a sumptuous bed for yuzu-tart rhubarb with a warming hum of ginger.
Of the petit fours, warm salted caramel madeleines are a crowd-pleasing sugar hit, while Attyflin blackcurrant pate de fruit perfectly captures the fruit’s essence.
Head chef Mike Tweedie is fast coming up on a decade in situ at The Oak Room. He was a very good chef when he arrived but it is those years of living with the seasons of the Irish culinary larder that have made him a great one, bequeathing him an insider’s intimacy with the annual nuances of some of the finest produce to be had anywhere in the world. Sure, he has to operate within the constrictions of an innate culinary conservatism of an offering designed with wealthy US golfers very much in mind but that doesn’t have to translate as a fatwa on flavour, which he delivers every time in beautifully balanced dishes. The room may give me the giggles but I could eat Tweedie’s food in a coal shed and still shiver with delight.
- Six-course tasting menu, €185 per person
- adaremanor.com
