A five star home from home on the set of The Restaurant
loved the luxury, the cosiness, and the total lack of fuss during his short stay at a venue known for its starring role on TV’s The Restaurant.
Pulling off the quiet country road in Glasson and into Wineport Lodge, you could be forgiven for thinking you had just been transported to an Austrian mountain cabin or to a lakeside lodge in the US.
As luxury hotel experiences go in Ireland, this is a little different. Everything is a little smaller, a little more personal and, for that, far more relaxing and rewarding.
Big is not always beautiful. The hotel itself is a beautifully understated. Clad in cedar, it’s nestled right on the edge of Lough Ree. With jetties and verandas in plentiful supply, this is a hotel where the setting is everything.
The Lodge is perhaps best known for its 130-seat restaurant which has served as the location for several series of The Restaurant on RTÉ and TV3.
More on the restaurant later — it is superb — but to focus just on food when visiting Wineport Lodge would be to do the entire experience a disservice.
Plenty of hotels offer luxury but it’s usually a paint by numbers experience: the rooms are picture perfect, the restaurant is top end, but yet you feel leaving like you have had a rather sterile experience.
The first thing my partner and I encountered when entering Wineport Lodge was a blazing fire, complete with some guests hiking boots and wellies drying off.
It was that type of weather but it was also a reminder of the type of place you are staying in. It’s not just a top of the range experience, you also get the feeling that you are at home.
There’s a cosiness that hits you right on walking in. You are immediately relaxed and the friendly but unfussy staff only help add to this feeling.
We were visiting on a Six Nations weekend and arrived with just an hour to kick off. As my partner is quite the rugby nut, we had hoped to watch the match in Glasson village but had no idea how to get there.
Staff arranged a taxi and had some recommendations of some good Guinness locations before our bags had even touched the floor.
The few pints of Guinness in Grogans of Glasson, a BLT from the gods, and Scotland sent homeward to think again was the only three hours of our stay that was spent outside the confines of the hotel. There is good reason for this.
Wineport Lodge advertises itself as offering warmth, passion and luxury. It has all these in spades. However, the key thing I took away from the visit was relaxation. It feels like a hotel you can walk around in your socks in and fall asleep by the fire — which is about as high a compliment as I can pay a place.
Our room was a case in point. All top class hotels offer luxury rooms but the Wineport Lodge offers a few extras that just make the stay a little bit special.
It did help that we were staying in the best room in the place. — the wonderful Champagne Suite — but it wasn’t just that.
The Champagne Suite isn’t just a room — it’s an apartment. It’s a duplex suite with floor-to-ceiling windows offering a stunning view over Lough Ree. The bathroom suite has a monsoon shower and a stunning standalone bath.
Wineport Lodge originally began life as a restaurant way back in 1993 so it’s no surprise that the restaurant is the focal point of the hotel.
It’s the ultimate foodie’s paradise. Eat yourself to contentment and then put your feet up by the fire in the lounge where a small and well-stocked bar is the perfect end to an evening.
The fact that the hotel doesn’t have your typical large bar setting complete with TV is one of the great things about this place. You feel like you are having a nightcap in the most comfortable living room in the world.
The food, as with everything at the Lodge, is rustic, unpretentious, and in plentiful supply. I had the seafood platter with more than a few cocktails. As a rather old-fashioned Guinness drinker, I had to seek out some advice on the correct cocktail to choose.
Our waiter, who was terribly good fun, not only introduced me to the delights of an Espresso Martini but also gave me its history. By all accounts, it was inspired by Kate Moss.
If you want to know how, go to Google. It’s quite the tale. How true or not it is, we will never know. The only downside to our trip was that we stayed one night. It almost seems a crime not to stay longer.
When you stay in a room as comfortable as the Champagne Suite, it’s pretty hard to get out of bed at a reasonable hour so I would highly recommend getting breakfast delivered to your room.
Just like in the restaurant, there’s plenty of it and with a few newspapers thrown in, there are worse ways to while away the morning.
In fact, there are fewer places I would rather while away an entire weekend than in Wineport Lodge. Feet up to the fire, drink in hand. Problems forgotten.
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