Editorial Review
Ballymaloe House
The Atmosphere
“The East Cork farmhouse dining room that invented modern Irish cooking, and still sets one menu a night.”
Ballymaloe is where modern Irish food began. Myrtle Allen opened the dining room of her family's farmhouse in 1964 and cooked what the farm and the sea nearby produced that day, which was a radical act at the time and is now the orthodoxy across the island. The dinner is a set menu that changes daily, served in a low-ceilinged country house dining room with the gardens fifty yards away. The cookery school on the same land is the other half of the story. Stay the night; the house has rooms and the drive back to Cork in the dark is a waste of the evening.
Rooms Worth Requesting
What it actually feels like.
Book the dining room and a room in the house together. The half-day courses at the cookery school need booking months out in summer.
Why we recommend it
A space that justifies the journey.
Everything else you eat on an Irish trip is downstream of this dining room. It is also, sixty years on, simply a very good dinner.