2015 Award Winners OUTSTANDING GUEST EXPERIENCE OF THE YEAR 2015

Blairscove House & Restaurant, Durrus, Co Cork

What makes a great hospitality experience? This is one of the places you might try visiting, to find out.

We have been visiting Philippe and Sabine De Mey’s beautiful waterside Georgian property for many years. A wonderful place to eat and to stay, it has always been a highlight of our travels, and the restaurant - lofty, stone-walled and black-beamed, with a magnificent chandelier as the central feature, and impressive gilt-framed family portraits on the walls - was our Atmospheric Restaurant of the Year in 2003.

Sabine's brother, Ronald Klotzer, has been head chef for several years and everything has been running sweetly. Then, in 2014, things suddenly got even better when Philippe and Sabine's daughter, Ann, and her husband, Chris ('Woody') Woodward, joined the team, adding youthful enthusiasm and fun to the mix, as well as bringing new expertise.

There’s a fresh sense of a family working together to create a unique hospitality experience - aided and abetted by the curious cattle out grazing between the restaurant and the shore, who cause much merriment amongst diners when they wander over to peer into the windows.

Chris Woodward currently works front of house (where he's a dab hand at explaining all the gorgeous dishes on display) but, under Ronald's supervision, he is also training to be a chef.

Together this small but highly effective team continue to offer the wonderful food and service that this stylishly atmospheric restaurant is renowned for, and more: there is a feeling of a unique business confidently moving forward into a new generation.

Blairscove is on top form and it is a truly outstanding example of the best of Irish food and hospitality.