Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites

Eating in Ruari and Marie-Thérèse’s Inis Meáin restaurant is a stunning experience, so elemental and naturalistic that it can seem to be almost an out-of-body experience. Weeks after you have left the island and returned home, the elements of the evening – the food, the room, the service, the aesthetic – will keep recurring in your mind, like the best sort of fabulist dream.
Working with his own produce grown just outside in the restaurant’s garden, and with seafood caught just off the coast, taught Ruairi de Blacam that his role “as a chef is to stay out of the way.” That’s the very Zen approach to cooking that Ruairi and his wife, Marie-Thérèse, take at Inis Meain, and it has made for one of the biggest success story in Irish hospitality: booking a room here almost verges on the impossible. By annihilating his culinary ego, Ruairi lets the food speak, and chances are that you will say of the scallop ceviche with toasted almonds, or the lobster bisque, or of some turbot served with their own potatoes – especially the potatoes! – that they are the best things you have ever eaten in all your life. Inis Meáin is – in every way – simply unique.