Restaurant Chestnut

Who could ever have imagined that the old Chestnut Tree pub would have found itself re-invented as a starred gastronomic destination, in little Ballydehob? The story of Robbie and Elaine and their 17-seater, two-roomed space is the stuff of West Cork fable, something so unlikely that it beggars belief. Of course, what has guaranteed Chestnut’s success is Krawczyk’s stunningly original cooking, and right from that first taste of house breads and turf-smoked butter, the food seduces with its elegant, organic and natural flavours. No one else cooks like Krawczyk, a cook with a very pictorial vision of how he wants his food to be. The sequence of dishes on the tasting menus, from mussels with seaweed and tapioca, to cod with hamfat, to wild deer with nasturtium seeds, to yogurt with brown butter, unfolds with a dramatic arc.