When the Michelin Guide revealed its 2025 selections at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Ireland’s culinary landscape, once dismissed as a land of potatoes and pints, emerged as something altogether different. The real surprise wasn’t Dublin’s predictable dominance or Cork’s steady showing, but rather the constellation of stars appearing in places most food pilgrims wouldn’t think to mark on their maps.
Take Ballyfin Demesne, tucked into County Laois at the foot of the Slieve Bloom Mountains. This five-star country house hotel, sprawling across 614 acres of manicured wilderness, earned its first Michelin star not through imported luxury but through Executive Chef Ricard Picard-Edwards’s almost monastic devotion to what grows in the estate’s soil. The kitchen doesn’t source ingredients—it harvests them, pulling vegetables still warm from morning sun, herbs that perfume fingers for hours afterward.
The kitchen doesn’t source ingredients—it harvests them, pulling vegetables still warm from morning sun.
It’s the kind of place where your lamb grazes the hillside you can see from your table, where seasonality isn’t marketing speak but mathematical necessity.
The numbers tell their own story: twelve new Michelin restaurants across Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2025, part of 1,147 establishments recognized across Great Britain and Ireland, with 220 sporting those coveted stars. But statistics can’t capture the quiet revolution happening in Kilkenny, where Campagne continues its reign, transforming local produce into something transcendent in a city small enough that everyone knows everyone else’s business, including what they had for dinner last night. Nearby, Mount Juliet Estate’s Lady Helen restaurant has retained its Michelin star for twelve consecutive years, a testament to Chef John Kelly’s relentless innovation.
What’s perhaps most striking is how these rural outposts aren’t trying to be Dublin. They’re not importing caviar or flying in Japanese wagyu. Instead, they’re diving deep into terroir, that French concept that somehow makes perfect sense in Irish soil. Even County Down’s Bucks Head serves its Mourne Spring lamb alongside Kilkeel crab in a traditional pub setting that feels more honest than any white-tablecloth affair.
Five new Green Stars for sustainable practices suggest this isn’t just farm-to-table posturing but a genuine reckoning with place and purpose.
The diversity surprises too. Cork’s Baba’dé earned a Bib Gourmand (Michelin’s “good food at great prices” designation, one of 36 new awards) by marrying Turkish techniques with Irish ingredients—imagine lamb from the Beara Peninsula seasoned with sumac and served with flatbread made from County Cork wheat.
Meanwhile, Dublin’s allta sources day-boat sole and Union Hall prawns, proving that modern Irish cuisine can mean more than deconstructed colcannon.
These restaurants cluster near natural landscapes and small towns, creating a new kind of culinary tourism where the journey becomes part of the meal. You don’t stumble upon these places; you pilgrimage to them, driving through counties whose names you might mispronounce, past stone walls older than most countries, to find kitchens where chefs treat grass-fed beef and fresh-caught fish with the reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts. The experience becomes truly immersive as visitors encounter the Irish folklore that shapes the cultural identity behind these culinary masterpieces.
It’s authentic without being precious, sophisticated without forgetting that food, at its core, should taste like the place it comes from.
