Dinner at Ireland's Downton

Demesne is memorable for its impressive renovation and impeccable service, but underneath the gold and silver leaf, the food is 'ordinary,' writes CATHERINE CLEARY

I’m driving slowly behind a 20-year-old horsebox on a narrow country road in deepest Laois. This is the road to Ireland’s Good Room. It reminds me of the half-jokey acronym in our house as kids if guests were coming: FHB, or Family Hold Back. Piece of smoked salmon? Not until the guests have had some. Those plumped cushions? For The Guests.

It’s Budget day and Messrs Noonan and Howlin are polishing their wooden spoons to give a collective rap on the knuckles. So I’m on the road to Ballyfin, to see what rich people eat. Only guests get to dine here. Many of them fly in from the US to do so. Gatherings of the glittering kind happen in Ballyfin, with Mom or Pops picking up the bill. My Wednesday night with lunch, dinner and breakfast is costing (deep, calming breath now) €475, and you stump up a quarter of that upfront. For two sharing, the price is €750.

So for 20 hours I will live like a New York hedge fund manager visiting a gilded corner of the old sod. Goodbye downturn. Hello Downton.

Two fat stone ducks sit on the pillars at either side of the iron gates to Ballyfin. There’s a carriage-width drive for about a mile down through the grounds. In front of the stern facade of this big house I see three liveried staff standing in wait. There’s a smell of woodsmoke. I hand over the car keys. They will be stored in the drawer of a desk that is probably worth more than the car.

In the Cathedral-scale stone-floored porch, wellies and umbrellas are lined up. Here they have a tray of hot facecloths, something I’ve never really needed after a 90-minute drive. But I might if I had just negotiated the Red Cow roundabout straight off the red eye.

Up the main stone staircase past a towering Christmas tree (not fully decorated yet, they explain) we go to the Butler room, not “the butler’s room” but a room named after James Butler, an Earl of Ormonde from the 1600s whose beady-eyed face looms down on me from his portrait over the fire place. The suitably dramatic Old Spice music (O Fortuna from Carmina Burana) is playing on a DVD player hidden in a mirrored wardrobe. The room is beautiful, with two enormous sash windows overlooking the sunlit lake.

There’s an armchair with a footstool, in which I could happily spend the entire visit, a couch, a high four-poster bed and an antique wardrobe with a brass plate on one drawer that reads “amenities”. These turn out (a little disappointingly) to be manicure sets and clothes brushes and a long shoe horn to allow you to slip on your Louboutins without having to bend down. The bathroom is larger than most hotel bedrooms. A chandelier with real candles hangs over the tub, which is deep enough to drown a baby hippo.

The final touch is a green curtain tassel hanging on the doorknob to the room. Putting it on the outside, the concierge explains, is Ballyfin code for “do not disturb”. I think of it as the “no-hassle-tassel”. Nothing so impersonal as a printed door knob card for guests here.

Fred Krehbiel is a Chicago cable magnet. His family company Molex makes a PC component called the Molex connector. He bought Ballyfin in a crumbling state in 2002. A painstaking nine-year refurbishment project wrestled it back to glory from the grip of the damp and the ivy. And last year it opened as Ireland’s most expensive hotel, with just 15 bedrooms, all of them stuffed with antiques and art.

Another Fred, French chef Fred Cordonnier, was installed in the kitchen. Chef Fred has left Ballyfin. Since October, Cordonnier has been cooking at a Dubai beach resort hotel, according to his Linked-In page.

The house was the 19th century country seat of the Coote family. It has also served as a boys’ boarding school. In a surreal find in one of the coffee table books there’s an old school photo featuring my uncle Peather grinning at me, from the top right, one of the class of ’59.

And so to lunch in a dining room at the back of the house, where you look out at water flowing down a set of stone steps. There is a bowl of Jerusalem artichoke soup. It’s a smooth and silky soup with golden beads of oil (I’m guessing rape seed) on the surface. Then there’s the Ballyfin egg, an omelette with “Limerick ham” and Coolattin cheddar. It’s slightly underdone with a pool of liquid egg under its grill-crisp top. So far, both dishes are good home cooking. Then comes a dessert that looks like a pimped up mini-Magnum, a blackcurrant mousse covered in chocolate on a stick. There’s some edible gold foil on the top. Gold foil tastes of nothing and leaves a plasticky residue on your teeth.

The service is impeccable. An American couple, who are on their last day having been here for a while, talk in low voices at the next table.

After lunch I take a run around the grounds in the December dusk with the frost turning the grass glassy underfoot. There are bikes or golf carts, but I need some exercise before dinner. In the bubble of Ballyfin I feel it’s only a matter of time before someone else can do your run for you and send you the endorphins by email. Afterwards I head to the small, navy-tiled swimming pool in the basement, where you walk past a jaw-dropping collection of contemporary Irish art in the corridors.

I have run, swum and dressed for dinner and now I’m on a couch in the enormous living room they call the saloon, soaking in its incredible beauty by a crackling woodfire with a pre-dinner drink. My wellbeing reading is pretty much off the scale, so I’m fully prepared for dinner to be my final swoon. Unfortunately it isn’t.

Dinner in Ballyfin is posh. It is exquisitely presented and served. There are more foams than you’d find in a college fountain on Fresher’s Week and folderols such as that edible gold and silver leaf too. But when you strip all that away, the ingredients are pretty ordinary.

The worst offender is the “West [sic] lobster and braised pork belly.” It’s the first of the four courses I have, so should be a crowd-pleaser, and it looks great. But the lobster meat is rubbery and dull, a bright pink claw piece has almost no flavour, in a way that makes me wonder from exactly how far “west” this lobster has travelled. The pork belly is salty and fatty, like a rehydrated Ranchero. White coco beans are a strange, mealy accompaniment.

Next up, a free-range chicken terrine has deliciously moist chicken breast but there’s little else in the terrine, which has no smell, as if it has just been taken from a fridge. The phrase “cold collation” comes to mind. There’s some Parma ham and a tiny smidgeon of foie gras. A black pudding crumb has the texture of sawdust. Its red wine puree is muddy and overly strong. Pickled beet slices have the look and texture of red onion skin. The nicest thing on the plate is a fresh, fiery sprig of winter purslane, which presumably came fresh from the kitchen garden.

Two couples are dining in the large room with me. They both speak in churchy whispers. I am beginning to feel like Lady Mary-no-mates and start to long for my room, my laptop and its unseen episode of Homeland.

A turbot dish is the best part of the meal, the fish fried butter crisp on top with a sweet potato puree and some smoky lentils cooked with cubes of potato and tiny potato crisps.

There’s a pre-dessert of chocolate, orange and nuts in a glass topped with another foam (white chocolate) and finally a plate with pistachio financier, crunchy caramel shards and chocolate custard piped around pieces of pear. I’ve had two glasses of a Languedoc Picpoul de Pinet Domain Félines-Jourdan (€8 a glass). It has been a long meal.

In fairness we are in the lull before a busy festive month (the place is almost entirely booked for December). Possibly they’re saving the best for Beyoncé or some other mega-celeb who’s booked the whole house.

I get the impression that a firm hand is being kept on the cost of ingredients. The kitchen garden is looking as empty as all midwinter vegetable gardens do.

Breakfast the next morning is lovely, the kind of simple country cooking that made lunch so good: porridge followed by a fried duck egg surrounded by barley and leathery strong pieces of smoked bacon. It’s the kind of thing I think my alter-ego hedge fund manager would remember as uniquely Irish when she got back home.

Back in the porch, the guest comment book is full of praise for the astonishing comfort and beauty of the place and the world-class service. An Arizona 10-year-old thanks them for fulfilling her dream to be a princess in a castle. As I drive away to a school pick up and a Lidl run, it’s strangely cheering to think that in the decade since Ballyfin was bought, Irish restaurants outside the walls of this beautiful place have moved up several notches. There are dozens of dining rooms that would more than give it a run for its money. If I dream of Ballyfin it won’t be for the food, but for that armchair by the window and the quietest most comfortable hotel room in which a lucky escapee from Austerity Ireland could ever find herself.

Overnight in Ballyfin including lunch, dinner, breakfast, soft drinks, two glasses of wine and snacks came to €491.

Ballyfin Demesne, Ballyfin, Co Laois Ballyfin

tel: 057-875 5866

Music: iPodded classical arrangements in every nook and cranny. If you hire the whole house perhaps you get to put on some Metallica

Facilities: Lavish. Loo seats have drawer handles screwed on to aid their raising and lowering

Food provenance: Cheesemakers are namechecked and food, in season, comes from the extensive kitchen garden and polytunnel

Wheelchair access: Yes

Coeliac options: Available on request