THINK the air of content and calm which exudes from Waterman's Lodge, Brid and Anne Ryan's restaurant and country house in Ballina, Co Tipperary, can be ascribed to a fairly simple thing.
It is a house where the use of contents, and the style of food, seems to be guided by the defining principle that the Lodge should have all it needs - and absolutely no more.
So it enjoys the appropriate sofas, the appropriate flowers, the appropriate cooking and yet, in the era of downsizing, in the times of chic simple in which we live, here is a house whose essential simplicity and modesty does the heart good.
Brid and Anne Ryan seem to have taken the lessons of the Chic Simple books - a collection of clever little tomes on furnishings, clothes and food produced by Jeff Stone and Kim Johnson Gross - and not only assimilated their diktat, but assimilated the central message of simplicity to their own metier.
Nor for nothing is there a copy of Chic Simple Cookery in the drawing room - but where I find many of the recipes in that book rather ropey, to say the least, Anne Ryan's cookery is both confidentally simple and defiantly chic.
It achieves this by understanding that less is more. If you make a perfect tart of shallot, onion and thyme, with an ethereally constructed pastry, it needs no more than a little concasse of tomato and a single sprig of thyme flowers to finish the dish. The effect of the combination of such elemental things is so adroit, so right, as to be marvellously powerful.
This sense of the power flowing from the right thing in the right place, this feng shui, is rampant throughout the house. Aside from the restaurant, they have 10 guest rooms, and describe their direction as the intention to "provide a beautiful rural retreat with good food and lots of Irish hospitality".
They not only achieve this effortlessly, they effortlessly surpass it.
If we enumerate the gifts neccessary to run a good establishment - calmness, confidence, control, personality - in Waterman's Lodge, we find the Ms Ryans have these gifts in spades.
The confidence and control emanate from wide experience in the people business. Brid Ryan worked for Bard Failte back in the 1970s, before running various restaurants and owning a pub in Dun Laoghaire. Anne Ryan did a Ballymaloe cookery course back in the early days of the school, worked amongst other places in The Inn Between and the Dunraven Arms in Adare, and did freelance catering here and there, and almost everywhere.
But it is the calmness and the personality the Ryans bestow on the Lodge which makes it very distinct, and which in turn makes the food cooked here very inviting, very delicious. The house was built by the local McKeogh family, a series of rooms organised around a central courtyard which now houses the restaurant, and was constructed as a family home back in the 1940s. In extending it, the Ryans have wisely retained the ample height of the hallways and the rooms, which makes it light filled and spacious, and have also managed to hold on to the atmosphere and courteousness of a private house.
The principle of enough and no more has left the public and private rooms uncluttered. There are invitingly plump sofas that one wants to crawl into to take afternoon tea, grandiose big beds in brass, colourful wood panelling which splits the space of the walls in the bathrooms and in the restaurant itself. It feels good, with attention shown to each and every detail.
And this attention is perhaps at its best in Anne Ryan's cooking. Though there are many elements of modernism in her, cooking an oriental dressing with some excellent roasted peppers; fish kebabs marinated in olive oil, chilli and turmeric; a Puy lentil salsa to accompany roasted wild salmon on a bed of leeks - her cooking is fundamentally a beautifully wrought form of country comfort cooking.
Anyone who can make an onion soup as sweet and consoling as she can, or prepare such a fine fillet of beef with mushrooms and thyme leaves, or produce such a slender shallot and onion tart, is really a cook in love with the principles of grandma's cooking.
The pearl barley with a grilled chicken breast, the herbs served with a pan fried fillet of turbot, the mint flavoured potato cake served with fillet of lamb, are all elements of a style which is very personal, powerfully enjoyable, and admirably understated. Ms Ryan cooks in a very feminine way, with great intuition guiding the contents of each dish, and not a jot of showmanship anywhere. The little splash of Irish whiskey which sharpens a bread and butter pudding, or the hint of ginger in some stewed rhubarb, show the way in which she likes to accentuate flavours, without ever losing sight of the central tastes she likes to create.
The cheeseboard, sourced from Peter Ward's shop a few miles up the road in Nenagh, is the best I have encountered in a long time.
It makes for a smashing dinner in a smashing house, just the sort of retreat on the banks of the Shannon one craves, just the sort of food to head home to after a day's boating or walking, when you are hungry from the fresh air and mustard keen for the crack to continue.