Wild Honey Inn by Aidan McGrath

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By Aidan McGrath

An overnight success doesn’t happen overnight. Besides time and effort, it takes a lot of persistence and assiduity
to become an ‘overnight success’ in the restaurant business. My overnight success took more than 30 years. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into getting The Wild Honey Inn where it is today.

I’ve worked in some of the finest kitchens in the world, alongside some exceptional chefs. I wanted to return home to Ireland because I missed the pace of Irish life. On my return, I started working in several four-star hotels, which were production kitchens with lots of wedding catering, banquets, large groups, as well as grill rooms and restaurant dining.
Very quickly, I became aware there had been little or no progress in food since I had left compared to the quality
you would get, for example, in London where I had spent ten years. The food was still a little old-fashioned.
For many years I just saw it as a production job.

Eventually, I started to think about opening my own restaurant. In 1998 we took the plunge and our first restaurant opened in Bunratty Co. Clare. After trading successfully for many years, we decided to move on. We wanted a place where we could offer food and rooms. We bought the building which now houses The Wild Honey Inn in 2008. Since taking it over, we have always seen the former hotel as a pub with rooms.

We opened our new business in 2009 at the height of the worst recession the world had ever seen in a long time.
There was no business and we had to start from scratch. However, we saw it as an opportunity to do something
different and to serve food that we liked to eat in a pub setting. This, then, is the story of what happened next, how we won and retained a Michelin star, together with a flavour of our dishes and the producers we work with.

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