Ireland`s high-quality produce is imaginatively prepared by today`s chefs to emphasize its freshness, flavor and texture. Ireland`s chefs work closely with artisan food producers, who use traditional methods to smoke fish and make charcuterie and farmhouse cheeses. Besides excellent smoked salmon, you will also encounter smoked trout, mackerel and eel. Many restaurants grow their own salads and herbs, or have an arrangement with a local grower. When people eat out, they have come to expect a high standard of cuisine, whether at an expensive restaurant or at the local café.

Irish chefs are trained in the classic tradition, and most go abroad for a few years and bring back culinary influences from their travels( generally Mediterranean, but sometimes eastern) adapting them to the Irish market. This eclectic approach is also followed by Ireland`s private cookery schools, of which by far the best known is Ballymaloe Cookery School near the famous country-house hotel in County Cork. Darina Allen, its director, has been preaching the doctrine of using fresh local produce, treated with simplicity and respect, since 1983, and has trained many of today`s Irish chefs. Her mother-in-law, Myrtle Allen, who started advocating this philosophy back in the 1960s at her restaurant in Ballymaloe House, is active alongside Darina in the highly successful Irish Slow Food movement. The same holds true for Northern Ireland, where the chefs are if anything even more innovative than in the south. There are minor differences in the two cuisines - for example, at breakfast in Northern Ireland you will probably get a potato farl (fried potato bread) with your Ulster Fry, while down south, there`ll be white pudding with the Full Irish, as it`s known (bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, fried tomato and sometimes mushrooms).