Wild Honey Inn owners on why they are selling their €1.25m Michelin-starred pub

"While I was at school, I was doing butchering and I'd be dropping meat into various places, to the local hospital and to Kate's Uncle's small hotel in the town, and you'd always get the nice smells coming out of the kitchen. CERT were doing interviews in the local school for chef training and everyone was either immigrating or moving on, so I did an interview and got a place."

Following two years chef training at Killybegs Hotel School, the young couple joined the outflowing human tide and set off for London in the early 80s.

"When we were young," says Aidan, "the biggest export was emigrants."

Aidan began working in a series of the finest hotels in London, then pretty much the high watermark for fine dining in Britain, with an emphasis on the 'fine'; large brigades of chefs in the kitchens, turning out classical French fare and full silver service in immaculate dining rooms.

"My second position was in the Berkeley Hotel, in Knightsbridge, which was part of the Savoy group and is still there," says Aidan, "and there was about 60 chefs in the kitchen and that was probably the end of an era, when hotel kitchens were run by the hotel, and you had everything from the head chef to the apprentice. You had people that you requisitioned crockery, cutlery, silver from all of that type of thing. Hotels were run the proper way white glove service, all of that type of thing. 

"Now all the big hotel restaurants in London are run by named chefs who come in and oversee the restaurants themselves. You can't afford the labour to run a hotel-type kitchen anymore. It was cheap labour back then but you got to learn everything the proper way, all the sauces, no recipes, all by taste. When you are young, you are at your most impressionable and are best able to take in and memorise those flavours — and I still make sauces, hollandaise, bearnaise, Madeira, exactly as I was taught to make them all those years ago."

If the old era of Escoffier-style kitchens run by vast brigades was coming to an end, it was also the beginning of a new era of quite radical change in British restaurants. The first restaurant in Britain to get a Michelin star was Albert and Michel Roux's Le Gavroche, in 1973, and their French classical fine dining was pretty much the standard for the next decade until the arrival of the new wave of young English chefs led by Marco Pierre White began to upend the stuffiness of the old school model with an injection of 'rock and roll' and bring their classical French training to bear on British produce, creating an exciting new style of dining with a distinctly English twist. 

Aidan moved into working in restaurants, many of the kitchens from which this new wave had themselves trained and spent time in Le Gavroche and the iconic L'Escargot, the oldest French restaurant in London which had been reinvented under Nick Landers and alongside such chefs as Bruno Loubet, a young chef on the cusp of stardom.

On holiday in Canada, in 1990, Aidan spotted a silver airstream truck selling sandwiches to building sites and was inspired to start his own back in England, custom building it and taking it to fairs, festivals and other public events, a food truck some 20 or 30 years before they became an international phenomenon.

It gave me my first taste of having a place of my own, the next step would have obviously been a bricks-and-mortar venue."

In 1992, with a young child and another on the way, Aidan and Kate decided to move back to Ireland.

"We used to come home on holidays and I was thinking that everyone was having a great life over here. In England I was doing 20-hour days. We lived in Essex, and I used to leave in the morning at 5.30am to get into London at 7am, tube home at 12.30am, into bed and back in again the next day. We could also see that Ireland was a lot less expensive then and our daughter was going to be starting school."

Aidan returned to a job in an earlier incarnation of Adare Manor, a five-star hotel, though not quite as salubrious as the luxury behemoth of today, and he contemplated returning to England. The removal van was actually parked outside their home to return the young family across the water when he accepted a job in the Limerick Inn. It was quite a step down from the standards he had worked at up to that point but he was given a free rein.

"They were nice people to work for, and I stayed there three and a half years but it was all roast turkey, roast ham, lake, completely different to what I was doing in London. The first day I walked into the kitchen, I said 'fucking hell' but it turned out to be one of the best places I ever worked in, in terms of people and autonomy, everything I was promised was delivered, and it allowed me inside the Irish diner's head to see where they were coming from."

McGrath's next staging posts included a stint as head chef at Sheen Falls, in Kenmare, where he achieved a prestigious three rosettes, and a position as head chef at Doonbeg Lodge, but by now the desire to have their own place was taking over, in particular, a venue with rooms for accommodation.

"One day we were looking at a place in Ballyvaughan," says McGrath, "and we drove by here [Wild Honey Inn] in 2008."

Though the former commercial travellers hotel that was to become Wild Honey Inn was in reasonable shape, it still required some serious work and McGrath quit his job in Doonbeg and the couple spent six months readying it for opening in 2009.

"I had to jump in. And after I left Doonbeg, as we went along, I probably had regrets as there was only a few bob left to renovate. I remember one day saying to Kate, 'we'll stick with it or we'll move back to England again, and either way in five years we'll be back on top again. We'll be back as good as we ever were. We asked a few people's opinions and all that, and they all said, stick with it, just don't walk away from it because you'll still have the debt. So we gave it a shot and here we are, 16 years later."

And what a 16 years it has been, kicked off by a major boost when the brothers Brennan, Francis and John, wanted to feature this new venture in their programme, At Your Service. Wild Honey Inn opened in May 2009, and the TV exposure proved a huge boon to the fledgling business — McGrath says it is still the most successful business to ever feature on the programme. 

Free publicity, however can only bring so much and it was McGrath's cooking that did the heavy lifting and it wasn't long before a phenomenon more common to New York and pretty much unheard of back then in Ireland began to occur: people queueing up outside to wait for a table to become free.

We were doing 90+ for Sunday lunch, cars would be parked up all over the place outside, people sitting on walls."

Within a year, they had achieved a Michelin Bib Gourmand and gradually began to alter the menu to feature the dishes Aidan really wanted to cook, bringing his classical French training to bear on superb local produce but in a manner that eliminated fussiness and focussed on flavour. They also reduced the numbers they catered for as staff were becoming increasingly difficult to find as the recession began to drive up emigration once more, but Wild Honey Inn continued to evolve and grow in popularity, attracting guests and diners from all over the country, all the more so when the couple turned their focus to the rooms and began to sell them as part of very successful stay-and-dine packages. Then, in October 2017, the phone rang.

"It was a Tuesday morning and the phone was ringing in the office upstairs as I was leaving the building, the office door was closed, I was leaving but when you work for yourself, you don't like leaving the phone ring out so I went back in to answer it and it was [UK Michelin Guide editor] Rebecca Burr and, she didn't tell me we had a star but she said she was inviting us to the launch of the 2018 guide and she said, 'you know what that means, don't you?' I rang Kate and said, 'we got the call!'

"It was a big one, the only new Michelin Star in Ireland for 2018 and the first for this kind of business, and for food served in a pub, so it was big news for Ireland. It showed how much it was about the taste on the plate and the way things are put together. Later, when we saw some of the Michelin-starred pubs in the UK, we realised, we're doing exactly what they do. At first people couldn't understand how we could have a star the same as Chapter One or Guilbaud's, but they are fine dining, we are more casual, every star is different, every chef is different, there is no manual that everyone has to follow."

After the star, business moved to a new level entirely, with Kate having to install an e-booking system for reservations.

"It's a family business, our two children, Levi and Reece, were both involved but we couldn't afford to have a staff member answering phones all day long."

The interruption of hospitality by the pandemic was the first time in decades that McGrath had enjoyed substantial time away from days and nights in the kitchen.

"I hadn't had a summer off in 40 years. It took me back to my childhood in Mayo," he says "no planes in the sky, sun shining, birds singing, cycling around on the bike within the 5km restriction which was probably as far as we went when we were kids."

It also gave him a taste of what life might be like beyond the kitchen. In 2022, he and Kate began to discuss a life after the restaurant.

It's a young man's game. I'm probably one of the oldest in the country still standing in front of the stove. 

"I enjoy cooking but eventually you have to hang up the apron, you can't go on forever and you have to quit while you're ahead."

The couple's plans for the future are not yet set in stone, both relishing the prospect of freedom to make different choices after so many years tied to the business and the industry. McGrath has just had a cookbook published, a sumptuous production, cloth bound and boxed, by UK publishers Awaywithmedia, the promotion of which will be his focus in coming months and, while the restaurant is now closed, they will keep operating as a B&B and for private parties until the property and business is eventually sold.

"I'm looking forward," says McGrath, "It's a pity though that I'm not 40 instead of 61 [chuckling] because there's so much I want to do next."