Qualla: Ballymaloe House

Ballymaloe House: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The house keeps its own time. The Georgian front, with its symmetrical sash windows and the broad front steps, faces a circular gravel drive lined with hydrangeas. Walk around the side and you find the much older stones of an earlier building - rough limestone walls that date from around 1450, when the Norman Desmond FitzGeralds held this corner of East Cork against the local Gaelic chieftains. Ballymaloe House is two buildings really, a medieval castle still standing inside an early-nineteenth-century country house, with the joins visible where the rough stone meets the dressed Georgian work. The current life of the place began in 1948 when a Cork farming couple, Ivan and Myrtle Allen, bought the house and twenty-five acres. What they made of it would change Irish food.

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Ballymaloe House: FitzGerald Stones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The earliest fabric in Ballymaloe House is the remnant of a tower house built around 1450 by the Desmond FitzGerald family, the great Hiberno-Norman dynasty that controlled most of Munster from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The house was particularly associated with ...

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Ballymaloe House: Myrtle's Restaurant

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the Allens bought Ballymaloe in 1948 they were farmers first. Ivan ran the dairy herd; Myrtle ran the house. By the early 1960s, with their children grown, Myrtle began to think about opening her dining room to paying guests. The era was wrong - Ireland in 1964 had almost no...

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Ballymaloe House: The Michelin Star Years

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1974, the Michelin Guide began regularly covering Ireland. In 1975 Ballymaloe House received one Michelin star - the first ever awarded to a chef-owner-farmer in the country. Myrtle Allen was sixty-one years old. She kept the star every year until 1980. From 1981 to 1994 the g...

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Ballymaloe House: Three Generations

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Allen family business now spans three generations. Myrtle's daughter-in-law Darina founded the Ballymaloe Cookery School at nearby Kinoith in 1983 and ran it for decades; Darina's daughter-in-law Rachel became a national television cook and food writer; cousins, in-laws and g...

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Ballymaloe House: What the Place Still Is

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ballymaloe House is one of the more peculiar institutions in Irish hospitality. It is a country-house hotel, but not an expensive one by international standards. It is a serious restaurant, but the dining room is informal and family-friendly. The drawing room has a real fire and ...

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