“If we don’t care then who will?” sous chef John Kelly said simply after a sumptuous dinner in the Lady Helen Restaurant at the Mount Juliet Hotel.

He was talking about the importance of cooking food grown and produced around them and how the responsibility rests with the chef. Under the hotel's head chef Cormac Rowe and restaurant head chef Ken Harker the team cooked a truly tasty tasting menu of local ingredients, including a superb beetroot sorbet from beets grown in the grounds teamed with a blackcurrant jelly. Fresh Goatsbridge trout sous videwas turned into silken flakes of flavour and Kilmore scallops were teamed with a crubeen croquette and a delicious Jerusalem artichoke and apple jelly. For so long, hotel cooking has been less than impressive. But this was a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking from a young, enthusiastic cooking crew.

Lady Helen Restaurant, Mount Juliet Hotel, Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, 056-7773000