‘Excellent all round.’ It is more than 50 years since farmer’s wife Myrtle Allen launched the modest restaurant that would burgeon into hotel, shop, café, cookery school and event space.

‘The Mustard Seed, with its great tradition of Irish hospitality, is in safe hands,’ says a Guide reader this year of a return visit to John Edward Joyce’s ‘lovely, charming’ restaurant-with-rooms.

On the most remote of the Aran Islands, a stronghold of Irish culture, Ruairí and Marie-Thérèse de Blacam’s sustainably run stone-and-glass restaurant-with-suites blends into the landscape, revealing ‘stunning views’ to Galway bay and the Connemara mountains.

Susan and Derek Alcorn’s friendly restaurant-with-rooms occupies a 19th-century flax mill in a small resort town on the Wild Atlantic Way.