Sixty years ago, Myrtle Allen opened the Yeats Room restaurant in the dining room of her Georgian farmhouse, serving organic, home-cooked, farm-to-fork fare that would earn a place on the gastronomic map and pass into legend. Soon after, in response to demand, Mrs Allen made a few bedrooms (sometimes even the children’s rooms) available to overnight guests. Today, Ballymaloe House is a world-renowned brand, a country house hotel with cookery school, but in those early days it was, without question, a restaurant-with-rooms.

At one time, accommodation at a restaurant-with-rooms, as at Ballymaloe, tended to be somewhat of an afterthought – functional, even stylish, a place to sleep comfortably but not designed for long stays. There might or might not have been a bar, lounge or breakfast room. Over recent years, however, that has been changing, with restaurateurs adding ever-more-desirable bedrooms and facilities, and hoteliers focusing more on their restaurants, with the distinction becoming more blurred. In recognition of the rise and rise of restaurants-with-rooms, both in numbers and aspirations, in our 2018 edition we created a distinct category for them among our Editor’s Choice lists.

The list for the new edition of The Good Hotel Guide, now available online, shows how diverse that category has become. What they all have in common is cooking of a very high order.