Cliff House Hotel, an SLH Hotel

"In some ways, the Cliff House Hotel is just a resting place for people looking to eat in its highly regarded Michelin-starred restaurant, but the hotel’s loft-style bedrooms are also among the most modern and stylish anywhere in this country. (Plus, each room has a terrace or veranda, and even the rain-forest showers have sea views.) The House Restaurant, though, is a highlight, and it’s unusual in Ireland because Dutch chef Martijn Kajuiter prepares food that is highly wrought, inventive, and beautifully plated—but also deliciously unpretentious. That sense of unfussiness might have something to do with the dining room itself, which is neither too stark nor too clubby, and edged by a glass wall overlooking the calm blue waters of the Celtic Sea. The hotel overlooks Ardmore Bay, 140 miles south of Dublin, and thespa’s impressive yoga program, indoor infinity pool, stone outdoor baths, and Jacuzzi can help guests counterbalance any evening’s indulgences."

"It’s hard to improve on the natural beauty of the Irish coast, and the Cliff House Hotel doesn’t try to: Its 39 bedrooms cantilever over Ardmore Bay, the view from one floor more dramatic than the next. The rooms themselves are decorated with egg-shaped bathtubs, tartan chairs, and headboards in wood, fabric, and blown-glass crafted by local artists. But the real reason to stay in is the food. “Right now, my favorite ingredients are the lobster straight out of Ardmore Bay, just-picked woodruff, and tiny sea radishes from Goat Island,” says chef Martijn Kajuiter, who moved to Ireland in 2007 to open the hotel’s House Restaurant. Informed by techniques he’d learned under Marco Pierre White in London and at De Kas in his native Netherlands, he set about transforming County Waterford’s magnificent farm butters and forgotten varieties of local kale into confections that smoked, puffed, or popped; three years later, he received a Michelin star. In the years since the restaurant opened, Kajuiter and his team have been working continuously to expand and refine their offerings—going from one amuse-bouche to four and from one type of bread to three, “but without forgetting where we come from,” he says. Spend the day tromping along the coast in a borrowed pair of hotel wells, and end it at one of the tables that stare out at the endless sea; you, too, might just forget where you’ve come from. —Nathalie Jordi"