How to find a foodie hotel break in Ireland

To find a foodie hotel break in Ireland, start with the meal rather than the room: look for a break built around a specific dinner, check how that kitchen is rated on its own, and confirm exactly what is included before you book. On Mosey, food-led breaks sit in the Travel section, each showing the nights, the meals included and the dining experience it is built around, with the food rated separately from the hotel. You book on the hotel's own website, not through Mosey.

What is a foodie hotel break?

A stay chosen for the food rather than the room. Usually that means one of two things:

• A hotel with a kitchen worth travelling for, where the dinner is the reason to go and the room is where you sleep afterwards.
• A hotel near somewhere that is, packaged with a meal at a place nearby.

A typical package is one or two nights with breakfast and a dinner on one evening, sometimes a tasting menu, sometimes a set menu or a dining credit. The details vary a great deal, which is why the checks below matter.

How to find food-led breaks on Mosey

In Mosey's Travel section, a set of stays has been chosen for the food. You can browse them and narrow them down by:

• Type of break
• Meals included
• Dietary needs
• Number of nights
• Rating, price and region, or distance from where you are

Each offer shows the number of nights, the meals included and a short description of the dining experience at its heart, along with photos. It links to the place that cooks the dinner, which has its own page with diners' photographs and ratings. Town and city pages in Travel also show stays and foodie breaks in that area, so you can start from a place rather than a hotel.

You can save an offer to come back to. When you are ready, you go through to the hotel's own website to check dates and book. Nothing is booked or paid for on Mosey, and Mosey adds nothing to the price, so the price and the terms are the hotel's own. More on this in Travel.

Two ratings, kept apart

One of the most useful things on a break's page is that the food and the stay are rated separately and never blended into one number.

• The hotel's rating reflects people who have stayed and rated the break.
• The kitchen's rating reflects people who ate there, with their photographs of what they had.

This matters because a lovely hotel with an average dining room, or a brilliant kitchen in a plain hotel, look the same if you blend them. If you are travelling for the dinner, the kitchen's rating and its dish photographs are the numbers to read.

What to check before you book

Packages are where the small print hides. Before you commit, find out:

1. Which night the dinner is on. Some kitchens close on certain nights, so a two-night break may only include dinner on one of them.
2. What "dinner" means. A full tasting menu, a set menu with a few choices, or a fixed credit towards an à la carte bill. They are very different evenings.
3. Whether drinks are included. A wine pairing can double the cost of a tasting menu.
4. How dietary needs are handled. Tasting menus are planned in advance, so tell the hotel when you book, not when you sit down. Ask whether they can adapt the menu or need to swap a course.
5. Whether the price is per person or per room. "From" prices are often per person sharing.
6. The cancellation policy. It is the hotel's policy, not Mosey's, so read it on the hotel's site.
7. Dinner timing. If you are driving there, make sure you can arrive and check in before your booking.

How to judge the restaurant before you go

You are paying for a meal you have not tasted, so do the reading:

• Look at diners' photographs of the food. Ten plates from ten different visits tell you more about a kitchen than any description.
• Read the count as well as the score. A high rating from a handful of people is promising; from many people it is a pattern.
• Check which dishes people mention by name. If the same course keeps coming up, that is what the kitchen does best.
• Look for a Gold mark. It is earned from ratings over time and cannot be bought.

When to go

Timing changes both the price and the experience.

• Midweek breaks are often better value than weekends, and the dining room is quieter.
• Off-season stays in coastal and rural Ireland can be the most relaxed of the year, but check the kitchen is open; some kitchens shorten their week outside the main season.
• Book well ahead for weekends, bank holidays and the weeks around Christmas.

Where to go for a food-led break

Ireland's food reputation is spread well beyond the cities. Coastal towns are an obvious draw for seafood (Dingle, a harbour town on the Dingle Peninsula, is a well-known example), and county towns across the country have kitchens that would stand out anywhere. The guide to Ireland's best food towns is a good place to start choosing, and the top-rated places in Ireland show where people have rated the food highly.

Wherever you go, save the other places you want to eat to a list before you leave. A break is two or three meals, and the ones outside the package are worth planning too.

After the break

Rate it. A break is rated like any other place on Mosey: rate the hotel for the stay, and rate the place that cooked dinner for the meal, naming the dishes you had. That separation is exactly what helps the next person choosing between two weekends.

Try it on Mosey

Open Travel, look through the food-led breaks for the region you fancy, and read the kitchen's own page before you click through to book.