Restaurant Chestnut to close in West Cork after nine seasons
Chefs Rob Krawczyk and Elaine Fleming serve their last dinner at the Michelin-starred Ballydehob restaurant on October 30, eight years after its first star.
Restaurant Chestnut closes in Ballydehob, West Cork, after a final dinner service on October 30, nine seasons after chefs Rob Krawczyk and Elaine Fleming opened the doors.
The couple announced the closure in May, giving diners a five-month run-up to book a last table. Reservations stayed open right through the final night.
Eight years with a star
Our story is rooted here in West Cork and it is the place where our next chapter will begin.
Krawczyk and Fleming opened Restaurant Chestnut in March 2018 on Ballydehob's Main Street. The Michelin Guide awarded it a star that same year and kept it in every edition since, eight in total.
The small dining room built its name on tasting menus drawn from West Cork's coastline and farms: fish landed nearby, lamb from the peninsulas, vegetables and foraged leaves from the hedgerows around the village. The tasting menu changed with the seasons and rarely ran beyond eight courses, built around a handful of ingredients from the same postcode.
In March, the Irish Restaurant Awards named Chestnut Best Restaurant in Cork at its Munster regional final, a late honour for a kitchen that was already counting down its final months.
"After nine dinner seasons, this one will be our last as Restaurant Chestnut," the owners wrote when they announced the closure on social media.
A new chapter in West Cork
Krawczyk and Fleming have given no reason for the closure and no detail on what comes next, beyond a promise to stay local.
"Our story is rooted here in West Cork and it is the place where our next chapter will begin," they wrote, without a timeline for the announcement.
Chestnut was one of a small cluster of chef-owned dining rooms that gave West Cork a reputation out of proportion to its population, a scene closer in spirit to Dublin's Glovers Alley than to any city tasting-menu circuit.
Ballydehob, a village of under 300 people, has held a Michelin star for eight straight years largely because of this one kitchen. What happens to that status now depends on whoever, if anyone, takes over the room. For now, the village loses its only starred address, and West Cork's fine-dining map shrinks by one pin.
