Driving around Connemara with a husband and a dog in tow are the happy highlights of summertime for me. On a recent jaunt around the winding roads of Connemara, we drove up to the Connemara National Park, an area nearly 3,000 hectares of mountains, bogs, heaths, grasslands and forests.
On the edge of this vast Park lies the village of Letterfrack, home to the Furniture College Campus for Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, as well as a number of hostels that provide walkers and travellers a temporary base from which to explore Connemara. We get a local heads-up about The Lodge at the Connemara National Park Hostel, a hostel with guesthouse aspirations and a welcoming restaurant open for lunch and dinner, just off the main road of Letterfrack.
Mike Laffey is a local man, the son and grandson of fishermen. After spending most of his 20s travelling the world, he returned to Connemara and opened the Letterfrack Lodge as a hostel in 2000, which he runs with his wife Janet McDonnell. It has since developed into more of a self-catering B&B, moving away from student accommodation. “We’re either a really good hostel, or a bad hotel,” jokes Laffey.
The Lodge Restaurant is in its third season. Originally, Laffey had envisaged this space to be more of a music venue but when local chef Stewart Lindley expressed his interest in getting behind the cooker at the Lodge, Laffey was delighted to take him up on it.
The lunch menu is a distilled version of the dinner offering, and includes Moules Frites (€15), harvested from Laffey’s own mussel farm in nearby Killary. It’s an enormous bowl of plump, bright orange mussels generously garnished with local sea samphire and the creamy sauce is delightfully salty and rich, with a pleasant consistency, perfect for dipping the excellent hand-cut chips into. The Lamb Burger (€15) is exceptionally tasty. The lamb is Bernard King’s Connemara Organic Mountain Lamb, and it makes for a juicy mouthful. A chia seed bun, made for the Lodge by Welsh’s Bakery in Clifden, is a perfect vessel for the burger. A tangy tzatziki, a crunchy seeded salad and those yummy chips make for wonderful accessories to the burger.
Dessert (€7) is a luxuriously moist chocolate mousse cake with a tangy fruit coulis, and it’s made in-house, along with all other cakes on the menu, the bread, the scones and the flatbread pizza bases. The coffee is agreeable though not remarkable (€3), and is made with an Italian blend supplied by the Galway Coffee Company.
The décor is an eclectic mix of styles, with Buddha heads and blue-tinted glasses in the tidy, bright dining room selected by local interior designer Eileen Kane, and a spinning vortex wheel built by local man Jackie Coyne hangs on the wall.
There’s another room off to the side of the dining room, which is dark and wood-filled, with the feel of a snug in a pub. Before heading off on his travels, Laffey studied at the Furniture College Campus in Letterfrack, and he built all of the wooden tables and counters in this part of the restaurant himself using locally felled wood.
There appears to be the beginning of some building work going on at the back of the hostel, an inkling of Laffey’s hopes to extend his hostel and guesthouse once planning permission is granted. “The endgame for me is to create loads more local jobs,” says Laffey. In the meantime, first impressions suffer a little bit, but at The Lodge it’s what’s inside the kitchen that really counts. Here, you’ll find something that is still frustratingly absent from so many restaurants along the tourist trail – a proud representation of local ingredients, cooked well. Though the accommodation is open year-round The Lodge Restaurant is open from April to September/October.
