Folks, the party is over. What you need now is plenty of exercise and fresh air to tone the muscles and get rid of that puffy, boozy, fluey look. Throw on that new fleece and a stout pair of shoes and start walking. You can always promise yourself a little treat along the way - like a decent lunch in a country hotel. January 2nd saw us tramping around the Avondale estate in Co Wicklow. It was bright and the scenery was beautiful, but it was very cold and we were hungry - hungry for proper food as opposed to the Christmassy snacks we'd been living on - Stilton on crackers, ham every way possible and Chocolate Kimberleys.
After a very short walk, we were back in the car and heading for Aughrim in search of The Brook Lodge. This is a brand new small hotel, run by Evan Doyle who made his name in Killarney with the Strawberry Tree restaurant where he served mainly organic and free-range food. That restaurant is now closed, but a few weeks ago it opened again at The Brook Lodge.
The hotel is the centrepiece of a new village where there is also a pub, as well as houses and shops selling fresh produce and tableware. The idea is that you can eat in the restaurant, stay in the rooms overhead and then buy the bread, or the wine glasses, or something from the smokery.
It's all less than a couple of months old, and it's not very easy to find. You follow the sign posts for Macreddin from Aughrim and after lots of twists and turns and warnings about building work in progress, you arrive at The Brook Lodge, a long, low building that looks like a big stable block stranded in a field.
The areas immediately around the hotel have been nicely landscaped, with a lawn and rows of baby bay trees, but the overall effect is still raw and muddy, as you might expect for the time of year.
Small signs plead with you not to step on the grass, but apparently to little effect, since it looked as though a herd of cattle had just passed through the strip between the car-park and the front door. Nothing but the rows of cars told us the hotel was open, but thankfully it was, as we had promised Kate, turning five that day, a special birthday lunch with the possibility of a chocolate cake and candles.
Inside, all was peace and calm and there was a lovely smell of fresh lilies. The decor is refreshingly light with a limestone style floor, vanilla-coloured walls and yellow sofas here and there. A sign points upstairs to a snooker room and double doors lead to a big lounge with more huge, sink-into sofas and armchairs, full of people having sandwiches and coffee.
We stopped by the reception desk to pick up the room rates - £140 a room including breakfast in the high season, with weekends at a special rate of £120 per person for two nights' B&B and one dinner.
A corridor leading off the lobby heads down towards the restaurant, passing through an open patio area for a last blast of wind up the trouser legs. The Strawberry Tree is right at the end of the building and it looks like a very serious restaurant with its two rooms with burgundy and navy suede-effect walls and dark, mirrored ceilings.
The tables were perfectly laid with stiff, white table cloths and tall, stemmed glasses, but it was closed for lunch. It opens for dinner seven nights a week and the plan is to serve only organic and free-range food.
Lunch is served in a big, airy dining room with tall windows and a well-spaced tables with really comfortable padded chairs. It is split level with a seating area upstairs where you can read the papers while waiting for a table down below. There is a set Sunday lunch menu at £12.50 with four different main courses and five starters. Though it shares a kitchen with The Strawberry Tree, the food here doesn't come with any organic promises, though some items, such as the bread, are made with organic ingredients.
We were early and had our choice of tables, so we took one well away from the other diners in the room, just in case the children started acting up. We assumed the room would stay empty, the hotel being so new, and the year being so new that people would not yet be in the mood to go out, but an hour later it had filled completely, mostly with families. The staff seem mostly French and were absolutely charming.
Next to us, two teenage girls made a great show of cutting up things on their plates and putting tiny morsels in their mouths, but still managed to leave a full plate at the end of the meal, as only gorgeously thin young girls can do.
One of them complained that she couldn't eat because there was horseradish everywhere, which might be expected with roast beef. Certainly the chef seemed fond of horseradish and there was a dollop of it on top of my roast cod. It perked the fish up no end, though the fish itself, a dazzling white fillet, tasted beautifully fresh.
It came with the herb crust we've come to expect on cod, surrounded by a coulis of sweet, sun-dried tomatoes that managed to taste of marmalade and chilli, among other things. Small chunks of carrots and red cabbage came on the plate, and also in a dish of vegetables, which also featured courgettes. And we got a dish of quite hard little new potatoes that had been sauteed to give them a crisp coat.
Far nicer were the children's homemade chips that came with their plain chicken breasts. This was the chicken breast from the menu without its cloak of mushroom sauce. The chicken was juicy but distinctly pink in parts, so the children just nibbled at the edges. Before that, we had had gorgeous starters - a bowl of creamy leek and potato soup that our pernickety eight-year-old loved, as did I; a vegetable samosa, made with a light, buttery filo pastry around a parcel of fresh cooked vegetables sitting on a bed of golden lentils with tiny chunks of pineapple; and a bouillebaisse with lime aioli that came in an ordinary, small bowl but had a wonderful flavour of fresh fish, though the lime didn't make a big impression.
Unlike the teenage girls, David had no trouble putting away the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, declaring it just as he liked it, cooked on the outside, but nice and red within. The bread that stayed on the table throughout the meal was just outstanding and, had the bread shop been open (it is now, I believe), I would have bought bags of it. There were fresh-baked, brioche-shaped, rolls that turned out to be tomato and fennel, tomato breadsticks, poppy seed rolls and plain white dabs of sourdough.
I liked the sound of a cappuccino cheesecake to follow, but desserts were out because of the birthday cake. The waitress and the pastry chef had come up trumps, producing a big, fluffy-looking thing with cream and white chocolate flowers on top and cut-up Twix bars keeping it upright. Five pink candles had been found and lit and Kate nearly burst with excitement. They made a great play of cutting it for us with a huge knife and then, mortifyingly, the children would eat only the Twix bits, since the cake was too rich for them.
The bill for four was £56, including cokes and a 30 per cent discount for each of the children.
The Brook Lodge is in Macreddin Village, Co Wicklow, tel 0402-36444.
Orna Mulcahy can be contacted at omulcahy@irish-times.ie
