Gillian Nelis

Yeah.

So we're here for the launch of this year's edition of 101 Great Irish Restaurants, which we've been doing for a few years now.

I always get asked, why is there 101?

I was like, because I just had to go one better than everybody else, of course.

So we're going to have lunch and a launch today with some of the people who are in this year's guide.

Never gets any easier to pick places.

And I get asked a lot, like, why is it great Irish restaurants as opposed to the best?

And I suppose that was quite a deliberate decision because I often think the best.

It's so subjective and it's hard enough to.

doing it for awards never mind something like this that i suppose the goal with this is to give people a real overview of some of the great things that are happening in irish food and you know this place there's so many places that could have been in there and it's getting harder every year which is brilliant because you know if things weren't happening if new things weren't happening it would be the same place as every year on that point a little bit uh gray irish food you've

I think you're seeing really interesting younger people coming into the business.

You've seen that real, you know, you've seen people coming home from abroad, people who've trained with the likes of Ross Lewis.

with Guillaume and Patrick Guibo.

So there's a whole ecosystem now that's trickling down and we're seeing the effects of that.

And there's some people doing really amazing things.

And I mean, I suppose I started first when I started getting involved in kind of judging or going to events.

I mean, it was it's probably like 10 or 12 years ago.

And really, you could have predicted in advance who has got you certainly could have predicted who is going to win the bigger awards or be in in most guides.

I think it's actually really hard now to predict it.

And I think that's a tribute to just the new energy, the new people that are coming in.