Derry, Sallyanne and James in The Club

Derry & Sallyanne Clarke and James Sheridan

The Club at Goffs, a new hotel and restaurant just outside Naas where Derry Clarke and James Sheridan are cooking, is a big, big space. It’s also a fascinating space, a wild hybrid where Bauhaus canteen meets Lake Tahoe diner meets Irish hotel dining room meets the Horseshoe Bar of the Shelbourne Hotel.

Here’s how radical it is: seated in one booth on the Wednesday night we visited, there were a quintet of women who spanned three generations. At the next booth, there was a solo male diner who worked on his laptop as he ate. And there was no tension between the two.

This isn’t meant to happen in a dining space. The solo guy should be spoiling the girls-night-out vibe for the women. But The Club somehow makes this leisure and pleasure vs business divide seem irrelevant. 

It is, in short, a broad church, a third space where you can do just whatever you want.

What you want to do in The Club is to eat, because the twin-turbo charged cooking of Derry Clarke and James Sheridan delivers, and then some. The Clarke-Sheridan cooking is finessed with gossamer textures, but the flavours are fathoms deep and hugely impactful. It’s an iron fist, in a velvet glove. It’s one hell of a lot of fun.