

- By
Emily Hourican - Published
Hospitality Ireland
October 2022 - Link to Article
https://bit.ly/3T69yZR
The magnificent Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites is evolving into something new and wonderful. Marie-Thérèse and Ruairí de Blacam tell Hospitality Ireland about the closing of one chapter and the opening of another.
Tell us why you have decided to close Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites.From 2023, the restaurant will be closed, but we will be offering beautifully designed accommodation on our farm estate. We have renovated a new building, the Boat House, which will join our iconic limestone-clad Stone House, with both properties being available for groups of up to four and eight, respectively. These special and historic structures – the Boat House is where the traditional island fishing boats, or currachs, were made – will be available on a self-catering basis. Delicious pre-prepared meals, fresh baking, vegetables and honey from our farm will also be offered. In late 2019, we added a special 66- acre island farm to our landholding, which includes areas dotted right through the island, from the north coast to the south coast. The Aran Islands form part of the Burren, so the landscape is spectacular and very ecologically rich. The farm will be accessible to our guests, with an in-depth ecological study to guide them around the various terrains.
Along with our livestock of cattle and
bees, and vegetable-growing, the farm
has many spectacular and diverse natural and archaeological features and
will offer a private off-road and up-close
nature experience to our guests – but
back to the question: why are we
changing from the Inis Meáin Restaurant
& Suites format?
There are many factors, but the main
one is that Ruairí’s parents, Tarlach and
Áine de Blacam, would like to retire
from the business that they set up 45
years ago, and we would like to take on
the running of that business, Inis Meáin
Knitting Company.
The knitwear company is the largest
employer on the island, with a team of
around 20 out of an island population of
180. It plays a pivotal role in the island
community, which is something that we
wanted to help sustain. It is also an
international expert in its field of designer
knitwear, using luxury yarns, and has
forged strong relationships with clients all over the world through the tenacity of
Ruairí’s parents and their team.
However, any business is particularly
challenging to manage on a small oceanic
island, so we have always known that we
couldn’t run Inis Meáin Restaurant &
Suites and Inis Meáin Knitting Company
simultaneously, as they currently operate.
This is because they both involve a huge
amount of personal commitment and
time to produce what they do at a very
high level of quality. Therefore, if we were
going to stay in hospitality and also run
the knitting company, at least one of
those businesses had to change
significantly, to enable us to do both well
while retaining a life balance.
The upcoming retirement of Ruairí’s
parents, the needs of our own children,
the purchase of our farm, and more came
together in the last couple of years to favour running the knitting company in its
current guise and evolving the hospitality
business to be more centred around our
farm and immersive nature stays.
How hard was that decision?
Very difficult. At first, it seemed crazy to even contemplate it. Inis Meáin
Restaurant & Suites has been like a baby
for us. Ruairí bought the three-acre site
in 2000, it took over two years to get
planning permission, we started building
in 2005, opened in 2007, and now it’s
2022 – that’s half of our lifetime already
invested in it!
Although it brought challenges and
required sacrifices over the years, we
persevered, and it’s now a good, solid
business with a wonderful clientele, but
there are many life considerations – as
well as business considerations –
involved, and we are now happy to be
evolving our baby to its next stage.
Much of the creativity and constant
rethinking every winter to keep
improving Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites
will be as relevant in our new chapter as
the previous one, so it’s great to know that there is continuity there, and that a
lot of hard work is not going to waste.
Why is this the right decision for now?The option came up to take over the knitting company, and there seemed to be several factors in favour of this move at this time in our lives. One is that our two girls are now 11 and nine, and we’d like to have more flexibility to be able to offer them opportunities that might involve more regular trips to the mainland. For example, this year the three Aran Islands combined had enough children – for the first time in 12 years – to form a mixed under-12s GAA football team, but the matches were on the mainland, which could involve a whole day trip for a one- hour match because of ferry times. These logistics can be considerable and time- consuming, and not very compatible with running a restaurant on the island. Covid has also made a difference. It has exposed the fragility of the hospitality industry, while, at the same time, helping to make Inis Meáin Knitting Company more manageable. It has done this by making it acceptable to show the new knitwear collections to buyers in New York and Tokyo through online meetings from our island showroom. This is replacing the need for the extensive international travel that was previously required, which was particularly challenging from a west-of-Ireland, offshore island base! Covid has also helped drive forward the retail side of Inis Meáin Knitting Company, selling directly to customers online. It has traditionally been a wholesale business, primarily, but it makes sense to continue to grow the online retail side of the business, and that will be one of our main areas to focus on for the future.
What kind of legacy do you think that
Inis Meáin has left?
We are very happy with what we
achieved with Inis Meáin Restaurant &
Suites, in that over the 15 years since we
opened, we kept reinvesting in the
business to eventually bring it to a level
of quality that we ourselves were
satisfied with.
We feel our guests responded well to this approach, many rewarding us by
returning every year, always eager to see
what new additions had been made.
Having the opportunity to welcome
about 65% of our guests back each year
has not only given great joy, but has
been the best form of job satisfaction we
could have imagined. We feel that part of
our legacy are the happy Inis Meáin
memories that are embedded in the
minds of these special guests.
Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites, when
we opened in 2007, offered something
new in hospitality. We had both travelled
extensively, internationally, for work and
leisure in our previous lives – getting
married in Brazil along the way – and
neither of us had ever come across the
model that we created.
What we did know from our travels is
what we liked and what we didn’t like,
and, after that, the island – being the
unique location that it is – guided every
other decision, in terms of forming the ideas for what we were going to offer.
This amounted to the creation of a travel
experience that was unique at the time
and still seems quite rare, in terms of a
beautiful, remote, quiet island location
with a design-orientated nature lodge, on
a tiny scale and at very high quality, with
great food and wine.
With the combination of those factors,
it was always going to be hard work to
make it feasible, especially
independently, without deep pockets or
financial investors. So, having succeeded
in creating a viable business – almost
against the odds – and having guests like
it so much that it ran at 100% occupancy
for almost all of its 15 years is something
we really appreciate. We’re very grateful
for that positive reaction from so many
that helped us along the way, including
fellow islanders, our regular guests, and a
very supportive press over the years.
Perhaps Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites
helped open the door for other hospitality businesses to think outside
the box and see that doing so could be a
success – that it doesn’t have to fit into
the traditional categories of hospitality
for people to be able to understand and
support what you do if you do it well
enough.
We introduced a no-choice, daily
changing menu as the only option back
in 2013 because we were loath to have
any of our freshly harvested garden
vegetables linger at the back of a fridge
if left unordered from an à la carte menu.
This was a significant move at the time,
particularly on an island with very few
other dining options available.
All of the decisions we made as we
evolved Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites
over the 15 years were to create the best-
possible product we could for our guests,
given our unique circumstances, however
challenging, surprising or unconventional
these decisions may sometimes have
seemed to others. We have seen many of these ideas replicated in the industry over
the last few years, as interesting owner-
run businesses brought sustainability and
guest well-being to the fore.
Designing a business in empathy with a
natural location, a daily changing set
menu, restaurants growing their own or
cultivating close relationships with
vegetable growers and other small
suppliers, shorter opening hours, allowing
for higher quality and sustainability,
delivered breakfasts, unconventional
accommodation formats, a renewed
focus on nature and enabling guests to
get closer to it are all elements that, 15
years on, now appear much more
regularly in the hospitality offering in
Ireland and internationally.
Some of your best memories over the
years ...?
It has been an ongoing pleasure, through
the years, to continuously welcome back
returning guests and islanders to the
restaurant and suites, and to host them
while they make their own unique
memories for their special occasions, or
simply have the opportunity to rediscover themselves, or each other, in Inis Meáin.
However, it is the special friendships that
have come out of our work that have
created some of our best life memories
over the years.
We have had the most fantastic,
intimate experiences, from San
Sebastian to San Francisco, shared
dinner tables with amazing winemakers,
and made wonderful lifelong friends
who share our love of good food, wine,
the island, and our outlook on life. These
are opportunities and friendships that
probably wouldn’t have happened out of an office job, and that more than
make up for the challenges we faced
over the years.
What are the challenges and sources of
excitement in the new chapter?
We are evolving one business and taking
over a second one that, combined, have
60 years of hard work behind them. They
both have fantastic brand loyalty and a
wonderful, unique product. They operate
in two different industries, across
international markets, and currently
employ 30 people on a very small
offshore island.
So, the next couple of years are
absolutely chock-a-block with both
challenges and sources of excitement in
equal measure – too many to mention.
That said, there is one big thing that we
are all really looking forward to: our first-
ever summer family holiday next year.
Italy seems to be calling. Ruairí spent
two years there cooking, he speaks
Italian, and there are also knitting
company links there, but the rest of the
plan is another item on a very long to-do
list this winter!