Restaurant Review - The Fork & Wheel
Wednesday 18 June 2025
There was a house in Kinsale, facing the famous Man Friday restaurant and The Spaniard pub, on a sharp bend that curls around from the aptly named Heartbreak Hill that had a note pinned on its door saying: “The front door is around the back.” It was just the sort of quirky thing that the then owner Peter Barry would do. Arriving in Kinsale in 1963, he founded Man Friday, and became a driving force in putting the town on the map. While Peter is no longer with us, he’s honoured by a bust standing in Market Square, while Man Friday and The Spaniard now under different ownership, are still legends in Kinsale.
The new Fork & Wheel at Whiterock between Midleton and Castlemartyr is a bit like that. The magic really starts when you go around the back. I’ve whizzed along the N25 for years, occasionally glancing at the former Two Mile Inn, a popular local pub, overlooked by the ruins of a moviesque small church and historic graveyard with lots of crooked gravestones, but frankly I’d never been tempted to veer off the road.
lucindaosullivan.com
First Published In The Sunday Independent