Oliver Callan: An Italian worthy of the Clare shout

The warm bustle inside is a defiant show of colour against the stark bleakness of our windswept evening

L’Arco in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare: an unexpected delight amid the curlicues of mist and ragged stone of the Burren

L’Arco

Main Street, Ballyvaughan, Co. Clare

065-7083900, burrenrestaurant.com

Chef: Matteo and team

L’Arco Italian restaurant is situated through an attractive stone archway that leads off the Main Street in Ballyvaughan village, Co Clare. The building itself was once an RIC Barracks and it still feels today like the officers’ mess of an old imperial outpost.

Today, the village is the central hub for the top sites of the Burren’s famous karst landscape of ...