Drinking and dining in Ireland

Dennis,
If your wife does not like "roughing it," you can definitely do a high-end Irish experience. Places to stay:

Dromoland Castle
Adare Manor
Mt. Juliet Hotel
Old Presbytery Inn (B&B..lovely breakfast and tea, and they will recommend an excellent local seafood restaurant)
Ashford Castle (among the top 5 hotels in Europe) and the original home of the Guinness family.

Accommodations, meals, etc. will be totally delightful at any of these places.

Informal pubs where we dined for a quick lunch had delightful food, just suggest she order what she will likely enjoy (and ask a few questions about various choices).

I spent two weeks in Ireland for my 50th and loved it. No need to drink Guinness or whisky; the wine is as good as you will find anywhere ( it is not made in Ireland,)

As for the food, it is fantastic, especially (. It not exclusively) if you enjoy seafood. As I understand it, when Ireland started becoming a popular tourist destination, they brought in trained chefs from France and elsewhere to raise the bar on their cooking. The fresh local ingredients were there already, they just needed to train the locals to cook more than lamb, potatoes and cabbage.

I enjoyed every meal, but found dinner at Reginald's Pub Waterford ( now called " The Reg") and Doyle's in Dingle to be very memorable, in the best way.

No need to endure rustic lodging either, as shown above.

2 weeks in Ireland is a great idea. The food and wine are outstanding, including for vegetarians.

If your wife is not one to rough it, you may consider the Irish Supreme tour from CIE Tours. Very high end hotels (some of the ones a previous poster mentioned, including Ashford Castle) with very nice dinners.

Enjoy!

My husband and I like fine food and wine as well.
There are several Michelin starred restaurants in Dublin. The highest is the two-starred Michelin restaurant called Patrick Gilbaud. So this is where we went. Outstanding! Of course, very expensive too!
We were dining there and in walks The Edge from U2 with his wife and another couple. The waiter told me he dines there frequently. It was a very memorable night! This was our first Michelin starred restaurant, but I hope not our last!
In other parts of Ireland, we found the food to be quite good!

Two weeks in Ireland is always a good idea. One can find fine food (whatever that means to you) in most towns and one can purchase beverages other than beer and whiskey at any bar. Unless you're in a really small town there are always restaurants that serve other than pub grub.

Every sit down restaurant I ate in in Ireland (Republic of and Northern) had wine available if they served alcohol. No no one was forced to drink whiskey or stout. Even the pubs had (limited) wine choices.

I was in Ireland for 2.5 weeks, never drank a Guinness, only drank whiskey at the Jameson tour. My go-to drink is cider when good wines aren't available - get it everywhere on tap and in bottles. She may well develop a taste for it too. Pub lunches are the best - every pub I went into made a huge pot of fresh, thick vegetable soup every morning, served with fresh-baked brown bread and butter for about €5. Most pubs have a pretty long and varied menu for dinner - often dinner is served in a dining room upstairs - much more than the menu you are likely to get in the main pub rooms. There's lots of fresh fish (seafood? don't remember, don't eat it) and various meats. I'm used to a Mediterranean diet so the only thing I found boring was the lack of variety in cooked veggies. But another pint of cider and I didn't really care☺

Will agree that the food in Ireland was amazing. Pub food in Ireland is not pub food in the US.

Thanks all for the straight story. I shared them with Elinore and I think we will proceed.