Cork International Hotel

I have to give a special mention to Rachel in Reservations. She is always so helpful and nice. A pleasure to deal with.

The hotel's rooms are fine - but the F&B is BAD. I had read the reviews on the hotel's bar/restaurant on Google before - and was surprised at some of the quite negative ones about the New Yorker, the main evening F&B outlet. I figured that in a decent quality hotel the food in the New Yorker could surely not be as poor as some reviewers suggested. WRONG! It really is bad. Food is so poor that if you find yourself having to overnight at Cork airport hotel - you should consider (1) picking up a snack at Cork airport and bringing it with you, though be advised that in 2026 the airport is still undergoing renvoation so the landside area has only 1x operating cafe (2) buying snacks on-board or at your airport of departure if you are arriving in Cork or (3) getting an Uber to go out for dinner in Cork city or its suburbs. Taking steps to avoid the hotel's F&B will be WELL WORTH your effort. The odd thing is - the New Yorker restaurant LOOKS fine. When you walk in you'd have a reasonable assumption of some good food ahead. First 'red flag' was when we asked the waitress what the soup of the day was. 'Vegetable'. What vegetables we asked. Are we talking a mixed veg broth, green veg, leek and potato? Just give us a clue. Waitress said she didn't know. (So no help there). We asked her if she could please ask the chef then. Her response - no kidding - 'I don't think he's likely to know!' Read what you will into that - either a bad attitude, or an insight that the chef is taking only a tangential role in the sourcing / producing of food. We decided to avoid the soup anyway. But the very low quality of the dishes that ultimately arrived showed that our 'red flag' moment had been on the mark. This was food produced by someone (in the kitchen? or bought in from an external caterer and merely reheated?) that had no love or passion for food. The F&B Manager responsible should be ashamed. The GM of the hotel should definitely be ashamed. Unable to raise enthusiasm on the mains, we opted for dessert - mainly to fill up. Having assessed the low interest / expertise in the food product of the hotel kitchen, we figured that they could simply NOT make a mess of Sticky Toffee pudding - could they? Sticky Toffee Puddings of varying qualities are standard fare in gastro pubs. The supermarkets make quite decent microwaveable versions. At least we could fill up - after this prior poor meal - with some pudding. WRONG AGAIN! This slice of sponge - no sticky, no toffee - was absolutely pathetic. I'd urge the hotel's GM to buy the chef or F&B Manager a book of recipes. SHOW him/her what a Sticky Toffee Pudding actually is. Take him/her down to Aldi or Lidl and buy a selection of ready deserts, and just see the basic elements, the KEY elements of a sticky toffee pudding. (Clue: it's in the name - STICKY and TOFFEE - this is not just a slice of dry sponge). We gave up at this point. If they cannot get this right, there was no point in persevering. There is a McDonalds 5 km away from the hotel. I'm not a huge fan of McD's - but be assured - you will get a WAY BETTER meal there than at the New Yorker. The fare in the New Yorker restaurant is barely school-dinners quality. And if the GM bothers to read this and offers the usual - 'we have no record of a complaint' - then I'd point out that certainly we were NOT asked when we paid (barely eaten food on the plates in front of us) 'have you enjoyed the meal?' --- perhaps cos the wait staff could anticipate the answer and didn't want to bother with it. And when the food is THAT bad, where do you start? There's no point in asking them to send it back to the kitchen to 'make it better'. They clearly have no clue. And are you up for a night-time argument for a 'full refund'? When we checked out we were asked at reception if we'd enjoyed our stay. We stated very clearly that the room was fine, but the meal was AWFUL. Was that recorded? Certainly no rectification was offered then or since.

It did the job. A bit dear but it was fine. For people who cannot stand noise, the reception was happy to turn off music that was playing outside the front door for arriving guests so that I did not have to listen to that while trying to sleep. (My room was close to the main entrance