From best burger to tastiest pizza, Ireland's best takeaways have been announced
Food delivery app Deliveroo announced the winners of its 2025 Restaurant Awards on Wednesday after more than 160,000 votes were cast around the country as food businesses battled it out for one of the many awards up for grabs.
Launched in 2018, Deliveroo's Restaurant Awards aim to celebrate and recognise the very best restaurants across the country. The Irish winners of the Deliveroo 2025 Restaurant Awards are:
2025 marks the introduction of several new awards, including Best Middle Eastern cuisine. The inaugural winner of this award is Reyna in Dublin.
Aylin Aydin, Reyna: "Wow, I can't believe we've won! It's incredible to be named Deliveroo's Best Middle Eastern restaurant in Ireland.
'Huge thanks to everyone who voted – your support means everything. We're looking forward to serving up our award-winning Middle Eastern dishes to Dublin locals for a long time to come."
One of the most hotly contested awards in Ireland is Best Burger, which was won this year by Galway's Smashbird. Orla and Fraser Scott from Smashbird: "We can't believe it — we actually did it! The team here at Smashbird Galway are absolutely buzzing to have won Deliveroo's award for Best Burgers & American in Ireland!
'Huge love and thanks to every legend who voted for us — your support means the world. We're proud to be reppin' Galway with our award-winning burgers, and we can't wait to keep smashing it for years to come!"
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Melissa Hamilton: It's produced by my production company, Hamilton Cristou Productions, which I set up with my husband, Michael Cristou. This show at the Bord Gais will not be replicated, it won't be seen on any other stage. It will be what I'd like to call, a greatest hits of ballet and dance. You can expect to see the big names that you always think of when you think of ballet. So, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote. . . but there will also be neo-classical, contemporary, modern dance also coupled in in the same evening. We have a collaboration with Ballet Ireland, I'll perform to a live soprano on stage from Irish National Opera, and we have dancers from the Royal Ballet, English National ballet company, Bavarian State Ballet in Munich - it's going to be quite a spectacle. It also sounds like it took a hell of a lot of hard work to get together! I absolutely love what I do and to be able to bring world-class ballet and some of the brightest artists to the stage in Dublin, and to the audiences of Dublin, is a privilege. And it's something that I think audiences need to see. They need to be exposed to this, world-class level of dancing, this art form. For me, I get to share the stage with some of my closest and most endeared friends that I have built up over the years. For me, it's a really special moment. Would you agree that ballet is beginning to lose its 'only for posh people in evening dress' image. It's something that a lot more people can relate to - once they give it a chance. Relate to - exactly! That's something that I really love. Like bringing human emotion and human stories. The thing is now, to be able to have an audience empathise with what is happening on stage, to have some emotion attached to what is going on on stage, is so important. And that's why I like to choose dancers and artists who have that ability to transcend the quintessential ballet - the idea of the trinket box ballerina - and have real stories on stage. Have that emotional connection. And not just have a kind of child-like image of what a ballerina is . . . That's it! When you see ballet live, it's pretty hardcore. You guys are throwing yourselves around the place. And there can be a lot of death as well! It's very emotional, and you get that experience through the music and the dancing. Yes. Exactly. And there's nothing like live performance. I know there's so much exposure now on the internet and on cinema screens, and live streaming, but there's something about being at live theatre that will move you, and touch you, that you just can't get past a screen. That human connection that is embodied by dancers on stage, it transcends through the theatre and into the audience. It's really an experience - and it's worth buying the ticket to have that experience, rather than watch it on your screen or in a cinema. It's night and day. And people might look at you and go, 'Oh Royal Ballet.' But there's much more to you than that, as you've done more contemporary work such as Wayne McGregor's Maddaddam. Well, actually, Wayne McGregor will be showcased in the gala! The thing is, I'm very much from humble beginnings. I'm a little girl from Northern Ireland who didn't train until I was 16 - but now I class Royal Ballet as my home. But the Royal Ballet is not just your classical ballet, your tutus and tiaras. There's so much more to it. We get to work with Sir Wayne McGregor and the innovative nature of our art form means it's so much more open. What really strikes me about you is that you're not a typical ballerina who is in intense training almost from infancy. Weren't you dancing locally until you were a teenager? That's ancient in ballet terms! It wasn't until I was exposed to it when I went to Summer school at 13. I was in class with students who were training vocationally - vocational training is when you're doing ballet all through the day, Monday to Friday - whereas I was doing ballet as a hobby one day a week after school. It was after that that I went home at 13 and told mam and dad, Oh, I want to be a ballerina. At that point, they didn't know that that was a career choice. They hadn't put two and two together and think: well, if there are ballet companies, people work as a ballerina. I wasn't exposed to it. I didn't see ballet companies coming to Northern Ireland. Until little ol' me, I don't think Dromore ever featured in anything to do with ballet (laughs).
