Welcome to Food Hub - a look at towns and districts throughout Ireland with a cluster of offerings for eating and drinking.
This edition: Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland.
Noble
6.35 pm on a winter Friday evening, and the volume in Noble is at Berghain level. Downstairs, the wine bar is jammers.
“A lot of people would be there from lunch”, explained our server, “because, you know, when you’re out, you’re out.”
Saul McConnell and chef Pearson Morris opened in 2016, opening up above the Iona Wholefood Shop. Right from the start the crew and the cooking had a tightness, a discipline, and a joie de vivre that made them a success from the get-go.
Their secret is an accessible menu – oysters; chicken; crispy mac’n’cheese bites; a variety of steaks; chicken; duck; superlative ice creams – and the menu’s accessibility means their audience spans the demographic.
Pearson Morris’s cooking is a model of precision and deft execution. This allows him to put on some edgy plates and deliver them confidently – beef tartare with quail’s egg and Bloody Mary dressing; scallop ceviche with orange, chilli and coriander – whilst also making certain that the core offer of Bangor Bay crab, and Portavogie prawns, and chicken breast with braised leeks, are delivered to the letter.
Saul McConnell and his staff dance around the room, as energised as their customers, fleet, funny and charming. The dining room upstairs in Noble has about 30 covers, and the staff will turn the tables twice for each service. Do the math: more than 100 covers in a thirty-seater. That’s how you weather recessions.
Lynchpin
Lynchpin cooks and serves vegan luxe.
The cooking in this modest wee room in Holywood offers something akin to the cashmere culinary snuggle that the hottest starry teams in Belfast and Dublin strive for.
But in Lynchpin they do it without meat or dairy products. Lynchpin climbs the culinary Everest, but without the oxygen of animal proteins.
No pressure, then.
Here‘s how good Lynchpin food is: two of us visited on Thursday lunchtime, and we ordered the polenta cake, and the Scotch’ugang egg. Both were sublime. We were back for lunch the next day with the third party who hadn’t been able to make Thursday and who, we insisted, had to order the Scotch’ugang egg, and the polenta cake. Three happy people, so.
Ethan Jerrome’s cooking is so complete in and of itself that there is no FOMO when eating his cooking: all you want is more of the same. His world of plant-based food is total, and he is able to make even straightahead dishes on the menu eat like treasures, and then turn his hand to dazzling everyone with the echt authenticity of the dishes he cooks for the restaurant’s themed Thursday dinners: Nordic Nights; Sri Lankan Nights; Korean Nights; Italian Nights; Caribbean Nights. To find such excellence in the simplicity and minimalism of Joe McGowan’s dining rooms is a true win-win.
Frae
Shaun Tinman likes to make things tough, for himself.
Who else would barbecue swede? Serve roasted yeast with coley – coley! Serve a marmite butter with ciabatta? Resurrect an old Silver Palate speciality like Chicken Marbella. Make a gilda with Young Buck cheese.
Frae cooking is outré cooking. It’s a blast. It probably shouldn’t work, but Tinman makes it work because he loves the challenge in making things work. His menus don’t read like menus, instead offering a long list of dishes at various (very keen!) prices, everything from parsnip and Coolattin fritters (wha?!) to a 750g sirloin on the bone with Young Buck butter. It took a while before people got used to this unusual presentation, but what has won Tinman an audience is the utter deliciousness of everything he cooks, a catalogue of dishes with which he demonstrates a Promethean technique.
Best of all, Frae food is sui generis: there is nothing like it anywhere else, so if Tinman puts barbecued swede with barley and cavolo nero on the menu, or fried sprouts with crispy shallots and St Tola goat’s cheese, then you are going to be ordering it, because you want this walk on the wild side of life.