24 Hours in Belfast
Whilst writers and critics seek out the novel and the unconventional, most everyone else seeks the familiar and the comfortable. Writers and serious cool hunters want to bestow critical legitimacy on what they find, but many more just want a good time.
Finding the familiar and the comfortable explains why the beautiful dining room that is Lottie Noren’s Beau, in central Belfast, is packed to the hilt on a Friday evening.
Beau is a place for comfort eating. Lottie Noren is not pushing the envelope because her customers don’t want her to. Noren’s small plates read global and radical – lamb rib and hung yogurt; langoustine scampi and sauce gribiche; pressed potato, truffle and Parmesan; beef fat focaccia – but the dishes offer conservatively expressed ingredients.
It’s a brave step to serve Kilkeel crab with creme fraiche, chilli and crumpet, when Niall McKenna’s Waterman House – basically just around the corner on Hill Street – serves the same concoction as one of its outstanding signature dishes.
The Beau version is more muted, the quenelle of dressed crab meat contrastingly cold to the hot crumpet. Noren likes the contrast of a main player with a dairy supporting actor – grilled courgettes with ricotta; whipped St Tola with heirloom tomatoes; the hung yogurt with lamb rib – and it makes for comfortable eating in a very comfortable room.
Prices are very fair – a tenner for the crab and crumpet; 20 for onglet and bone marrow – and it is lovely to see local drinks such as the McAlindon Creu Celta, Bullhouse, Copeland and Boatyard featured so prominently on a terrific selection of wines, spirits and beers.
Pretty much all the action in Belfast these days is happening in the nexus of streets in the Cathedral Quarter and extending from the central Hill Street.
Just on the fringe of the zone is Trait Coffee, who have just had the inspired idea of opening as a wine bar, with a bespoke cheese and charcuterie offer, on weekend evenings in their gaff on High Street.
At 5pm they flip the switch, and the caffeine morphs into some fine natural wines and – get this – a selection of cheeses chosen by, and made by Mike Thomson of the outstanding Young Buck cheese and Mike’s Fancy Cheese shop.
Getting Mike to make sure the trio of cheeses on the plate – Cooleeney, Coolea and Young Buck – are in peak condition is the equivalent of getting Quincy Jones in to show you how to play scales. The three cheeses, served with house focaccia, were pristine: the Cooleeney yielding and lactic; the Coolea fudgy and sweet; the Young Buck pointed and precisely acidic.
We were there on only the second night of the new venture, but the staff were right on it, as if everyone in Belfast was born fully able to describe artisan cheeses and pour Pet Nat and bergamot soda. The huge windows of the room give a real creatures-of-the-night vibe, and this is a must-have experience.
We didn’t have far to walk to get to Trait because we were staying in Flint, a slick set of rooms in an aparthotel on Howard Street, a hop, skip and jump from the City Hall.
It’s a magic location, once you have navigated the lengthy check-in which asks multiple questions and then asks you to fire up your room key (full disclosure: we needed help to do both.) The rooms have a small kitchen, and you could cook interesting things with the multi-function microwave and the twin-turbo induction hob. One morning an American guest who joined us in the lift was bringing back a couple of coffees, and we suspect many folk who stay in Flint use the kitchen space and the small table for snacks and breakfast, so that you aren’t eating out at every meal. The rooms have a kind of punky luxury, and their Amelia Hall bar and eaterie on the ground floor is insanely busy.
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