275 years after the giant 35-foot waterwheel of the original bleach works first began to turn, Carlos and Lucie Capparelli have made the wheel at The Old Mill at Dundonald turn once again.
Its motion signals the changes of the ages. What was once an 18th century bleach works, then a 19th century corn mill, is now, as Capparelli at the Mill, a singular destination dining room for the 21st century.
Bah! History is bunk. This is what you need to know right now: Capparelli at the Mill is the most gorgeous eating room imaginable, and has killer cooking from Carlos Capparelli and his crew.
It’s the room where you want to be, the room that makes you feel both glam, and grateful, the room where you book a return visit on your way out the door.
We visited twice, for a Saturday evening dinner and a Sunday morning breakfast, a month after they got the doors open. Last time we were here, the Old Mill was a building site. This time, it is an ocean liner of light and texture for which architect Gerry Irvine, of Hutcheson Irvine, will win a shelf-load of architectural prizes.
It is also an extremely busy room, one which is already hosting 450 people a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner and which needs to be booked well in advance if you want a table on the weekend.
Competing with you to get that table are the well-heeled food cognoscenti of north County Down. You will know these folk by the fact that they have extremely expensive motor cars – check out the car park – and by the fact that they are so too-cool-for-school that they do not get dressed up to go out for dinner: Capparelli is strictly casual dress, understated luxe.
Understated luxe also describes Capparelli’s culinary style. The food is as elegant as you can get, as if the chef has revised the old mantra of Coco Chanel as to how to dress a plate well: take one thing off.
So, hummus has toasted pumpkin seeds and a sweet chill shattah. The signature rotisserie chicken has a jus gras and chermoula sauce. Roast aubergine has a feta yogurt and pomegranate. Pan con tomate is draped with a pair of anchovy fillets. The aubergine with casarecce alla Norma has been smoked, then paired with paprika. Every plate is lean and focussed and, it has to be said, this is not Ottolenghi cooking. Whilst Yotam Ottolenghi is an investor in the project, and Carlos Capparelli spent years working with the Ottolenghi group in London, this is a very different style of food from the dishes created by Sami Tamimi and Ottolenghi.
There is more of the Med, and less of the Middle East. Burrata, for example, comes with fermented plums, crispy sage and fennel and coriander seeds. The rigatoni has beef shin ragu and Grana Padano. The halibut has capers and brown butter.
What all the dishes share, however, is skill in the composition and skill in the execution. With rotisserie chicken, for instance, what counts is the crispy skin and the ability of the kitchen to deliver something almost papyrus-like in its finish. That is delivered here, along with a small tub of frites that are simply state-of-the-art. Chicken and chips, then? Yes, chicken and chips for the Gods.
Capparelli food is modest, precise, and totally yum balls. If you had nothing but the rotisserie chicken with fries and a bowl of soft-serve ice cream with fig and plum jam, you would be the happiest soul in Dundonald. That fact that your lunch or dinner would cost 30 quid would further burnish your contentment: prices for food and wine are very keen indeed.
We were back the following Sunday morning for breakfast, and there were already people waiting for the doors to open at 10am. In the morning the room is bathed in light, with the flower planting outside the room offering both an impressionistic shimmy and pointillistic bullet points of colour.
The kitchen offers a choice of six dishes, alongside pastries and cakes. A leek and miso bechamel sold us on the mushrooms on toast, and this is a beauty: the wild mushrooms threaded through with greens and served with a fried egg on a doorstop of sourdough. The scrambled eggs have a sage brown butter and Coolea cheese, though our expertly scrambled eggs could have done with both more butter and more cheese.
Almost best of all was the Greek yogurt with roasted plum compote – this kitchen loves plums – with a sublime, nutty granola and Summerhill honey, a pure blast of early autumn in a bowl. The casually dressed County Downers had been replaced with casually dressed families with babies, and a bunch of tables of youngish women in twos and threes.
Our dinner and breakfast experiences were the equivalent of treating yourself not once, but twice, with the big room metamorphosing a different complexion for the two visits. The front of house team are youthful and enthusiastic, and the experiences put us in mind of our first visits to Paul and Jeannie Rankin’s Roscoff, back in 1989, when that extraordinary venture changed what it meant to eat out in Belfast. With its professional assurance and luxe style, Lucie and Carlos have written a hip new chapter for Northern Ireland’s food culture.
Related:
