The Fold, Ebrington, Derry
The MVPs of the North West bring their game.
We’re very happy to give you the heads up that this Sunday, John will be talking to Francesco Turrisi on his Substack Cooking By Ear. John was a music journalist before he became a food writer, and Francesco is a polymath musician who now writes just as well about food. Join them for what will be a very cool discussion, this Sunday March 1st at 3pm. Link here…
The Fold: The MVPs of the North West bring their game.
After almost four years of writing The Irish Stew and posting several hundred Stacks, we hope that you value the intellectual rigour and the philosophical consistency which we try to bring to the discussion of Irish food.
It’s our hope that you appreciate the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance position which we adopt, and the arm’s length disassociation when dispensing critical judgement.
Sorry, what’s that? Oh. You just want the scores.
Okay, so.
Well, then, here are the scores for The Fold, run by Mark and Shauna Froydenlund, with chef Derek Creagh, in Derry’s Ebrington Plaza.
Nduja sausage roll: 11/10
Pork belly doughnut: 11/10
Fold fried chicken and cornbread, chive aioli: 11/10
Side salad of baby gem, mustard leaf, citrus dressing: 11/10
Oatmeal shortbread: 11/10
Pastel de nata: 11/10
Established Coffee Americano and Flat White: 11/10
Total: 77/70
Not too shabby, eh? Fairly good numbers for a new business, for sure.
If you are surprised by the numbers, you really shouldn’t be. Derek Creagh, for instance, is for very many people, the MVP of Northern chefs.
From The Foyle Hotel in Moville to The Salty Dog in Bangor, from Deane’s in Belfast to The Shack in Portstewart, Derek Creagh has worked his magic behind the pass in many of the most important Northern food destinations.
If you hear that someone is making with the magic up North, seemingly out of the blue, then chances are that this peripatetic chef is in the kitchen, making sure everything is tip-top.
The Froydenlunds, then, bring an embarrassment of gifts to The Fold. Shauna is a Derry girl, born into a family of restaurateurs, who studied in the UK and who quickly worked her way up through the kitchens of the Marcus Wareing empire in London.
Mark, meantime, was spotted at cookery school by a tutor who recommended him to Wareing, with whom he began a long association, becoming head chef at the tender age of 27.
Eventually the couple went into partnership with Wareing in Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley, acting as chef-patrons, and winning numerous stars and accolades before deciding, after 15 years, that they would return to Shauna’s home city.
The combined experience of these three gifted kitchen maestros explains how you get 11/10 for every single thing which two of us ate for lunch. The dishes were modest – a side salad, for chrissake! – but they were perfect, each and every one. In fact the modesty of the offer in The Fold – toasties; sausage rolls; fried chicken – only serves to make the cooking seem even more special.
The magic dust with which the team garnish every dish is precision. For example: every cafe and restaurant in Ireland makes pastel de nata. Only a tiny handful are worth your time, because everyone gets the pastry all wrong.
In The Fold, the pastry does what it has to do: you break into it with your fork and it makes a cracking sound as multiple layer after layer of fine pastry cracks together. Never mind the custard: it’s the pastry that counts and the sound of the pastry breaking that counts, and it’s the pastry that everyone gets wrong.
But in The Fold, the pastry is exactly as it should be, cracking like a million mille-feuilles, exactly what you will get in Belem, in Portugal. The last time you ate a pastel de nata this good, you were in Lisbon.
Having this modest little custard and pastry pie with a perfect cup of coffee with the beans roasted by Belfast’s brilliant Established coffee house is as good as it gets, as perfect as it gets, simple as that.
And they do this with each and every dish. The char-su pork with the pork doughnut could easily be cooked on the grill in the kitchen. But Mark prefers to cook the pork neck and belly outside on their live-fire set-up, because he wants that wood smoke note. The result is Wow! Putting the meat in a doughnut is a blast, a real piece of fun, and makes us eager to return to try the ham hock ribollita, because the hock in that dish is also smoked, a novel note with the traditional Tuscan bean soup.
Side salads occupy the same low rung in the Irish kitchen where we find the pastel de nata, so of course in The Fold they show exactly how it is done.
A tumble of perfectly grown fresh leaves of baby gem and mustard are tossed with a light citrus dressing and together they make the taste buds sing. You need to pay such attention both to the quality of the leaves and the balance of the dressing to have something so simple turn out something so special, but these guys do it with gas in the tank, the lightly pickled red onion strands adding a note of extra acidity.
The Fold fried chicken is another exercise in technical wizardry and taste nirvana, the pieces of chicken thigh coated in a light batter and sitting atop a piece of cornbread, with whoops of chive aioli. By the time you have eaten it you feel punch-drunk with deliciousness, the same feeling you have as you collect the last shards of pastry that lie on the plate after you have demolished the nduja sausage roll.
The strange life of food writers means that we have spent considerable time in recent months thinking about shortbread, having baked the recipe in Stephen Harris’s latest book, The Sportsman at Home. Getting shortbread right is a bit like curling in Winter Sports: you have to worry the damn thing all the way to the finish line.
Here, using oats in the mixture, the biscuit was a full moon of earthy sweetness, both good to eat, and good to think. This, and a perfect Flat White, and you have discovered the sweet spot of living your best life.
We arrived at noon, just as the lunch menu begins and the early morning offer winds down. Forty minutes later the queue out the door had already begun, so timing is all important in The Fold.
The trinity of talent that is Mark, Shauna and Derek are making with the magic in Ebrington, the trio of MVPs of the North West. Fold cooking delivers simple concepts executed to simple perfection, and this team are only beginning, because the space in the Star Fort walls gifts them the room to develop in myriad ways. The scores may be stratospheric, but they only tell one part of what is unfolding in The Fold.
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