So why do we keep going back to... Frae?
Shaun Tinman's maverick, make-it-up room sets Escoffier amidst the avant garde.
It’s the work of a food writer to hunt down the new and the cool, because talent-spotting is really the animus of the work.
But sometimes a restaurant is so vital in creating and developing the culinary zeitgeist that we need to keep returning, just to see where they’re at, to try to work out where they are headed.
This is the first of a series where we go back and see where these chefs are going right now. First up is the maverick Frae, in Holywood, Northern Ireland.
Family matters mean we return often to the greater Belfast area and, when we do, we always find ourselves in Shaun Tinman’s Holywood restaurant, Frae.
So, why do we keep going back to Frae?
It’s not as if it’s the most popular restaurant in Holywood, a position stoutly held by Frae’s neighbour, Noble, which is not just the busiest place in town but actually one of the busiest suites of dining rooms in Ireland.
And it sure ain’t the prettiest room in the zone, a title stoutly held by the wildly successful Capparelli, a few miles over the Holywood hills in Dundonald.
So what Frae’s secret attraction?
Quite simply, it’s the fact that Frae is never the same place on any two visits. The vibe shapeshifts. The feeling in the little one-up, one-down set of rooms takes on a different aspect depending on what dishes Tinman is cooking and which wines the team are pouring.
That’s not to say that there aren’t constant factors. You know in Frae that what you will get is basically Escoffier Amidst the Avant Garde. Classic dishes, but not as you know them. “A normal place” is the tag line by which they describe themselves on Instagram, and that is a rich piece of humour. Frae doesn’t do normal.
But that is all you know. In a world of standardisation and instruction manuals, Tinman and his team write their own Codex with each service. And so, if you don’t get to Frae, what happens is that you find yourself missing that fix of crazy unpredictability, that unlikeliness, that frisson.
Right from the moment Tinman and James Fox opened the doors in August 2021, Frae was out of the box. They served breakfast and lunch back then, so you could get a bacon and date sarnie, or eggs on toast with Coolea cheese. For lunch you could have bavette with charred greens, lardo and whey onions.
We were straightaway smitten by this unlikely shoestring operation, a jape that was clearly making it up as they went along. We included them in The Sunday Times 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland in 2022, and described Frae as a room that “feels as though you are enjoying five-star cooking in someone’s garage.”
As time went by dinner service began for the little collation of tables on the ground floor – beef faggots with parsley, shallots and mustard; pork collar with chard; Veda treacle tart – they offered handmade pies to get them through the lockdown, and they got enough money to get the upstairs dining room fixed up.
And the menus began to take on that Escoffier amidst the avant garde vibe, so you might have lobster thermidor, or you might have the incredible mash-up where beef tartare met Caesar salad in the unlikeliest pairing imaginable. Tinman could cook the classics straight, and then he would just pop up some wild thing he fancied. Frae kept on going, and we kept on going back.
So, it’s Friday evening, we have taken the train from Belfast to Holywood and here we are upstairs in Frae, once again. The place is buzzing. Unlike city restaurants who open with a bang and have the general populace chasing seats as if they are gold dust – Chubby’s; Mongoose; Lena – Frae has built an audience steadily and, by the time we leave, every table upstairs will have been turned: clearly, we aren’t the only ones who sense something special whenever you walk through the door.
In addition to the one-page menu, Frae offers a quartet of specials, and they had our name on them: chicken livers with globe artichoke and broad bean fricassé; peas and confit tomatoes with oregano; smoked lamb belly and yogurt were the small plates; plaice Grenobloise, and cavatelli with Italian sausage and cime de rapa, were the mains. The Frae kitchen has a great fondness for obscure old culinary chestnuts like sauce Grenobloise and other relics of the classic kitchen which no one else cooks today. Grenobloise is a sauce of brown butter with lemon, capers and croutons that merits a mere three lines in Larousse and doesn’t even feature in Escoffier, but Tinman loves these arcane footnotes: on one visit we enjoyed a peará sauce, which is basically unknown outside of Verona.
If Frae loves archaic recipes, it also loves bitterness, putting the agrestic zing of turnip tops, chicken livers and lemons to great effect, creating those puckering Italianate tastes, giving each dish strong, bittersweet contrasts.
Tinman doesn’t just cook his ingredients: he conducts them, creating a plethora of taste notes with every dish, blending and melding his flavours and textures to create intricate compositions. Frae gives an edge-of-the-seat adventure with every visit, and somehow offers excellent value for money amidst all the thrills and unpredictability. Will we be back? For sure.
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