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Joris Minne: Home
This Belfast restaurant embodies all that’s great about the pop-up trend, but is it good enough to become a permanent city fixture?
Monday, 14 November 2011
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Running a restaurant is precarious. If you plotted a chart to measure performance based on volume of diners over the months and years in a selection of say 50 restaurants around the north you would soon uncover, er, no pattern whatsoever.
Many restaurants are up and down for no particular reason other than fashionability, or in and out of favour because of fair or unfair reviews. Few restaurants show steady performance from one year to the next. Some disappear altogether while new ones open to replace them.
One restaurant aiming to face down the turbulent restaurant circle of life by determining its own future is Home, the latest pop-up to pop up.
Pop-ups can be viewed in a few ways. You can think of them as kamikazes, willing to perform their brief duty and die; or you can think of them as the ultimate expression of anti-capitalist insolence, a kind of creative protest proving that commerce can survive without being nailed down by daunting property lease agreements.
Home, housed in the former Aldens in the City (better known in its earlier incarnation as the mighty Scandia), has all the ammunition it needs to win the short battle it is intended to fight. It’s bright, modern, comfortable, centrally located, and puts on a good spread. It’s also exceptionally on trend.
Owner Stevie Haller, familiar to many as the former front man in Mourne Seafood Bar (Mourne chef patron Andy Rae has been his mentor in the Home venture), and famous for his slightly cracked Eddie Izzard-inspired humour, his rugged good looks and his extensive culinary knowledge, says pop-ups are the future.
“Pop-up restaurants are trendy, in high demand and can vanish as quickly as they appear, making them awesome but often elusive if you’re trying to book a table.”
That’s why you won’t see too many reviews about pop-ups. But this one may be with us a bit longer than usual. Such an option is only possible with a flexible property owner and imaginative agent, in this case, Lisney, willing to share the risk by forsaking a conventional lease to see how things pan out.
Reassurance seems to be foremost here, with nothing on the menu to frighten the natives. The scariest thing is the BYO £4.50 corkage charge on a bottle of wine (or £1 for beer).
On the lunch menu (there is also a vegetarian and kids menu as well as a posher evening one) are comforting-yet-edgy bistro favourites including ‘super soups’ (small £4, large £6.50) like chicken, brown rice, organic veg and harissa; ‘old-school’ ham shank and split pea; and smoked chilli and bean with avocado salsa and crème fraiche.
There are starters you can have as a main course (£6 or £9) among which you’ll find scallop and prawn cakes with sweet pepper salsa; chicken and porcini ragout with rigatoni and parmesan; and hot smoked organic salmon with horseradish potato salad. The veggie dips are well worth a look, as these include the rare rainbow carrot from the farm of Drew Frasier, a purple version of the orange one we know (they were originally purple, the colour bred out to make them more commercial). While the crunchy texture is the same, it has a deep and intriguing flavour.
The advisor and I managed to get an early table for lunch last Friday. By the time the first course came, the place was packed. A pair of golden, bread-crumbed prawn-and-scallop cakes, packed with lots of both components leaving no room for potato packing, was excellent and satisfyingly salty. There was no cheating here and the chunks of scallop and prawn were clearly visible, tightly packed together. These came on a crimson red bed of chopped, roasted red peppers and tomatoes, which were clearly not just for show and worked a very good partnership.
The rigatoni with chicken and porcini was freshly tangy, the tomato sauce light and heightened with chopped basil leaves. I had expected something darker and more earthy but this was pleasant enough.
A pork loin covered in a crumbling crust of wild mushrooms and a kind of gremolata was served with big chips, spinach and watercress salad and a little thimble of peppercorn sauce. The pork, the best I’ve had since a Basque experience this summer, is worth the trip. The accompanying support act brought just the right variety of leaves and dressing and dipping those chips into the sauce provided a moment of intense happiness.
The advisor’s hake with chorizo baked beans was another triumph, offering up well thought out combinations of flavours and textures which worked.
Home should be more than a dip in the water and with the right support deserves to become a central and permanent fixture on Belfast’s culinary map.
The bill
Rigatoni £6
Prawn & scallop cakes £6
Pork £9.50
Hake £9.50
Lge San Pellegrino water £3.50
Coffees £3.60
Total £38.10
Address
8 Callender Street, Belfast BT1 5BN. Tel: 07936 292502.
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