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Joris Minne: Rhubarb Fresh Food Cafe
Monday, 31 August 2009
Belfast restaurant Rhurbard serves nostalgic meals... with old-school prices to match
All the recent talk of economic upturns, of house price crashes bottoming out and green shoots sprouting among the wreckage of our few remaining industries won’t do at all. This up-beat kind of language does not come naturally to Ulster folk. We are much happier kicking car tyres, muttering about the state of things and putting on a serious face.
Even during the white-heat glow of our economic boom a couple of years ago, most of us still shook our heads into our pints bemoaning the breakdown of traditional family values, the emergence of insolence as a virtue and how envy and greed now drove the thirtysomethings rather than the noble engines of application, ability and ambition that lifted us out of our grey and hopeless towns in the blighted years of the Seventies and Eighties.
For those of us who look back on those days with some fondness, the idea that Northern Ireland was turning into northern California was a frightening prospect.
Suddenly everybody with a semi was going to be a millionaire and the Northern Ireland BMW-per-head ratio here was higher than in Los Angeles. The crash of last year, however, meant a possible return to the stable old days when a pint was 35p and traffic jams were something you heard about on Radio 2.
In Berlin there are bars and restaurants that exploit this nostalgia. There is a restaurant in the east of the city that serves up the same old fatty pork and beetroot stodge as it did pre-Wall fall.
Its prices reflect the old days of communist subsidy and its plastic table cloths and grimy walls are a reassuring monument for the older generations who believe that climate change, Usain Bolt and self-clean kitchens are the work of the evil capitalist West and would never have been allowed under the old regime.
Belfast doesn’t have the same knack for celebrating, marking or commemorating its immediate past. That’s because it’s immediate past isn’t completely in the past yet.
But one restaurant, possibly the smallest in Belfast, has had the good sense to pluck one or two dishes from the last few decades, give them a bit of welly and serve them at incredibly Seventies-style prices.
Rhubarb on the corner of Hope Street is a tiny cubbyhole of a place with little booths, no drinks licence and a man in the kitchen who wears a chef’s whites.
Nor does it have a credit card link, which means you need to bring a bit of (but not much) cash. It might look like a funky taxi-man’s caff from the outside, but you’d be mistaken if you thought it was just another Ulster-fry eatery. Because what goes on in the minuscule kitchen would make much bigger operations weep.
A recent couple of lunches in Rhubarb proved that just because you can get a bacon sandwich in a place doesn’t mean the rest of the stuff is fast or rubbish. A plate of bacon, cabbage and mash was memorable in so far as I can’t remember having had as good a version of it anywhere else.
It was one of the meals I would put down on my desert-island list of top favourites. Among Pier 36’s langoustines, Cayenne’s confit of duck and Gourmet Burger Bank’s Lebanese lamb burger I would have to put Rhubarb’s plain-looking but gobsmacking bacon, cabbage and mash.
Top chefs often advise restaurants to create an iconic dish, something people will always want to go back for. This is the one. But of course, not all of you like bacon, cabbage and mash so thankfully, there’s more at lunch time than this.
The warm potato salad, for instance, consists of freshly sautéed new spuds, chorizo, lots of green leaves and dressing with bite.
The risotto shares some of the chorizo flavours and is a thick (though light and creamy) affair bursting with flavours and gentle texture.
There are daily specials, including the likes of a chicken and root-vegetable pie whose flakey pastry hat covers a very generous, deep and rich stew featuring carrots, celery, onions and much more. Among the specials are desserts that shore up the quality values of the place — crème brulee, chocolate fudge cake and so on.
But many office workers, students and wannabe young things who don’t know how to use cutlery go for the sandwiches. This is an indication of how flexible the man in white is.
On the one hand he can cook superbly, extracting maximum flavours from the most ordinary ingredients, on the other, he is providing the new generation of diners with something they understand: breakfast in a sandwich, or Caesar salad in a sandwich, or just about anything you might otherwise have with a knife and fork, neatly lodged between two slices of white or wheaten or stuffed inside a floury tortilla. I’m sure if you asked for a soup-of-the-day sandwich he’d make it work.
The night menu (Thursday, Friday and Saturdays only) is more grown up and while it might be fun to order a pan-fried-seabass-with-citrus-salad-and-sautéed-potatoes sandwich, you won’t find a sliced pan anywhere near the place after 6pm.
The starters list a decent range of soup, salads, smoked salmon and risotto but it’s the mains that make the place special.
If you were a visitor to Belfast, this would be the place you’d be delighted and thrilled to have discovered — because you can eat quality for next to nothing.
Mains starting at £8.50 include pork and honey sausages on mash with caramelised onion gravy, roast salmon with sautéed potatoes, spinach and wild mushrooms, Portavogie scallops, slow-cooked roast beef and so on. It’s exactly what you’d be looking for as an intelligent tourist or as a local in search of robust and fresh sustenance.
Rhubarb personifies the food we like in this country — fresh-faced, ruddy-cheeked, stick-yer-fork-in-and-smile grub, which is as enjoyable as it is good for you. Just like it used to be, in the sad old, bad old pre-economic boom times, really.
The Bill
Sausages and mash: £5.50
Chicken pie: £5.95
Bottle water X 2: £2.30
Coffee X 2: £3.50
Total: £17.25
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Myself and my wife visited Rhubarb last Saturday. The service was first class and the meal delicious. Full marks to all. One small point. It could be easy to be caught out by the no debit or credit card policy. More prominent wording to this effect would be welcome. It was by accident we saw the small lettering about this at the bottom of a menu displayed at the door and had to look for an ATM to obtain some cash before returning.
Posted by SS | 14.09.09, 12:50 GMT