Holywood is a charming seaside town cut off from the sea by a four-lane bypass and the railway line. It has streets named 'Shore Road' and 'The Esplanade', but to get to the shorefront walk and park, you need to dodge the incoming Bangor Range Rovers, get across the busy transportation routes and leave Holywood, its elegant High Street, ancient priory and remarkable Maypole Bar behind.
One of the side effects of the forthcoming Brexit is the growing number of requests I am receiving from readers for restaurant recommendations in Dublin. More and more of you are realising that you can in fact enjoy a decent weekend in the capital these days for the same money it would cost for a fortnight in Los Angeles.
The independent café phenomenon in Belfast may be the source of irritation to some (honestly, lads, if you're complaining because there are too many coffee shops, you need to throw a bag of slack at yourselves), but to many of us, it is evidence of an ever broadening and growing understanding of the uplifting quality of spending a short time drinking good tea and coffee in an environment which provides some comfort and solace from the busy world.
Hillsborough, Northern Ireland's most desirable village, is a perfect picture postcard kind of place. You might think you were in a small English market town in the Cotswolds such is the tidiness and cleanliness of its hilly little streets, but its heritage is as Irish as Dingle.
What makes a good café? Coffee, definitely; tray bakes, check; servers with aprons, check; comfortable chairs and no draughts by the window, absolute, red-line must-haves. Oh, and early opening for those of us stumbling in to work at stupid o'clock in medical need of flat whites and teas.
Naz Din is as Belfast as Carl Frampton. He has the same charm and wit and he pulls no punches. Good job he is a restaurateur, though, because Naz is more of a lover than a fighter. He won't mind me saying that, because everybody knows how resilient and single-minded he can be. Also, his understanding of hospitality and the need to keep customers happy makes him a natural at this game.
After a year of selfless tasting on your behalf, our reviewer praises the quality and price of the food on offer and picks his favourite places to dine.
The jaws of Christmas provide a good time to look back and reflect on things. For me, this mostly means a reassessment of the restaurant scene in Ireland. Were the bad reviews of 2018 deserved? Were the good reviews merited? And just how hopeless are my predictions? As the singing hotelier Bill Wolsey reminded a live audience recently, I described a recently opened restaurant as a sure-fire success a couple of months before it closed down.
Review my own cooking? I don't need a full page to tell you I'm a hopeless cook. I have a couple of set pieces for family dinners, a firm grasp of the microwave functions and a sensitive if formal approach to setting the table; but my culinary talents are ultimately narrow, limited and unimpressive. The adviser on the other hand is an accomplished cook which makes domestic meal preparations all the more stressful for me.
Restaurant lifespans are measured in months, not years. Along with haulage, fashion and scented candle making, restaurants have the shortest life expectation of any start-up businesses. But those who do survive can look back to see how and why they got through the difficult first year and point to quality of service, food and atmosphere (as well as clever management of tight margins, rates, supplier payments, staff retention and an endless list of other risks and governance issues).
Belfast food and tourism chiefs should be looking over their shoulders because leading the charge in the race to become the north's best foodie destination and closing in fast, is, er, Derry/Londonderry.
Restaurants come in all shapes, sizes, price ranges, styles and quality. Some fixate on the furniture and lighting, others on the quality of service and food while those who focus on the views should arouse suspicion, largely because the view is often used to provide a distraction obscuring the mediocrity elsewhere in the operation.
The internet is having a huge impact on our eating habits. Twenty years ago, if you had nerves of steel or knew a friendly driver, you could phone a Belfast taxi and ask for half a stone of potatoes, a pound of butter and 20 Regal to be delivered. It wasn't a popular service because a lot of drivers would chase you for even asking.
The Ivory is a restaurant perched on the top floor of Belfast's Victoria Square shopping mall. It's been there ever since the mall opened 10 years ago. It occupies a prime site with a view. By any standards, the location gives the restaurant a head start.
It's been six years since I was in CoCo, the Linenhall Street restaurant owned by talented fireball Jason More. He wasn't too happy with the last review and took me to task about it a few months later when we bumped into each other. More recently, I bumped into some of his very charming staff at an event in Dublin. They suggested a return visit would reveal much improvement and new thinking.
The reason for banging on relentlessly about the restaurants of the cordon in recent weeks is because some of the very good ones merit the extra effort by customers to support them. So far, we have visited Pizza Boutique in Castle Street and Mourne Seafood Bar. This week it's the Sagart on Bank Square, next to and part of the popular Havana restaurant.
We become blind to the familiar. No-one had much to say about Primark and the Bank Buildings until they were engulfed in flames which now leave a legacy of economic scorched earth all around them.
Do you complain about poor service or bad food? How bad does it have to be before you'll give an honest answer to: "Everything all right, folks?" I know people who lose the plot entirely when they are served substandard food.
The popularity of Spanish food can be measured by the vast numbers of food pictures posted by holidaymakers on social media. How many more paellas, tortillas, bowls of patatas bravas and gazpacho, tiny tapas of glistening anchovies, shards of burgundy-coloured Iberico ham, creme Catalan and churros beside pots of thick hot chocolate can we take? Loads more! It seems our appetite for these is never going to be sated.
The cordon surrounding Bank Buildings threatens to strangle businesses inside and outside its perimeters. Quality restaurants and cafes have seen business either stop entirely or severely reduced. City Picnic, housed at the back of the former Anderson & McAuley building, behind Zara, has not been able to open its doors for the past month because it is just within the no-go zone behind cordon. Same goes for the McDonald's across the street.
Everybody loves Donegal. Donegal for the holidays, Dublin for the cup. It's the Northern California of Ireland, a place of music, pints, craic agus ceoil, holiday bungalows, cottages and caravans and breath-taking scenery.
Evidence that dirty, street-style hand food, chilli dogs, pulled pork sliders, sloppy Joe pizzas and all the rest of the chin-greasing, finger-sticking, sriracha-saturated, manners-destroying "meals" are gradually being replaced by the return of real, quality food is hard to deny.
Years ago I went to Omagh in search of a decent restaurant but could not find one. There were one or two places to eat but the reviews would not have been great and I didn’t want the first write-up from Omagh to be a bad one. Leaves a sour taste in everybody’s mouth. Better to say nothing at all. Same goes for any town I go to the first time. Don’t want to fall out with the locals on first contact.
I've never met him, but Joe Bailey bought my bike. He told me over the phone that he owned SoZo on the Antrim Road when he answered a Gumtree ad I had posted to sell my bike. The bike - a very sexy little handmade, lime-green Cinello racer - was to be my last.
Ask any wedding planner how easy it is to do their job and they'll look at you sideways. Seriously though, what does it take to order a couple of limos, lunch for 120 and a DJ? Three phone calls, a clip board and an available date, that's what. Or so I thought.
Afternoon tea, once the formal torture you had to endure when visiting elderly aunts, nuns and distant cousins, has made a huge comeback in recent years.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. The two people behind Belfast's greatest competing entertainment empires, both on top of their game, each with a brilliant eye for branding, were bound to come together at some point to create the city's latest phenomenon: a bar and restaurant like no other, hidden away in one of Belfast's most ancient arteries, Joy's Entry.
The food sector is riven with rivalry. Restaurants want you to eat out more, supermarkets want you to buy ingredients and eat in more, take-away distribution services want you to do neither and instead convert your kitchen into a gaming den (Eat! Don't Cook!) and farmers' markets want you to adopt a more conscious way of buying food (keep it local).
Over the last 10 years, my aversion to hotel restaurants has been made clear a number of times. But people have been asking from where this repulsion stems. I can only explain this as the result of a childhood spent fearing the Sunday family outing.
A golden triangle of coffee houses, bars, restaurants and takeaways has emerged in that space between Belfast city centre's Dublin Road and Great Victoria Street.
Restaurants are like mushrooms. They thrive in the dark and are fed all sorts of crap, mostly from critics, diners, suppliers, investors and banks. Unexpectedly, they can also be mobile.
Some restaurants are destinations in their own right. People will fly from Belfast to Heathrow after booking a table in the Fat Duck, not too far from the airport, just to experience the full Heston Blumenthal magic. Others will go the 600 miles to Cornwall for the sensational dishes of Nathan Outlaw and Rick Stein.
The mark of a good restaurant is something much more banal than brilliance, trend-setting design, or innovation. It's consistency. In a business where nothing is predictable and where so many variables can affect a day's work - staff being off at short notice, suppliers not coming through with the right orders, unexpected visits by the health and safety people and a multitude of factors to do with heating, water, furniture, electricity, gas and occasionally unannounced royal visits, walk-ins by former paramilitaries and then photographers from the Belfast Telegraph to cap it all - it's a wonder we have restaurants with any reputation for consistency at all. And yet we do.
First time I ever saw the three words Thai, green and curry was in a Chinese takeaway in Glengormley in 1998. It sounded exotic and a bit weird. Green curry had as much marketing pull as a used tissue and yet I seemed irresistibly drawn to it.
Killyleagh, on the shores of Strangford Lough, has become a favourite stopping point for cyclists on weekend group runs. Swarms of men and occasionally a woman or two in bright, multi-coloured Lycra tops descend on the small town following a pleasurable pedal through the drumlin countryside around.
Baker Street is the reincarnation of French Village in east Belfast. The excellent Lisburn Road-based restaurant and deli has become an attractive fixture in the city's posh south. There's another one on Botanic Avenue, which is strictly for students and backpackers, and then there's the French Village catering arm, which is also recommended.
The greatest English language food columnist who ever lived and who wrote for the Sunday Times, the late AA Gill, was based in London. Gill loathed travelling outside the capital to review restaurants in the country, because he believed they were invariably inferior.
It's all happening in east Belfast. Ballyhackamore restaurant fever shows no sign of abating and, as the demographics of the area change, so new eating experiences move in, too. Not only that, but the ripple effect created by that cluster of restaurants in the centre of Ballyhackamore has now seen the arrival of General Merchant's, Oliver's further out the road and others in Strandtown.
As summer approaches and thoughts turn to sun, sea and sand, our attention is drawn to the marvels of the Mediterranean diet. All those tomatoes, olives and fish dishes are proven to help millions of people who live along the shores of the Med to keep running marathons until they're a couple of hundred years old.
Last week, I was lamenting the silence that surrounds Bangor, Co Down and its once great reputation as a food destination. I had just been to Gary Bell's new restaurant, Underground Dining, and had a quick check to see where the old greats had got to.
Restaurants in hotels are not what they used to be. Until recently, you could rely on being served a variety of dressed-up effluent and animal fodder in some of them. Inedible food, draughty dining rooms and gaoler-standard service still blight a few of these places, but they are becoming a rarity.
Is it me or has Bangor gone off the boil of late? There used to be all sorts of exciting cafes and restaurants in the town: the Wheathill, Cafe Essence, the Boat House, Guillemot and a few others had raised Bangor's profile as a destination worth visiting for the food alone. So what happened? Why has it gone quiet?
Only a week or two ago, I was giving off about the lack of pubs in this country which serve good food. Harry and Meghan's visit to Belfast and their lunch in the Crown Bar highlighted the demand for this kind of food experience. Then, lo and behold, I discover the Stillhouse of Moira (I have little to say about Moira and its fine citizenry other than it is as lovely a place as Hillsborough, ahem).
We are determined to bring our readers value for money, so this week I'm reviewing three places for the price of one. All three are within a few yards of each other, which means I am able for the first time to enact the Belfast Fantasy Menu I publish each week on Twitter: pick a dish from each of three restaurants and cafes and build your own perfect three course lunch or dinner.
There is a lack of pubs which serve good food in Belfast. When Meghan and Harry "nipped" into the Crown Bar for lunch last month, many of us swallowed hard in disbelief.
The smug faces around east Belfast's Ballyhackamore district would put you off your dinner. Now that they have been told that their barrio is the best place to live in the Western hemisphere, Ballyhackamorians are strutting around being impossibly self-satisfied.
If Beatrix Potter had ever gone into the catering business, she would have opened a cafe just like the Jolly Sandwich Shop. Nestled in the heart of Enniskillen town centre, the shop isn't really a shop at all. It is a classic, ting-a-ling, old school cafe restaurant, the kind you used to see in posh department stores in market towns across Ireland in your granny's day.
Jumon is one of the most exciting new restaurants to open so far this year. Its interior is explosively youthful, the menu is like nothing you've ever seen here and the service is as polished as you'd expect in a more conventional, more established place.
The signs of a collapsing civilisation are upon us: self-service check-outs in supermarkets, automated pumps at petrol stations and online banking services amount to a collective rejection of human contact. Automation is the avoidance of compassion, the reverse of empathy and the destroyer of that which bonds us all together: small talk.
People can be divided into two groups. Those who love their food and those who don't. The most depressing conversation I can have is with the moron who regards food as fuel. "Don't know what you're on about, mate. Food's something to keep you going." Or: "Seriously, I don't know what all the fuss is about. All I need is a packet of cheese and onion, and I'm happy."
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