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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
Even though Belfast's international foodie destination reputation basks in the glory of its two Michelin-starred assets, Ox and Eipic, there has always been a debate over which one is better. Their prices are similar, the food in both is of international standard...
Nothing prompts sneering cynicism among certain classes than super-pubs, restaurant chains and small-town night clubs. Those of us who enjoy nothing more than our living room pre-ing, followed by taxis to PizzaExpress, or Zen, and ending the night in Lavery's, or the Errigle, avoiding the police and the drunks on the way home, know what to expect.
Belfast has evolved in two decades to claim its rightful place at the top of a glittering array of foodie cities and destinations from across the world. Which other city, I ask you, of barely 350,000 people, can claim two Michelin-starred restaurants, a rich seam of excellent mid-range bistros and brasseries, country house pubs and some of the best fast-food outlets available.
In a recent household survey, food came out in front of sun, sea and sand as the single-most important consideration when booking a holiday. The survey, conducted in my house, reveals that if you go to any destination in the Mediterranean basin, the weather will...
Years ago when the Irish hospitality sector was an inconceivable concept, I went to the Lobster Pot in Strangford. In those days there were plenty of pubs and a handful of places which served crisps. But the 20th century Irish lounge bar was not always a...
One of Belfast's top curry restaurant owners, Ali Askir also happens to be the founder of the Irish Curry Awards, the only food awards on the island of Ireland to have received international Asian broadcast attention thanks to the TV station ATM Bangla and its global audience. (As head judge of these awards, my co-judges and I are unexpectedly big in Bangladesh.)
Belfast and Dublin's restaurant portfolios differ radically. They reveal a character in both cities distinctive from each other, yet mutually very attractive. Belfast may be much smaller and grittier than grand old Dublin, but its restaurants have, perhaps, a broader appeal. Also, it costs less to eat well in Belfast than it does in Dublin.
You wait three years for a decent Thai restaurant to open and then two come along at the same time. Towards the very end of 2017, both new restaurants, Bo Tree Kitchen and Banh, opened coincidentally within weeks of each other after a stasis of three years since the closure of the popular Bo Tree Thai in Belfast's University Road.
Ever since the doors closed on the Bo Tree Thai restaurant, Belfast has been left in a kind of Siamese limbo with little if any access to authentic gai pad ped, tom yam het or kung pad prik pao.
Putting together a list of the top 10 restaurants in Northern Ireland is an invitation to getting your head kicked in. Even as I go through the list of 52 reviewed restaurants of 2017, an intractable argument rages in my head over who should or shouldn't be included. This...
Burgers. You can't live with them and you can't live without them. The simplest of foods, anyone can make them. A burger is a sandwich and as long as the sandwich features a bun or bap split in two and a patty, pretty much anything else can be added.
Successful country house hotels and restaurants, bars and bistros work because they conform to a notion of rural life lifted straight from the pages of coffee table magazines found in city centre apartments and homes across the posher parts of cities...
I'm getting tired of inflamed sensitivities when it comes to favourite restaurants and takeaways. You make one claim about the best fish and chip shop in Belfast (undisputedly John Long's) or Indian takeaway (Asha in Bangor) and the crazed hounds of Cu...
Graze in east Belfast has carved out a sound reputation for consistency in service and food in the four years of its existence. Despite drivers entering the restaurant unannounced (a nice convertible Jaguar crashed through the front door last year) and the growth nearby of a restaurant culture, Graze has maintained and indeed built on its success.
The cradle of the culinary arts is in Lyon, France, where food is regarded as high art. It boasts a raft of Michelin-starred restaurants and is home to Paul Bocuse. Even the best restaurant in Paris, owned by legendary chef Alain Ducasse, is called Aux Lyonnais. An ancient and tiny bistro, it is the perfect encapsulation of everything you ever thought of as being a typical French café restaurant...
In tourism terms Belfast has gone from sticky-carpeted, ring of steel, smicked-out, club-land, fag butt, to hotter-than-South Beach, Michelin-starred, celestial plain of abundant joy and a hundred thousand welcomes city break destination. In less than two decades we have radically changed our tone and outlook. Would-you-drink-up-now-please! has been replaced by: would-sir-prefer-the-61-or-82-...
It's one of the most charming little pubs in the North. Behind the tiny door is a tiny lounge with hobbit furniture and flagstone floor. It's compelling and beautiful and just the job for visiting family and friends who may still have certain views about the North.
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