Two Dutch brothers have made a restaurant out of a boathouse reclaimed from the seafront, and offer the very best of the sea's bounty, served with a light touch, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
OF ALL THE things you think to pack for a trip to Belfast, suncream isn’t one. So I step off the train into a scorcher in an anorak. The sun seems to set off a shinier Belfast than I remember. The gleaming Titanic building like those 1970s Modernist churches, only on a gargantuan scale. The plaza around it is cleaner than a show house, with every blade of grass perfect.
The new quarter opens Belfast to the sea, like a huge new window thrown open in a darkened house. The holiday feeling continues in the seaside town of Bangor, as we squint at the dark purple bumpy line at the bottom of the sky that is Scotland while leaning on the sun-warmed pier. Behind us the Boathouse Restaurant sits landlocked in a car park. Where now there is asphalt, once there was sea.
It seems more than appropriate that a restaurant in a boathouse hemmed in by reclaimed land is run by two Dutch brothers.
I’m with Joris Minne, the restaurant critic of the Belfast Telegraph, and a man whose Flemish musician father came first to Clare and then to Northern Ireland to beef up the tunes in the Catholic church’s repertoire. With a Dutch father and a French mother, Joris stood out among the five-year-olds when he started school in Armagh in the 1960s. He didn’t speak a word of English. And he knew how to make mayonnaise.
We’re sitting where the boats once did, with a heavy iron ring on the wall above our table where ropes used to slacken and tighten with the swell and suck of the tide. Upstairs there is a tiny bar and the kitchen where Joery Castel is cooking. His brother Jasper, the more curly haired of the two, fronts this small house. The menu is short but elaborate: local ingredients given a light sprinkling of gastronomy.
I’m having the Belfast Lough crab. It’s served cut through with diced red chilli, two pineapple crisps and some pale pineapple pearls (tiny beads of pineapple juice like fruit roe). It’s all beached on a thick-set sea of buttermilk and lemon grass pannacotta, and sprinkled with borage flowers.
The crab is so good it would work without the bells and whistles but the whole effect is good, although the lemon grass doesn’t really get a look in as the stronger flavours dominate. A half-bottle of Muscadet is yeasty and pleasant.
The other starter is great: warm soft pieces of perfect Strangford Lough lobster draped over blobs of hazelnut puree, small cherry heritage tomatoes and a dazzling white tomato meringue.
We stay at sea for the mains, so I’m on the turbot, which has a butter-crisp top and is served with an earthy brown prawn bisque. There’s a summery pea puree, two perfectly cooked langoustines and a prawn ravioli with a salty side of samphire.
Joris gets the sea trout and it’s delicious, perfectly pan fried with white asparagus, hollandaise sauce, pistachio crumb and chateaux potatoes.
My dessert is sumptuous: a spill of strawberries sprinkled with sumac, (salt, earth and sweet in harmony), in a river of strawberry juice from a chewy orange meringue. There’s a sweet shop of jellies, from orange to Crème de Cassis, a rhubarb-and-strawberry one and a milk-and-vanilla – running the spectrum from tangy to nursery comfort. Joris is slightly less impressed with his dessert, which comes with a too-dry pistachio madeleine.
There are nicer things on the plate, however, including a golden raisin puree and teeny glass of advocaat anglaise with pineapple compote at the bottom.
We leave through the upstairs bar again, that magical sea light flooding in, and a young couple are leaving too. The man says it was one of his best-ever meals. Jasper is pleased.
The Boathouse is a special place, where you can taste the best from the sea on dry land, safe in the hands of a hard-working and talented chef.
Dinner for two with drinks came to £100.35 (€126.92).
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Home is where the heart is
At first it seemed I was too late to try Home, Belfast's pop-up restaurant in Callender Street in the city centre. The shutter was down and the tiny street had returned to a delivery van and fag-break kind of place.
But it turned out Home had popped up again in what looks like a pretty permanent spot at Wellington Place. The Mourne Seafood Bar is to the back of its new location. It has a sandwich bar to the front and cheerful sit-down restaurant to the back. Service was friendly and the place was decked out with mismatched lampshades and jumble sale furniture. There's some kind of colonial theme in the decor. "Cheap Donkeys", one painted sign read.
Another said "Discount Zebras". A goat's cheese salad was fine, although the cheese had been whipped so it was a bit tasteless. It came with nicely poached pear, beetroot and leaves.
My Asian soup didn't work. It was brown and hot but the chicken had the rubbery consistency of something long-separated from its origins instead of that lovely brown threadiness that comes from meat straight off the bone. There was pickled ginger and soggy rice in the bottom. Mains were better: two fluffy fillets of hake with black and white sesame seeds and a hearty scallop and chorizo risotto. Scallops great, chorizo too rubbery and too much.
Two good coffees finished a pleasant lunch in this buzzy place. It's great to see a bright new opening in a sea of shuttered premises in this area. Slightly more attention to the ingredients used in the cooking would give it a real edge.
Lunch for two with sparkling water and coffees came to £40.35 (€49.74).
Home, 22 Wellington Place, Belfast, tel: 048-90234946
