Belfast

The energy of rapid regeneration is healing Northern Ireland, where the promising future of this city overshadows its troubled past.

By Amanda Ross

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Photo by Robert Lemermeyer

How’s Irish-Asian fusion food for a strange dichotomy? It’s delicious: crispy duck confit with sweet corn blini and peach chutney, and gingered roast spring carrot soup with crème fraîche and coriander – and Guinness on tap served in a proper pint glass. Even more refreshing than the Guinness is the fact that this is modern haute cuisine with absolutely no attitude.

I’m at Cayenne, one of the best restaurants in Belfast and one that wouldn’t have existed even a decade ago. Irish native Paul Rankin and his Winnipeg-born wife, Jeanne, travelled the world cooking up experience before heading back to Belfast to transform the virtually non-existent culinary scene into one of the city’s main attractions. Now a celebrity chef with a line of appliances and a BBC show under his toque, he is Belfast’s culinary godfather. The duo earned Northern Ireland’s first culinary star at their first restaurant, Roscoff, and their focus on fresh local ingredients, sourced from lush pastures and the nearby sea, typify all that is good about Belfast cuisine.

Cayenne also typifies all that’s good about the city’s future since the 1998 Belfast Agreement was signed: youth, energy, ideas and the international recognition that’s starting to come. After slinking from its role as the country’s economic engine into conflict-induced malaise, Belfast is now staging a comeback worthy of James J. Braddock. Michelin-starred restaurants, award-winning design and exuberance have replaced hunger strikes, utilitarian architecture and grim prospects as signature Belfast experiences. This cultural groundswell is spearheading a regeneration and healing that is palpable in both city and citizens.

“C’mon, I’ll take you around,” says young jewelry designer Garvan Traynor in the city’s peppy Cathedral Quarter, looking for distraction from a temporary but nasty spell of jeweller’s block. So I get an impromptu tour of the neighbourhood’s warren of restaurants, art galleries, shops, and finally the pubs. The youth who used to leave Belfast in droves are now lining up at joints like the traditional Duke of York (where a young Gerry Adams tended bar), or the nouveau-traditional John Hewitt (oddly named after the only Irish scribe who didn’t imbibe). Pint begets pints begets friends here. A night on the town yields a minimum of eight new pals, the population is so amiable.

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