Jay Rayner 

Restaurant review: James Street South Bar and Grill, Belfast

Jay Rayner's last trip to Belfast went badly wrong, but a new bar and grill has tempted him back across the water
  
  

The Bar and Grill 21 James Street South Belfast
Grilling stuff: the Bar + Grill’s simple interior. Photograph: Paul Mcerlane for the Observer Photograph: Paul Mcerlane/Observer

21 James Street South, Belfast (028 9560 0700). Meal for two, including wine and service, £100

You can eat well in Belfast. You can also eat badly. I've done both. As a result I can tell you that eating badly in Belfast really sucks. The last time I was there, in October, something went wrong. It may have been my judgment, but I'm pretty sure it was the restaurant. Made in Belfast was that special kind of shabby which makes you want to kick cats, write angst-ridden letters to Reader's Digest and shake your fists at the sky shouting, "Why, God? Why?" even when you're a head-banging atheist who knows there is no God. What struck me was how publication of the review was met by volumes of fist waving at the heavens from the people who live there. Or at least from the people who live there who are on Twitter. There was a collective howl. Clothes were electronically rent. A few cats may have been kicked, albeit digitally.

There was little malice in it. Most people understood that I'd tried to do my homework but had got it wrong. So they peppered me with recommendations and hand-tooled eulogies to the restaurants in Belfast they most loved. And it quickly became apparent there were a lot of them, or at least enough. Compared to many cities I visit it really does have stuff going on. I despair of, say, Manchester and Leeds, which are plump with cash and eyebrow-threading bars and tanning shops, but can't support more than a few good places in which to eat.

And then I find myself sitting in the James Street South Bar + Grill on a quiet Sunday night, thinking: why the hell doesn't every city in the country have a place like this? Not overwrought. Not trying to innovate by putting another tine on the fork or offering up sharing-plate menus of Scandinavian-Mongol fusion kebab wraps. Just a bunch of stuff you want to eat, in a handsome-looking room. I need to keep this in perspective. The Bar + Grill is not the second coming. Nothing – other than the burnt Alaska – makes this the kind of place to write prose poems about. But it does get so many simple things right, when so many other places complicate them.

A pork rillette was dense and savoury. The toast in the crab dish was a little flimsy – they could do with making it more robust – but the crabmeat had been properly picked and was as fresh and bracing as you would hope in a city so close to the sea. A main course of beef short rib had spent Sunday loitering in the oven and came with a proper old-school French jus of the sort that makes your lips sticky.

Then there were the grills. They have installed the latest must-have kitchen toy, a Josper grill, which is the sort of charcoal gadget that men with sheds like to stand around and point at. It's one thing to have one, quite another to know how to use it, but they do. A rib-eye had a serious char and came with proper chips and a glossy, tart béarnaise sauce. It was served on a wooden board which I know makes the kind of people who hate the words "crispy" and "gastropub" shake their heads and mutter: "So jejune." Me? I couldn't give a toss. A wooden board may be a pose, but it does the job (unlike slate). And given how hard it is to eat well in so many parts of this country I'm not going to complain about the wood thing when, as here, the steak thing is done so well.

Desserts are worth ordering whether you have space or not: a sticky toffee sundae was the spongy bit of the pudding shoved into a coupe glass, drenched in caramel sauce and weighed down with vanilla ice cream. That burnt Alaska was a glory and a wonder, down to the sponge, jam and soft, burnished peaks. Try it. There's a well-thought-out wine list with lots of choice below £25, including a cracking Bordeaux – a soft round Chateau MyLord – which I'd never met before but will look out for again. Prices overall are reasonable and service cheery and unintrusive.

Is any of this radical? Absolutely not, and thank God for it. It's just good. That's rare enough.


Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place

 

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