Noble, 27a Church Road, Holywood, County Down BT18 9BU (028 9042 5655). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £90
It’s one of those midsummer’s evenings in Northern Ireland when dusk lingers, as if ambivalent to the concept of night ever falling. The roads are shower slicked and the verges smell of earth and damp and the deepest green. We are in Holywood, the tidy commuter town just outside Belfast, and from an upstairs window overlooking the shopping parade comes the music of happy people lost in their chatter. Let that be your guide, because you’re unlikely to spot Noble otherwise. It is marked only by a street-level doorway; that, and some stupendous cooking.
It’s worth defining “stupendous” here, because few of the dish descriptions will make you sit up and dribble. There are no wheels being reinvented. It’s all so much better than that. They are setting out to feed you in as classy and tasteful a way as possible, making as much as they can of the cracking ingredients in their reach.
Ah yes, the fetishisation of the local. Various bits of the United Kingdom do like to holler about the food on their doorstep, a proxy for clumsy regionalism. They do so using words like “bounty” and “fare”, which should be banned. Northern Ireland can be forgiven for this, because a fascination with food beats other historical fascinations. The generation who came to adulthood post the Good Friday Agreement craves normality. Nothing is more normal than the pursuit of a good dinner. Politics often stinks in these parts. Food always smells good. And so Northern Ireland feverishly reinvents a local food culture in the way 18-year-olds reinvent sex; as if nobody had ever thought of it before, and with an equally compelling wide-eyed pleasure.
The restaurant sector is also reaching a maturity which has enabled its own diaspora. For a long time if you discussed Belfast restaurants you would bow the head to those belonging to Lisburn-born Michael Deane, and rightly so. After a career in London he came home in 1993 and built an empire. Saul McConnell, who runs front of house at Noble as if it’s his living room and he’s pleased to see you in it, worked with Deane, as did chef Pearson Morris.
For their location they have escaped to the well-to-do suburbs and this upstairs space, with blue banquettes, textured walls in earthy shades and a blackboard for the scribbling of specials. There are puffy pork scratchings with apple sauce and glossy olives, wet with brine, to nibble on while you choose. There are their own rolls made with Guinness. Mostly there is the sense that everything in here will be OK.
The closest thing to innovation is a brisk salad of picked white crab with peanuts, ginger, chilli and coriander. It’s fresh and sweet and salty and invigorating. By contrast a pea soup flavoured with mint, the lactic push of buttermilk and the high notes of spring onions, is soothing and hearty. It is soup made by someone who understands that it’s not just a way of using up ingredients on the turn, but a place for vegetables to give the best of themselves.
There are crubeens, those deep-fried discs of piginess. Traditionally these are made with long-cooked trotters, but the meatiness suggests that primer cuts are involved. What makes them sing is the thick dollop of Savora mustard, which has gastronomic credibility because it’s French. In reality it’s a mass-market brand there, little different to slutty old French’s. It does the job beautifully.
There are two specials. The first is a risotto, and it isn’t flavoured with seafood or wild garlic or Paco Rabanne or desiccated kitten. It is the thing that few restaurants would have the confidence to make, because they don’t know how: it’s a classic white risotto. That’s rice, wine, stock, parmesan. This is the cult of the simple. It’s one of those bowls you stare into while emptying it until it is all gone and you are staring, mournfully, at porcelain and wishing for the return of the minute before last. It is £6.50 of pleasure.
The other special is six langoustine from just off the nearby coast for £12. In many parts of Britain you’d pay this retail, for creatures this size. They are roasted in thick puddles of garlic butter. The only criticism is the lack of tools to get through the carapace.
The joy continues with the mains, which all benefit from the liberal application of butter, and rightly so. The butter round here ought to be at the heart of its own religion and is now at the heart of mine. Get hold of some Abernethy, with its dense creaminess, and softness and salt. It’s the butter of your dreams or, at the very least, your hopes. Sauces are mounted with butter, meats roasted in it. Even the seared hispi cabbage is a different creature here. The edges of the leaves are smoky, but at the heart there is something altogether more luscious and, well, buttery. A hunk of turbot, glazed and golden, comes with roasted spring onions, peas and crisp bacon that shatters on the fork. There is roast chicken, with salty crisp skin, lubricated with a sweet, dense carrot purée.
Yet again, Peter Hannan supplies the meats, aged in his salt-lined room, as if serving his product is the law in Northern Irish restaurants of ambition. I’m not complaining; not for the rib-eye, and especially not for the aged lamb. We don’t think about ageing lamb. We should. It becomes a more serious, intense version of itself. The chips are cooked in dripping. Does this not close the deal? I hope so. Starters are £6 or £7, with mains in the teens and a glass of matching wine at £7. (Further up the list bottles are on offer for less than you would pay retail in London.)
Desserts are detailed pieces of indulgence: a picture-book slice of frangipane tart, raspberries peeking shyly through the burnished almond surface; a carrot cake, thickly frosted in all the right places; a smooth parfait dotted with peaks of meringue. As it began so it ends, with a quiet emphasis on doing things right rather than trying to show off. I don’t know where the name of this restaurant came from because I didn’t think to ask. I was too busy enjoying dinner. I find it hard to imagine such modest chaps are bigging themselves up. But you know what, they’re right. Everything they’re doing here really is noble.
Jay’s news bites
A Northern Ireland trip is the perfect excuse to mention again the marvellous Bull and Ram in Ballynahinch, half an hour’s drive outside Belfast. Chef Kelan McMichael does big, gutsy things with big, gutsy ingredients, including, of course, more of Peter Hannan’s salt-aged beef. There are scallops Rockefeller, lobster and crayfish cocktails in a Bloody Mary sauce, and a sticky toffee pudding that will demand you take the rest of the day off (bullandram.com).
It’s 25 June which means one thing: it’s six months until Christmas Day. Time to plan ahead. Here to help are Harvester, who have just posted their tinsel-strewn menus. This year, as well as roast turkey, mains include the Harvester’s Festive Full Rack of Ribs. The festive bit is the cranberry BBQ sauce. God, I feel Christmassy.
One to plunge the seasonal food lobby into a depression: the delicious anticipation around Jersey Royals is no more. Or as M&S says about their new frozen Jersey Royals product: ‘No need to wait.’ Some of us rather the enjoyed waiting.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
