The Bull & Ram, Dromore Street, Ballynahinch, County Down BT24 8AG
(028 9756 0908). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £90
The building that houses the dining room of the Bull & Ram, 30 minutes’ drive south of Belfast, was never likely to be a vegan café. Turning this Grade 1 listed Edwardian butcher’s shop into anything other than it now is would simply have been an opportunity missed. There is a chequerboard floor, and half tiling in shades of emerald.
There are garish paintings of prized livestock in the centre of the white walls, now discoloured by age to a something closing on ivory. Up above is the metal frame from which carcasses would once have hung. Close your eyes and inhale and you might imagine you can still smell the deep, sweet tones of raw rump and sirloin; the retail meat tang that I recall from my days as a butcher’s boy.
Chef Kelan McMichael, who has worked his way around Northern Ireland’s finest, has made sure that all the things happening in this handsome room are the good ones. To those of you struck by my unending warmth and positivity of late, and who are slightly bored by it, I can only sigh and shrug. Because this is another goodun. The Bull & Ram is a class act, without being flash about it.
That suits the location. Ballynahinch is a hard-working market town deep in farming country which does not look like it would tolerate swagger and ponce. Accordingly the furniture is utilitarian; the seating is made up of job lots of padded chairs of the sort that once surrounded dining room tables; the kind that were kept for best and never sat at.
Start with their own pork scratchings, here closer to the skin-only Mexican version than the fat-heavy Black Country style. The large pieces of dehydrated piggy hide are deep fried to order and arrive still warm, salted and a little oily, with a dish of apple sauce to dredge them through. There is a certain amount of menu name dropping. So it’s “John Lynch’s Irish mozzarella”, and the crab is from Kilkeel. Lucky crab. Lucky us.
Scallops Rockefeller is a sturdy classic executed with a light touch. The temptation is to pile the scallop under dunes of spinach and crumb, to make a spendy ingredient go further. Here it is a light brioche crust, with a small hillock of spinach underneath. There is the addition of impeccable dry-cured bacon, and lots of garlicky melted butter. We scrape at the shell and wonder out loud whether it would be OK to lift them up and run our tongues along the grooves to get to the best bits.
Saying that Northern Ireland has good produce is like pointing out that Hockney isn’t bad at the whole art thing. But the quality does shine through, especially in a lobster and crayfish cocktail, full of pertness and bounce. Here, the Marie Rose sauce has started hanging out in bad company and become a fiery Bloody Mary sauce. The usual ballast of iceberg has been spun through with a fine hand-cut guacamole, which turns it from texture to substance. The innovations are thoughtful rather than for their own sake.
The main-course section of the menu is dominated by a box offering various cuts from Hannan Meats over in Moira. Peter Hannan is a one-man PR machine for Northern Irish food culture. At base he is a processor, but oh what a process. Prime cuts from short horns raised on clovered hillsides are allowed to go longer before slaughter and then aged in a Himalayan salt lined room, full of pink bricks that shimmer and sparkle under the light. I’ll be honest. I have no idea what the salt does, and those who understand the science of these things have speculated to little effect. I imagine it can dry the air, which is good for ageing. Is it also mildly antibiotic, knocking out the sort of bugs that might lend a rancid edge to longer-aged beef? Thoughts, please.
I can tell you his beef is – and this is a technical term – tear-inducingly bloody lovely. Recently it won top prize at the Great Taste Awards, which are judged blind. In London it is available retail at Fortnum & Mason; Mark Hix also serves it at his restaurants. Here, there’s a choice between 28-day and 40-day aged ribeye and sirloin, with the latter at £24.95 for 300g. There’s also a daily menu at £18.95 for three courses, and a Sunday lunch at £15.95 featuring meat that’s more mature than I am.
The 40-day aged sirloin is about as good a piece of meat as you are ever likely to find, full of depth and intensity and care. Mind you, the accompanying bone marrow gravy, as deep and satisfying as a Jonathan Franzen novel only with more narrative, would make anything dipped in it delicious, even, say, Michael Gove. Beef dripping chips taste like the queue for Whitby’s Magpie Café. It’s all rendered animal and largesse.
A rib platter is three hunks of slow-cooked meat, slathered in a deep, dark sauce that lets sugars wrestle with vinegars in equal combat. The lamb comes from an animal that tastes like it’s seen enough winters to join the grown-ups. The beef and the pork are cuts that once were on nodding terms with a bone, but now stand four square on the plate, that perfect mix of fibrous meat and jellied fat and a glorious dark stickiness. There are sides of sweet potatoes roasted with chilli, of a crunchy slaw and springy greens treated sensitively. A small note: I have seen pictures online of all this served on a dreaded board at the Bull & Ram. I got mine on a plate, which strikes me as a terribly good idea. Plates are brilliant.
Naturally, there is a sticky toffee pudding to finish, alongside rum and raisin ice cream. It needs to be broken up and allowed to wallow in the sauce for a few minutes to become properly sodden and shameless. Gingerbread, with the salty tang of bicarb, finishes off both the meal and, frankly, us. This is food for cold nights and roaring fires; for sofa comas, and waking up with a jolt to something on the telly you don’t want to watch and the sweet breathy memory of perfect grilled and glazed meats. It’s worth noting that the day we went was the start of McMichael’s first holiday since opening in June. We wouldn’t have known had we not been told. They know what they’re doing here. And what they’re doing is an utter joy.
Jay’s news bites
■ When I first reviewed Blacklock in London’s Soho, I whinged about the lack of chips. They rectified that and, just as at the Bull & Ram, fry them in beef dripping. As the proposition here is the best cuts of meat, grilled, it makes sense. There are skinny chops, from animals many and various, and big chops. The most appealing offer is the ‘All-in’, a selection of skinnies to share at £20 per person (theblacklock.com).
■ Latest crowd-funder news: the rather marvellous chef and writer Rowley Leigh – his parmesan custard with anchovy toast is a classic - is looking for money to back the publication of a collection of his newspaper food writing and recipes. Search for ‘A Long and Messy Business’ at unbound.com.
■ A bunch of restaurants in London’s Hackney – including Ellory, The Richmond, Clutch and Frizzante – are adding a solidarity tax to their menu to support local food charities, like the Spitalfields Crypt Trust and the Hackney Migrant Centre. The optional payment will go either on menu items or the whole bill.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
