Edo, 3 Capital House, Upper Queen Street, Belfast BT1 6FB (028 9031 3054). Meal for two including wine and service, £60 to £90
A few hours before I ate at this week’s restaurant in Belfast, I stopped off at Hannan Meats, in Moira, 30 minutes’ drive southwest of the city. Last year their beef, aged in a room lined with glittering bricks of pink Himalayan salt, was named Supreme Champion in the Great Taste Awards for the second time. It’s a serious achievement, but not necessarily a surprising one to those of us who know their product.
I don’t know what impact salt ageing has. It may have a certain antibacterial effect, which reduces that hefty tang of putrefaction that long-aged beef can sometimes have. Perhaps it’s just hygroscopic, and reduces the water content more quickly. Whatever the reason, it’s seriously good. At Christmas the queue outside their onsite shop went twice round the building. Try it for yourself in any of Mark Hix’s restaurants in London or it’s available to buy at Fortnum & Mason.
The day I was there, Peter Hannan, a big-shouldered man who pelts you with words as if conversation is a game of paintball, was in the demonstration kitchen cooking various products for a pair of visiting chefs from Dublin. There was one of their bacon rib joints, finished for 14 days in a sugar pit. Cook for a couple of hours at around 140C – the sugar burns above 150C – and you end up with the last word in sweet-savoury, meaty joyousness. Oh the pearly, sticky fat and crackling. He ran about the kitchen, barking internal temperatures at the cook working the grill behind him, and discussing his latest experiments with ham hocks and sausages made with wet rather than dry ingredients.
The amount they are producing has expanded over the years, as has the number of restaurants nearby they are supplying. Indeed, I told him, he was heading towards cult status. It seems to be law now that any new restaurant opening in Northern Ireland has to have a Hannan Meats memorial section on the menu. It was there at Noble in Holywood, my last Northern Irish review, and at Bull and Ram, the one before that. It was there in the restaurant of the Europa Hotel where I was staying. Peter candidly admitted it was a problem. “But what can you do when they ask to be supplied by you?”
I told him I’d gone out of my way to find a place he wasn’t involved with this time, though I refused to name it. One of the issues with somewhere like Northern Ireland, which has a fast-developing restaurant sector, is the assumption in some quarters that it must be a certain thing: every dish must give us pipe and drum and champ and bacon. Give us food with an authentic local accent. To which I have to ask: why? No one wanders London or Manchester dismissing the latest killer Thai or Venetian opening for not celebrating locality. Why should anywhere else in the UK be any different?
Hence Edo, near the Europa in Belfast, run by chef Jonny Elliott, who has time on his CV with Rhodes and Ramsay. It sounds like a Japanese place, but the name is Latin for “I eat”. It therefore declares itself to be modern European. The room is certainly on trend. There is an open kitchen fringed by an eating counter inlaid with shiny bricks. There are banquettes the colour of burnt caramel and blue walls with Adidas stripes.
I scan the menu and notice something I hadn’t seen before: a section listing “salt-aged” steaks. I ask the waiter if Hannan supplies their meat. He says no. He comes back five minutes later. “Actually,” he says with a cheery grin. “I was wrong. We’ve just swapped all our meat to Hannan’s.” Oh balls.
The menu is a game of two halves. One side is dedicated to familiar tapas, and it’s fine. Not earth- shattering; not “sound the trumpets” good, but solid and reliable. Crispy squid with a chilli aïoli comes in a pleasingly chunky batter reminiscent of karaage, or Japanese fried chicken. There are pieces of pork belly, first slow cooked, then deep fried to crisp, and I’ll never complain about that. A cheery dish of beans stewed in a tomato sauce with chorizo and a fried egg on top provides perfect lubrication in the evening and would be an even better breakfast.
But the real reason for going there is listed on the other side of the menu under the word “Bertha”. It refers to their wood-fired oven, filled with logs of pear and apple tree alongside pieces of peat. Suddenly the sunny southern European restaurant becomes something darker and northern and, frankly, altogether better. A chunky cured ham hock for £15.50 has been slow roasted in that oven until it is sticky and falling apart. It comes with a celeriac purée that must have been whipped and passed and passed again until it is all velvet and silk. Around it are carrots, both roasted and pickled, along with toasted breadcrumbs. Here I was trying not to stereotype the food of Northern Ireland and then I’m served a brilliant bacon dish.
A salt-cured beef cheek has been for a long turn through Bertha until it, too, is falling apart. It is deep glazed and served on another brilliant purée, this time of cauliflower, alongside earthy pieces of both golden and red beetroot. Elsewhere on the menu there’s ox tongue with crushed new potatoes, and roast saddle of venison with red cabbage. They may serve plates of Iberico ham but here at Edo, in the depths of a Northern Irish winter, Bertha is your friend.
We head back south for dessert: for impeccable sugar-crusted churros, with a fingertip-coating chocolate sauce, and a polenta cake sodden with a thyme-infused orange syrup. We drink a sprightly Vinho Verde and mutter about the reasonable wine prices outside London. Here, below £25 is the norm. It’s a mark of Belfast’s vibrant restaurant sector that Edo, though open three months, was not a name that brought nods of recognition from my friends over there in the food business. It’s slightly under the radar, but deserves to be better known and doubtless, courtesy of its meat supplier, soon will be. The next day I receive a chirpy email from Peter Hannan. “I hope we fed you well,” he says, “wherever you dined.” Smart arse.
Jay’s news bites
Like Edo, Jun Tanaka’s London restaurant The Ninth also uses a Bertha indoor wood-fired or charcoal oven. Tanaka has experience in many classical kitchens, but this is more relaxed. Do not miss the freshly baked pitta or the oxtail croquettes to start. Salted beef cheek comes in an oxtail consommé and sea bream is chargrilled whole. Finish with a classic tarte tatin (theninthlondon.com).
Jacob Kenedy’s Cajun and Creole pub, Plaquemine Lock, in Islington is celebrating Mardi Gras on Sunday 18 February. There’s music from the brilliant Kansas Smitty’s Big Four and a charity auction hosted by Tracey Ullman. All profits to Serious Trust and the Food Chain. For tickets visit plaqueminelockmardigras.eventbrite.co.uk.
Closure watch. In Birmingham Turners at 69 has gone, while in London 8 Hoxton Square has ceased trading. The Galvin brothers have announced the closure of their much-loved (by me) Bistrot de Luxe, on Baker Street. They say they have plans to open other ventures soon.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
