A number of Northern Irish restaurants have been recognised in the top 100 across both sides of the border.
The Sunday Times has unveiled its definitive 'Top Ten Hottest Dining Rooms' list as part of its annual '100 Best Restaurants' list - the ultimate guide to eating out.
Compiled by renowned food critics John and Sally McKenna, this is their fourth decade covering the Hundred Best Restaurants in Ireland and their seventh edition with The Sunday Times.
Read more: Full list of winners from The Food Awards Northern Ireland 2023
12 spots from across Northern Ireland have been featured in this year's list, with two establishments featuring in the top ten.
Coming in at number four on the 'Top Ten Hottest Dining Rooms' was James Street in Belfast, followed not too far behind by Coleraine spot Lir at sixth.
Here is what The Sunday Times had to say about each establishment featured in the top 100:
James Street
In the reviewing game it’s considered bad manners to recommend a restaurant as a good place to order steak. So forgive us our trespasses as we dare suggest that you should order steak in James Street.
You have good choices — sirloin, fillet, chateaubriand to share, a mighty tomahawk weighing in at 1.2kg — and the executive head chef, Ryan Stringer, has the perfect technique and the perfect sauces to make an umami adventure to remember.
Stringer goes back to his Tyrone roots when it comes to steak: he hails from Dungannon and sources his meats from the peerless Lisdergan Butchery of Fintona.
The result is meat cookery of the highest standard, and if we suggest the crab and chilli linguine to start and the 70 per cent chocolate tart for dessert, you will have experienced the perfect meal. Twenty years old, and frisky as a pup, James Street is on top form.
Lir
Stevie and Rebekah McCarry have created a whole new piscine imaginarium in Lir.
After a long and tortuous journey in which they pivoted from restaurant to food cart to fishmongers to pierside seafood purveyors in Portstewart, they are back where they began, but now in a glam, glass box room overlooking the River Bann.
The cooking is strictly wild style: the squid snack, for example, comes as a bhaji. The john dory is transformed into a schnitzel. Monkfish and coley are transmuted into chorizo or lomo.
Always dreamt of a monkfish sausage roll? You can stop dreaming and go to Coleraine.
No one else attempts this wild reimagining of seafood, where the raw ingredients and the culinary context in which they are served are transformed into brilliantly avant garde creations.
Artis
Phelim O’Hagan’s restaurant is the culinary sun-toucher for the northwest. His cooking works because it is flavour-first.
A lot of technique is involved, from the 62-degree egg with maitake mushroom, leek and bacon to the jaw-dropping architecture of the hazelnut entremet.
But deep down everything is anchored to primary tastes, not least O’Hagan’s mashed potato with scallions — we would walk across the Peace Bridge on our hands for this alone. Every element of each dish is sinuously resolved and orchestrated.
And — get this — you can have a three-course lunch for £35, one of the best-value meals in Irish eating. The room is pretty and relaxed, service is just right, and Artis shows the Derry way of doing things, with charm and talent.
Flout!
Peter Thompson has owned the past 12 months in Irish food, which is pretty good going for a guy who describes himself as “a 44yo dad of two with a hedge for a haircut who wears crocs unironically”.
And not just any Crocs: pink Crocs! Flout!’s success has been viral.
You queue up outside the warehouse-style room in east Belfast, order your slice from the blackboard, sit on the benches with everyone else and, even before you have finished your Spicy Kings slice or your to-die-for “sourdough focash”, you find you are messaging your family and friends: “You have to try this!!!”
That’s what Flout! does: it hits home with narcotic accuracy, the irresistible meld of melted cheese and crisp, crunchy crust converting every customer.
Thompson experiments with a range of styles — Chicago deep dish, Detroit, New Jersey, New York Sicilian — so don’t expect the Neapolitan pizza school. But do expect to be blown away by some of the best Belfast cooking.
Frae
Shaun Tinman has done things his own way since opening Frae, which began as a tiny ground-floor daytime eatery in the middle of Holywood and then added an upstairs room and evening menus.
What has been consistent, however, is the stunning quality and distinctiveness of his cooking and the disruptive style of his presentation.
Frae’s single-page dinner menu offers dishes from jambons — the best jambons — all the way to a grand sirloin on the bone, which can happily feed three people; it is a freestyle deep-dive into unusual combos, such as potato rosti with cultured cream and smoked eel, or cured cod with clementine and turnip.
Part of Tinman’s secret is getting the details right: his fried spuds with caramelised garlic are ace, the Veda treacle tart one of the best around and those jambons with ham hock and Coolea cheese should not be missed.
Lynchpin
Chances are the good burghers of wealthy Holywood don’t reflect for long on the fact that Joe McGowan’s Lynchpin is a vegan restaurant, as they pile into this lean, unadorned room for breakfast and lunch.
But vegan food is what chef Ethan Jerrome serves and vegan dishes are what Holywood has taken to its bosom, big time.
Jerrome cooks Kiwi-style, so no meat pretenders, just clean and vivid flavours in dishes such as jerk oyster mushrooms with rice and peas, his signature sweet and sour cauliflower, or miso and Marmite-glazed tofu with homemade noodles.
Lynchpin has become a lynchpin of Holywood with its culinary trifecta: the food is top-class, the coffee is excellent and the service is always on the money.
The Muddlers Club
For lots of culinary professionals, Gareth McCaughey’s Muddlers Club is the first-choice destination in Belfast.
The name comes from a secret society that met here more than 200 years ago, and in many ways Muddlers still feels like a secret, tucked away in the backstreets — National Geographic called it a “gourmet geocache”.
This makes the impact of McCaughey’s cooking, and the handsome room with its superlative staff, seem even more commanding. McCaughey is a most intelligent cook and his style abstracts ingredients in the fashion of a painter: every plate a work of abstract impressionist art.
But the flavours are always locked in, adding depth of field to dishes such as beef with asparagus and wild garlic, or the brilliant mix of strawberry and rhubarb with sorrel. Best of all, this team have kept improving over the past eight years.
Noble
Noble is one of the foundational destinations of Holywood’s reputation as a food-lover’s mecca.
And it’s a sign of how much it is cherished that when Saul McConnell and Pearson Morris opened their newly liveried ground-floor wine bar late in 2022, you couldn’t even get into the room, never mind to a seat at the bar for food: Noble was mobbed. You face a similar struggle to secure a table upstairs.
Noble’s secret has been to cultivate steadily an audience who will return time after time to eat Morris’s adroit, classic cooking: parmesan arancini with mascarpone, Portavogie prawns with garlic butter, confit duck with savoy cabbage, a stonkingly fine pudding such as cheesecake with Eton mess ice cream or chocolate delice with pecan ice cream.
The crew are wonderfully welcoming and super charming.
Ox
Stephen Toman and Alain Kerloc’h have followed trailblazers including Nick Price, Michael Deane, Paul Rankin and Robbie Millar in writing a whole new chapter for Northern Irish cooking.
During Ox’s ten years, great talents have come to the kitchen and learnt well before moving on, meaning that Toman’s meticulous food has always been supercharged by the oxygen of new energy.
The dinner menus follow the conventional route of small tasting plates for the table. Toman conjures dishes like a magician: venison tartare with fermented turnip, wild sea bass with oyster emulsion, Skeaghanore duck with mead, rhubarb with white chocolate and jasmine.
The room is minimalist, the cooking maximalist, the service as good as it gets.
Scarpello & Co
Kemal Scarpello has the sourdough baker’s sixth sense: an innate ability to understand a fermenting dough and orchestrate it to deliver maximum deliciousness and goodness.
It explains why so many think Scarpello breads and pizzas have no peer.
But the attention to detail here is not only crust-deep: each pizza is finished with the mellifluous Cetrone olive oil, for example.
As if this distinguishing professionalism wasn’t enough, Scarpello have the secret sauce that is the great Donegal chef Derek Creagh firing out some of the best sweet dishes in the country.
We would walk here just to get a bourdaloue tart or a slice of the coffee, hazelnut praline and dark chocolate meringue.
Stock Kitchen
It’s the easiest menu pick in Ireland.
When you are in Danny Millar’s restaurant, upstairs from the storied St George’s Market, and the menu proposes whole market fish on the bone, roasted fish bone sauce, market vegetables and proper chips, there is only one way to go.
Millar will have sourced the fish and the vegetables from the market traders downstairs, then quietly added his own magic to the pristine fish, and the result is as good as eating gets.
Plus those proper chips: wow! Millar is a veteran of Northern Ireland kitchens, but he cooks with impish energy and persistent inquiry, aided by his spirited sous chef, Chris Kelly.
Of course, everything else on the menu is just as expertly finessed: the crubeens with green sauce, the rabbit ravioli, the signature scallops with brown butter. Lovely cooking, all of it.
Waterman
Niall McKenna’s Waterman has the buzz of a Paris bistro but that’s where the comparison ends, because Aaron McNeice’s cooking is on a different level from the food you would be served in a simple room in the French capital.
McNeice is one of the great young cooks, a guy who can turn out pasta like an Italian and deliver steak and chips as if he interned with Hawksmoor.
His cookery is flawless in dishes such as spaghetti with shellfish and spiced butter or mushroom ravioli, and he is sure-footed with plates as diverse as crispy squid with spiced sausage ragu and house gnocchi with parsnip and hazelnuts.
McKenna has been Belfast’s pre-eminent restaurateur for more than two decades, and in Waterman he has upped his game one more time, creating one of the defining Belfast experiences.
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