Whiskey is a Food Group, Right?: Northern Ireland, Day 2

We woke up, feeling much closer to normal people after both going to bed and waking up at reasonable hours. Normal start or no, we decided to give breakfast a miss because our first and main activity of the day was a “Secret food tour of Belfast.” We don’t go in much for tours but this one tickled our fancy (with apologies to Sublime) so we took a chance. It turned out to be a yummy if slightly strange experience.

Our tour met at Belfast City Hall, a natural and obvious site in the middle of downtown. Our tour guide was pleasant enough, and it was a small group of 6, so our hopes for a good time rose quickly. Then, he proceeded to give us a good 15 minutes of general Belfast overview and all I could think was “does he think this is our one, single, 4 hour block of time in Belfast that we parachuted in for and will immediately exfiltrate via the river afterwards?” (Ok, that may be a reconstruction after I’ve had time to gather my thoughts, but you get the idea.) The food tour doesn’t need to go all 101 on all things Belfast. Especially since, upon doing the introduce-yourselves whip ’round it turned out that the other 4 people were 1) a local girl, 2) her boyfriend, 3) her brother who moved to Australia years ago where he met 4) his wife, so more than half the tour lived in the freaking city. Annnnyway, despite failing to read the room he still got on with it before too long. Honestly, the irritation might have had something to do with the whole skipping breakfast thing I mentioned at the top.

Our first stop was Jeffers, a bakery with deep historical roots in the city. The main take away from this first stop was that the recipes our grannies have passed down for soda bread are flat out garbage; the real thing is suuuuuper yummy. We had soda bread sandwiches with a healthy portion of bacon in them (full stop; why mess with something so good?) and were well-pleased. Then it was across the street to a fine foods-type shop called “Sawer’s” to sample some local cheeses, smoked salmon, and accompanying noshies. Bit of local lore – according to our tour-mates, everyone in town calls it “Sawyer’s” and are perpetually surprised when someone points out that the sign doesn’t have a “y” on it. Huh,

Our next stop was down the road to Belfast’s longest-continuously-operating bar, and if that sounds like a tortured description you can bet that other pubs in town split the hairs a different way to make their own longevity claims. In any case, it’s where the Presbyterians gathered in the late 1700s to plan their doomed rebellion. (We’ll talk more about the Presbyterians at a later date.) Why were we at a pub on a food tour? Why, to drink flights of whiskey and discover what was different about them of course! The look of utter bafflement on his poor Irish face was precious. No matter, I’ve been hanging out with drinkers all my adult life; besides, Lisa tried them because her disdain for spirits wasn’t going to go down well after my abstinence. I asked her which she preferred just now and she shook her head and said “I didn’t.” In our defense, it was a food tour. Anyhow, the next stop was also a pub, specially chosen because it was known to serve a lot of Guinness and, apparently, slows-selling Guinness leads to stale Guinness(?) so this was important. Guinness was downed (she liked that better) and then we had hearty portions of classic Irish stew. (What makes it “Irish”? Lamb, apparently.)

After a brief, perfunctory stop at a cheese shop to class things up a bit, we made our way to Sunflower, a bar that provided two oddities. First, it is the only bar in Belfast that still has the security cage at it’s front door, which served exactly the same purpose as a gatehouse always has – slows down potential attackers to keep the people inside safe. Yeah, Belfast was a special place in the middle-late 20th century. The second oddity was that they had Beamish on tap. What is Beamish? Well, in the words of the bartender it’s “Catholic beer.” Yep, Belfast. Anyway, Sunflower was a nice spot on the edge of Belfast’s gay district. (That sounds weird coming off the tongue, so to speak, but that’s the right term, right? Like, how else would you describe the Castro?) After Sunflower we finished up at the Dark Horse, which is where our header photo comes from. It’s a fancier pub, and a nice place to end up. We had our choice of whiskeys and/or Irish coffee. Again, the sign said “food tour”. Oh well, I had a coke and Lisa nursed an Irish coffee, and we had a lovely last bit of chat with the rest of the tourists before parting company. We had plans to do something else but were feeling kinda stuffed and and kinda tired, so we punted for the hotel and a quiet evening. Tomorrow’s agenda was loosey-goosey so we’ll just kick today’s plans down the road a bit. Cliffhanger again! How does he do it?!