The Focacceria,
Upstairs, House Proud Furniture,
52 Boucher Road,
Belfast,
BT12 6HR
077 8870 9854
instagram.com/focacceria_the
It’s not unreasonable, as you sit amid the wardrobes and double divans, to consider just how you’ve come to be faced with some of the best chips you’ve ever tasted in a life that’s featured more than its fair share of chips.
And it wasn’t just by negotiating your way past the corner suites and TV units to make it up the stairs of House Proud’s furniture showroom on the Boucher Road in Belfast.
That’s where you’ll find The Focacceria, and you’re faced with those chips, as well as pizza and Italian-inspired sandwiches, because Ciarán McLarnon and his Hundredth Monkey Bakery has ended up there.
His story, or the start of it anyway, is a familiar one: Lockdown leads to sourdough. Beginning in his kitchen in Glasgow while furloughed from his job during Covid the self-taught McLarnon outgrew his domestic set-up and relocated to a shared production space in the city.
After moving home to Belfast a couple of years ago he found a base in a kitchen unit in the sprawling Boucher commercial area and did pop-ups, classes and demonstrations in various spots.
Then, at the end of February this year, he found out that his kitchen, based in shipping container, was being removed about a week later.
A video on social media outlining his situation and what he’d need to keep going was seen by House Proud, whose nearby shop had just lost its cafe operator. So a deal was struck to move in and, in May, The Focacceria opened its doors.
The space itself is like any cafe or restaurant you’d find in any big retail space. You’re not going for the ambiance. But you’re probably not going for just a sideboard either because wherever The Focacceria would find itself, it would be a destination spot.
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The sandwiches are made with schiacciata, a thinner, Tuscan variant of focaccia that’s better suited to being generously filled, and it comes out like glistening dust jackets housing blockbuster page-turners you can’t put down – or barely lift, because these are weighty tomes. But even with that, the quality outweighs the quantity.
The bread itself is cratered on top and shot through with bubbles, but held together with the fantastic chew that only comes from being made by someone who really knows what they’re doing.
All this would be good enough by itself, but once you get inside you’re met more simply fantastic stuff.
There are gloriously blush pink rare slices of roast beef with a bright, soft ricotta. A rubble of quality meatballs comes topped with a rich tomato sauce and fresh fior de latte cheese, with more excellent cheese pulling together the chicken parmesan sandwich – a whopper of a piece of poultry wrapped in a percussively crunchy breadcrumb blanket, with another slick of that sauce. As good as the classic combination would be, the chance to add a smear of nduja, the addictive fiery spreadable Calabrian pork sausage that improves everything it touches, was never going to be passed up.
A super square of Roman-style pizza, just a toothsome sourdough base, tomato cheese and basil, is a fine way to spend a fiver, which is also how much the considerable portion of garlic butter fries will set you back. The way McLarnon describes how he makes them tells you everything you need to know about why his stuff is as good as it is.
They’re treated first like baked potatoes then cut into wedges, dried and chilled over the course of a couple of days to drive out moisture and intensify their inherent spud-ness.
What emerges is every stop on a colour wheel from shimmering gold to the deep ochre of the skins that crackle and cling on to the edge of the burnished flesh, with craggy-edged nooks and crannies absolutely everywhere.
If you don’t fancy them dripping in garlic butter – seriously, what’s your problem? – they’re a pound less, but whatever way they come, just the sight of them may find you needing to sit down for a minute. That corner suite may come in handy after all.
The bill
- Nduja chicken parmesan sandwich £12
- Roast beef and ricotta sandwich £10
- Meatball sandwich £10
- Pizza slice £5
- Garlic butter fries £5
- Fries £4
