The Ivy Belfast Brasserie
Cleaver House,
56 Donegall Place,
Belfast,
BT1 5BB
028 9568 0074
ivycollection.com/restaurants/the-ivy-belfast-brasserie
The buzz – can you feel it? To be fair, it’s hard not to. There haven’t been many restaurant openings in the city accompanied by as much hoopla as The Ivy Belfast Brasserie’s arrival in the stately listed Cleaver House building across from city hall.
The launch came amid a whir of Irish dancers and the involvement of a roller-skating flash mob. The opening came with bookings snapped up at breakneck speed and talk of weekend tables being out of the question until some time after Casement Park gets built. But such is hype.
That’s not to say there’s not actual buzz, because there absolutely is.
Even in the peculiar no-man’s land between a late lunch and early dinner on a Wednesday afternoon, the place is heaving.
Every time you poke your head around another corner or curve of the massive space, there’s another huge burnt orange or botanical print banquette or cluster of chairs, every space seemingly taken.
You can feel the buzz rustling through the foliage and bouncing off the shiny, sharp art deco edges that evoke the original Ivy, the West End haunt of London celebrity life, repackaged and spun off into a chain of brasseries that number more than 30 across Britain with another in Dublin and now one in Belfast.
Whether whatever passes for the glitterati of the north make this the place to be seen remains to be seen, but you’ll at least feel treated like a star by its best feature. From the staff at the door with a greeting as bright as their mustard and floral fuchsia blazers to the friendly, unobtrusive, genuinely helpful waiters and waitresses in their snooker-table green waistcoats, the service is fantastic from start to finish. The food, on the other hand, isn’t. Not even close.
For all the shimmer and pizzazz of the place, what arrives on the plates is remarkably forgettable.
None of it is particularly bad, but it’s almost all decidedly meh.
The duck salad, a mixture of not-all-that crispy meat, watermelon, cashew nuts, mooli and a vaguely Asian dressing just feels like a lot of stuff, none of which is doing anything special.
A beef tartare would be lovely if it wasn’t utterly overwhelmed by the Tabasco mustard dressing that’s been mixed through it. The soft egg yolk on top calms it down enough to make it a perfectly decent thing to spread on toast but doesn’t help it taste much of beef.
Like the salad, the shepherd’s pie is pointed out on the menu as an Ivy classic. It’s certainly much better than the duck, with the mixture of beef and lamb packing some good flavour under a decent mash. But ‘classic’? Casablanca it is not.
The mash that comes with a whopping fillet of sea bass – portions are generous and prices, for the most part, are more than competitive – is better than the one on the shepherd’s pie, and the fish is well-cooked with some lovely little brown shrimps and samphire scattered over it. But the white wine veloute tastes of so little it may as well be transparent.
A side of creamed spinach could do with being looser but is tasty enough if you avoid the brutally salty pangrattato, pine nut and parmesan topping sitting on it.
A white chocolate mousse – a squirt of sweet, thick cream, some raspberries, nibs of pistachio and shards of chocolate – feels like barely a dessert at all. It tastes absolutely fine but the lack of imagination – clearly something entrenched a long way from this kitchen in Belfast – is overwhelming.
The point of a chain, whether it’s the Ivy Collection or Burger King, which used to occupy some of the space here, is that you will get exactly the same in Brighton, Bristol or Belfast. But you can still do it better than this, and in some spots the Ivy does.
The rum baba is lovely, the shot of booze added at the table by another faultlessly cheery server joining a sopping, bready sponge, properly saturated and just right with a sweet cream and some more of those absolutely perfect raspberries.
It’s not reinventing anything, but it at least puts a smile on your face, as do the superbly made cocktails, as do the blazered beaming cheerios at the door on the way out. If only more of The Ivy’s food did the same.
The bill
- Two-course 1917 menu with dessert and supplement £29.12
- Steak tartare £12.95
- Shepherd’s pie £16.95
- Creamed spinach £5.50
- Rum Baba £10.50
- Ginger and honey Margarita £13
- The Ivy Iced Tea £10
Total £98.02
