IT takes a particular type of person to enjoy being in Belfast city centre this time of year. Probably the same type of person who would enjoy more than 10 per cent of the Christmas songs reverberating around all those shops you can’t budge in, or cheese on toast made with brown bread. Good luck to you, knock yourself out, but please leave me out of it.
Simply tolerating the annual December mania is difficult, especially when you’re the only one negotiating the footpath at an appropriate pace on the proper trajectory with due consideration for fellow foot traffic.
If I can serenely make my way around the Christmas Market outside the City Hall scoffing a currywurst and holding a paper plate of cod fritters in the other hand while looking at neither and keeping my eyes anywhere but the direction I’m going, why can’t everyone else? Other people, eh?
At times like this respite is needed and you don’t have to venture too far away from the middle of the city to find it. You also don’t have to compromise a demanding appetite.
One of three restaurants of chef Tony O’Neill’s Thornyhill group named for legends of Italian cycling, along with Coppi in that cursed city centre and Bartali in Portballintrae, Il Pirata on the Newtownards Road pays tribute to the late Marco Pantani, the bandana-clad, earring-wearing Tour de France and Giro d’Italia winner who died of a cocaine overdose in 2004 and was nicknamed Il Pirata – The Pirate.
While Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi were the stars of the first half the last century and Pantani the new kid on the block as it came to an end, Il Pirata is the senior member of the restaurant triumvirate. Opened in 2011 to immediate acclaim, five years later it remains an understatedly superb place for an Italian meal.
Wooden tables, mismatched plates, exposed lightbulbs and an industrial edge to the interior give it something that verges on a hipster aesthetic without ever tripping over into a face-full of beard.
The menus serve as placemats and offer a selection of Venetian-style cichetti – small plates that are also the centrepiece of Coppi’s menu – as well as pastas, risottos and mains you’d expect in any Italian restaurant. Whether you could expect any Italian restaurant to get just so much right as they manage at Il Pirata is another question.
The decision to fill the table with the smaller plates on offer proved wise. From the cichetti – priced £3.50 or £4 – there was polenta fritters, smoked hake baccala, fried duck ravioli and smoked chicken, with a starter of goat meatballs and a pizzetta – a mini pizza with salami, onion and pickled radicchio.
Those choices made the meal a sum of its parts – and every part of the equation delivered. All the dishes were good, they were very good, but in every case it was what followed the starring ingredient on the menu that elevated each plate to something better than very good. The roughly pureed baccala was balanced perfectly by the grassy, spiky salsa verde. The smoked chicken reached another level thanks to chopped hazelnuts. The pickled radicchio did the same for the pizza, as did the raisin and caper vinaigrette with the meatballs and the parmesan mayonnaise on the ravioli.
Best of all was the candied fennel, scattered through the deep fried crispy cubes of polenta along with goat’s cheese. A bowl of that and a few hazelnuts from the chicken would have done nicely for dessert, but that would have been a shame given the actual desserts on offer.
The amaretto panna cotta sat under winter fruit compote of black and redcurrants, blackberries and pear. Every spoonful allowed more of the fruit to fall into a crater in the scented cream, making every subsequent spoonful more enthusiastic than the last. The tiramisu is the sort you should order if you’re feeling particularly pleased with yourself, maybe for obviously being the only person who has the slightest idea what they’re doing on the mean streets of Belfast in the run-up to Christmas.
Eating the tiramisu will only make your sense of smug self-satisfaction worse. But in a really good way.
THE BILL
Hake baccala £3.50
Polenta fritters £4
Duck ravioli fritters £4
Smoked chicken £4
Goat meatballs £6
Salami pizzetta £6
Tiramisu £5
Panna cotta £5
Old Fashioned £8.50
Sparkling blood orange £2.50
Americano £2.75
Espresso £2
Total £53.25
Il Pirata, 279-281 Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast, 028 9067 3421 www.ilpirata.com
