Mourne Seafood Bar,
34-36 Bank Street,
Belfast,
BT1 1HL
028 9024 8544
A REVIEW of Mourne Seafood Bar in Belfast was always intended to run this week. In an often forlorn effort to be organised, I'll visit places for this fortnightly contribution to your bumper Irish News Weekend package as soon as the notion takes me, hopefully getting ahead of the game to make sure there's no last-minute panic to find somewhere to then pontificate about it.
With that in mind, the restaurant in the city centre's Bank Square was visited nearly a month ago, a couple of days after the Twelfth, which you could tell, as it was almost entirely populated by tourists.
Another way you could tell we were smack-bang in the middle of July was that the incessant rain didn't stop from starter to dessert and well beyond.
Less than two weeks later, The Shack – Mourne Seafood's excellent outdoor eating space – was destroyed in a fire. A man has appeared in court to deny a charge of arson.
However the case is resolved, the end result for the restaurant is the same. Thousands of pounds worth of damage and thousands more in lost revenue at the height of summer.
Life's tough enough for the hospitality sector – something Mourne Seafood owner Bob McCoubrey has consistently and resolutely banged the drum about – without things you could never plan for coming along and delivering a kick in the teeth like this.
So, if you can afford it, visiting and supporting restaurants who need it, in whatever circumstances, can only be a good thing.
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This review wasn't planned as a show of support but rather the record of an overdue return to one of the city's genuine dining institutions, opened as it was by McCoubrey and chef and business partner Andy Rea in 2006, a year after McCoubrey launched the original in the shadow of the Mournes in Dundrum.
From the off, the place feels the same as it always has. The seafood shop in the window is getting ready to be restocked for the morning, and the long banquette that stretches to the back of place, facing a bar on the other side with some tables in between, gives it the feel of a cosy pub, offering protection from the weather battering at the windows.
With that in mind, it's no surprise the cocktails are on point, as, it seems, are the pristine pints of Guinness hitting just about every other table regardless of whether platters of just-as-perfect-looking oysters are arriving, too.
Much to my chagrin, I've fallen out with these briny delights over the past couple of years, but thankfully there's plenty more goodies where they came from.
First, a generous bowl of whitebait, with the merest hint of a crisped-up dusting of flour, the whole little fish as moreish as a bag of Tayto, with some lemon mayonnaise for lubrication.
Across the way comes a £9 pot of mussels, which takes an age to get through and leaves a light cream of fennel and white wine to pitch lumps over crusty bread overboard into.
The deep fishiness of what's left in the bottom of the pot is what people come to Mourne Seafood Bar for, and there's more of it in the coral shellfish cream blanketing half a lobster, its sweet rich meat sharing its bed of shell with plump prawns. Hot crisp, bang-on chips end up swimming in that cream and having the time of their lives.
But as lovely as all that was, it has to admit honourable defeat to the star of the show: two huge cobblestones of roasted, shimmering white monkfish. They came dusted in spice, on top of fiery Bombay potatoes and char-edged cauliflower, with a sweet korma sauce, shards of toasted coconut and shattering poppadoms, and it went in double-quick time. Truly a plate of food to make a special journey for.
In truth, desserts felt a bit 'after the lord mayor's show'. A chocolate fondant, a panna cotta, a sticky toffee pudding, some sorbets or a cheese plate didn't jump off the page, and while the toffee pudding was a solid example of the staple, the coconut sorbet was a long way ahead of its icy blackcurrant and blood oranges mates in the bowl.
But that's nitpicking, and anyway, it's probably my own fault. I should have ordered more of that monkfish for dessert.
THE BILL
- Whitebait £6
- Mussels £9
- Half lobster £27
- Roast curried monkfish £23
- Sorbets £6
- Sticky toffee pudding £7
- Pear Necessities cocktail x2 £19
- Caught in the Rain non-alcoholic cocktail £4.50
- Elderflower tonic £2.75
