The Old Inn,
15-25 Main Street,
Crawfordsburn,
Co Down,
BT19 1JH.
028 9185 3255
[ theoldinn.comOpens in new window ]
THE Old Inn in Crawfordsburn is, you'll be stunned to discover, old.
Some part of it has sat on the north Down village's pretty main street for more than 400 years.
Just how much of it goes back that far isn't entirely clear but given that 'old' sells, particularly to tourists, there's no surprise to see places like this lean into their longevity, even if the coaching inn established here in 1614 may not have been dishing out pints and bags of cheese and onion non-stop since.
But while 'old' might sell, if you're not a castle or a pile of stones and you want people to stay, eat and drink, there needs to be a bit of the new thrown in.
After the Galgorm Collection, owners of the Galgorm Resort among others, bought the hotel last year they set about a £1 million renovation, reopening in September, and are still sprucing up the place with a tree-top spa and refurbished rooms and all the mod cons Peter the Great (please be telling the truth, internet) would be raging he missed out on back when he came to visit.
It's not clear how much of the revamp extended to the huge restaurant dining room which, while bright and pleasant enough, feels stuck somewhere between the 17th century and the 21st.
We're here for an early dinner equally in limbo. It's 5pm and, as the actual dinner menu doesn't begin for an hour, we've got lunch choices, but that's no bad thing. While there is a smaller selection of starters and mains than you get at dinner, lunch offers some of the best of both the restaurant and the next-door pub offerings.
So you can have blow-torched mackerel with pickled fennel and grapes and you can also have pie and mash, which are exactly the sort of options life in general should provide.
Today the pie is lamb and is restraint itself. A dome of flawless pastry is filled with falling-apart meat and chunks of carrot. Mash and a little pot of deep, dark gravy come next to it. Nothing else is required.
Though there obviously is something else.
From the restaurant side of things, the chicken terrine is mostly a lovely thing. It's properly seasoned - never a given with this sort of thing - but let down by patches of black pudding that should only be a positive - it is black pudding after all. Instead those bits of blood sausage are too dry and drag everything down just a little. It's still tasty - there's the air of a Sunday roast and it's enlivened by some fine piccalilli - but it could be better.
There are no such problems with the arancini - one of the light bite interlopers from the bar/lunch menu. Hot, crisp risotto balls ooze with goats cheese and tomato and are much more than a light bite for £5.80.
A main course of duck breast is a solidly pleasing plate of bistro, or indeed very good hotel restaurant, food, with knobbly bits of crisp gnocchi and irony chard. Apparently there's passion fruit in the jus, but it's lost on us. It's just an excellent port sauce, which is good in itself.
Service is friendly and efficient, though one dose of the modern - the menu on an iPad that's loaded up with the website - is a step in the wrong direction.
No doubt this was a Covid innovation, but having to pass the tablet across the table and navigate between drinks and food is a pain.
The desserts are a much more successful combination of old and new, and round things off as they deserve to be. In a good way.
Ordinarily, messing around with a treacle tart is a suspicious activity. If it ain't broke, don't break it. But the addition of Guinness brings a ferrous tang to hold back the sweetness, and make you feel better about the excellent custard under it and vanilla ice cream on top of it.
Things are a bit more spiky across the table, with a ginger and lime cake, honey mascarpone and a ginger 'cream' that probably wasn't made by pureeing a popular dunking biscuit, but certainly tasted like it. And that sort of thing will never get old.
THE BILL
Chicken and black pudding terrine £8.90
Arancini £5.80
Pie and mash £15
Duck breast £24.70
Treacle tart £7
Ginger and lime cake £7.50
New York Sour £10.45
Watermelon Fizz £4.25
Total £83.60
