OX Belfast: Civilian review.

Link to CIVILIAN.

MAY 4, 2013

Review: Ox, Belfast

Paris-based food writer Trish Deseine returns home and finds the shoots and leaves of a new Belfast dining scene

It would be easy, after nearly 30 years in Paris, to apply Parisian standards to the menus in Belfast’s cafés, bistros and brasseries, and scoff – and not in a good way. They’re just not doing it properly, you see. Serve good coffee then spike it with banana syrup? Thai green curry with chips? Cajun wraps and garlic potatoes everywhere else? I could, tutting like the starchiest of the growing breed of food “experts”, lament the impending, inevitable obliteration of palates reared on the plainest of produce – beef, lamb, root veg, pasteurised dairy – by their apparent desire for shockingly “inauthentic” food which assails and anaesthetises tastebuds in a deluge of heat, salt and fat.

Food and music. Irish Examiner, 13th April.

Joe McNamee from the Irish Examiner interviews me and chefs Jess Murphy, Mike Hanrahan and Michael Quinn about how we mix music with our food.

other walls, Belfast.

Eiffel Love.

You might not feel the same way about the Eiffel Tower as this person does. (Is it over yet, I wonder? Someone needs to check in on her.) But if you fancy snapping this amazing view (and apologies for my enormous, fuzzy iphone pics)

the newly refurbished Hotel Marignan has a couple of suites which will make photographers very happy indeed, on a clear day.

Cookbooks for free?

I was over the moon yesterday to discover two new books, one by Irish author Anna Burns,  ”The Food Nanny” , offering direct, pragmatic advice to how to feed children more healthily. Even more exciting to me (as now I can stop obsessing about writing something similar myself, as if I were remotely the right person for the job) was the discovery of this book,  by Gill Holcombe, available completely free on her publisher’s website. 

Hopefully there will be more of this real life food, coming from real people. I’d love to see Irish blogger, broadcaster and active community volunteer, Catriona Redmond published, for example.