Dinner of the Year Justifies £500 Outlay

Award winning travel writer John Trew travels 244 miles for 'meal of the year'

It’s not often I make the round trip of 244 miles from North Down to West Fermanagh in wintery weather – just for something to eat. Was it worth it? Yes, it turned out to be the Meal (or even, in this case, McMeel) of the Year. Not only that, but I watched a Feat of Clay at the Belleek Pottery which deserves its global reputation as one of Northern Ireland’s most enduring tourism assets.

It all started with a note that dropped into my email making an offer that I did not care to refuse. Lough Erne Golf Resort was offering a FREE Taste of Monday seven-course Dinner tasting menu if you reserved accommodation which included Monday, a notoriously slow night for country hotels.

So I booked a couple of nights in a Lakeview twin room for Karen and I. Surprise, surprise! Our break coincided with a mass decision of grans and grandads to cash in the Winter Break Vouchers they had been given by their generous families at Christmas. The car-park was therefore full of granny cars from Dundalk to Galway and we had to haul our bags through the slush for ages in the dark. Also, our so-called lake view of Lough Castle Hume was partially obscured by a huge concrete architectural feature that intruded in the same way as those awful pillars in the Grand Opera House.

I mention these irritants because the five-star Erne Resort is not cheap, even in mid-winter; our stay was priced at £220 a night B&B, that’s a total of £440, with the one night’s £58pp Tasting Menu complimentary. On the Sunday night we each also had a one-course steak dinner in Blaney’s Bar, gushingly described by the Resort’s marketing people as “one of Ireland’s most unique bars…with eclectic Grazing Menu”. That brought our total spend up to £500 – much the same price I saw around the same time for a Deal covering a whole week’s B&B for two in a sunny Tenerife hotel, including flight direct from Belfast. Yet that £500 was justified in the end by the excellence of what turned out to be our Meal of the Year.

Also, I do not mean to be otherwise negative about the resort, because our stay was generally great, with superlative food, excellent service from a cosmopolitan staff, plus good old-fashioned standards of comfort and generosity of space that city hotels no longer seem to offer. The fluffy Egyptian Cotton bath sheets were even better than the ones I have written about following Press Visits to the Ritz Carlton in Cannes (€1,600 a night) and Mandarin Oriental, Macau( £750pp).

An air of quiet excellence against a noisy background

I DO NOT know who now owns the Lough Erne Golf Resort and Thai Spa (to give it its full name). I just hope Trump never gets his hands on it, as I have already had to boycott my old favourite golf hotel, Turnberry, since he took over and stuck his name onto a venerable Scottish institution.
One thing is for sure – nobody can never put as much devotion into the Enniskillen resort as the original local owner/developers, Jim and Eileen Rose Treacy who launched it to global acclaim in 2007. That’s when I first stood in awe of the magnitude of their vision: I wrote here that it was like “ a Florida resort being transposed from a flat desert to a lush green lakeland with mountains”. Karen and I used to love staying in classy Florida resort hotels like Miami’s Doral, Saddlebrook and, best of all, the Radisson Sanibel Island Gateway, where no member of the Trew family has ever paid for accommodation thanks to the daily Prize Draw which my brother and I won by coincidence,two years apart!

I last interviewed the Treacys together at the hotel 10 years ago when their dream of creating Northern Ireland’s greatest leisure resort was coming to fruition. At last, their £30 million investment had started paying off after a decade of hard work and 24/7 commitment from them both. Sadly, the financial crisis led to their bank calling in the company’s development debts in 2011 and it fell into administration, subsequently being bought and sold by bargain-hunting investment companies.

All of this background noise has never seemed to have affected the guests enjoying the amazing Afternoon Tea, nor the ladies steaming off a brilliant breakfast in Ireland’s only Thai Spa, nor the golfers enjoying the challenges that Sir Nick Faldo cunningly set for them when Jim Treacy got him to design the course.

That’s because the capable management team and their creative staffs have always generated an assuring atmosphere of excellence by always winning accolades and awards for Hotel of the Year, Top Golf Course, Restaurant of the Year, Best Spa, Best Wedding Venue, etc, etc.

Topping the list of awards to an individual is, undoubtedly, my good friend, the Resort’s Executive Head Chef, NOEL McMEEL whom I have known for half his lifetime and who deserves a story to himself…

My top local chef wins the McMeel of the Year

NOEL McMEEL has “all the skills and vision to become a world-class Masterchef.” That’s what I wrote about him in the 1990s for a glossy magazine cleverly entitled OmNIbus published by the NIO and distributed to embassies and media outlets throughout the world to help counter the negative image of our wee country in those dark days.

I already had written a five-page eulogy in the same mag to two of Noel’s mentors, PAUL and JEANNE RANKIN, who thought so highly of him that they recommended I immediately organised another spread on New Ulster Cuisine devoted to Noel and his first enterprise, the short-lived – but superb – TROMPETS restaurant in Magherafelt (wrong place; wrong time).

My story was largely devoted to the astonishing saga of his journeys across Britain and America – Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley is still his idol – in search of new culinary skill-sets, ingredients and inspirations. He still looked like a teenager when we first met, but he had the imagination of an old maestro…

I will never forget the subtle wood-smoke flavour enrobing a rack of little mountain lamb cutlets encased in a wigwam of dry twigs which he had ignited into glowing embers. This was the centrepiece of a genius lunch costing a tenner at Trompets in the 1990s! Later, he invited me to spend the day at TOOME EEL FISHERY where he hosted a dozen Top Irish Chefs – including their President, my country house cooking idol Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe, whom I believe, instigated Ireland’s Foodie Revolution.

I have subsequently followed Noel’s career, including his long spell as executive head chef at CASTLE LESLIE, Co Monaghan, where he famously created a vegetarian banquet for 400 at Sir Paul McCartney’s wedding. When Noel moved back across the Border to take up a similar exec role at Lough Erne Resort, he earned fame as the man who charmed Obama, Merkel, Putin and Cameron plus all other world leaders, with his stellar food at the 2013 G8 Summit.

Typically, Noel has created magical menus for all guests at the Resort that largely adhere to his own vision of Modern Irish Cuisine – to source as many ingredients as possible from local small producers. He once summed this up to me in a pithy phrase: “Chefs need to support Francie – not Francois.”

I well remember seeing this philosophy in print, on a visit to the Resort a few years ago when I read his menu for Fermanagh’s Ten-Mile Breakfast : it included Pat O Doherty’s potato boxty, Kettyle sausage and bacon, O’Doherty black and white pudding, Cavanagh’s poached egg with chives and warm Ballyrashane butter sauce. What a perfect start to a brisk day in our Lakelands!

Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Irish Cuisine

LET’S GET down to the main reason for our winter food odyssey to the manicured wilds of Fermanagh – the TASTE OF MONDAY MENU that has become a tour-de-force at Lough Erne Resort.

Our meal comprised seven courses – plus one or two other nibbly wee bits. It was a masterpiece of creativity and I wanted to congratulate Noel personally as his oldest (in all senses!) friend on the Estate but as soon as I sent him my email he took off for two week’s winter hols! So all credit goes to the brigade at the stoves, headed by another up-and-coming executive chef, STEVE HOLLAND who comes from the village of Monea on the other side of Lower Lough Erne, and who is destined to go far.

Dinner started with a pre-starter (a bit Oirish?) of a savoury amuse bouche with a glass of Prosecco: Karen got my bubbly (as always), so that kept the wine bill down! NEXT was Silver Hill Duck Leg Ravioli with artichoke purée & pickled mushrooms OR Fermanagh glazed Telford’s pork belly, celeriac puree,butternut squash, pine jus. Best-ever pork belly!

I am not noted as a soup-er man, but the Celeriac Soup with carmelised chestnuts and ham-hock tortelini floating on top was a souped-up starter of world-class! (I am already running out of exclamation marks). THEN we had Whiskey-cured Salmon, beetroot terrine and pickled beetroot & vanilla puree Goatsbridge trout roe.

What complex flavours!

NEXT was a substantial course of Thornhill duck breast, roasted artichoke and puree, blackberry & buckthorn gel, fermented blackberries,toasted hazelnuts and thyme jus OR Listergan Beef from the famous Fintona butchers, comprising a full-size Fillet, crispy beef cheek (ingenious), baby turnip, red wine jus and garlic potato.

DESSERT started with Blackcurrant Soufflé, Homemade Custard and multi-award-winning Glastry Farm vanilla ice cream from the Ards Peninsula OR Bitter Chocolate Delice, salted caramel gel & ice cream, glazed pecan.

TO FINISH we had a choice of top-class teas and coffee served with an assortment of Sweet Tasters that were not so much Petites Fours, more like Petites Fives and Sixes! Phew…what a meal…well worth the £500 Fermanagh break – including the drive back through a rare snow-storm in the Clogher Valley.
Feat of Clay: Belleek Pottery’s enduring appeal

JOINT highlights of our mini-break were a visit to Belleek Pottery and, of course, the culinary delight of our Seven Course Tasting Menu. I forgot to mention that this was served in the Catalina Restaurant which is named after the sea-planes based nearby during WWII that helped win the Battle of the Atlantic against U-Boats. We were reminded of their role even before we reached our destination, thanks to a pipe-laying detour that took us up the pine-clad mountain road to the Viewpoints of Lough Navar Forest above Lower Lough Erne where we saw two War Graves.

What a panorama on a fine day and what a location for Remembrance! From the Atlantic Ocean in the west beyond Beleek, to the Sperrins in the east,in neighbouring Tyrone, this would have been a familiar landscape to the aircraft crews commemorated here. They operated from nearby RAF Castle Archdale in Catalina sea-planes, or in some of the 63 Shorts Sunderland Flying Boats which were assembled near my East Belfast home when I was a toddler.These heroic crews flew across the secret treaty Donegal Corridor in ‘neutral’ Eire to destroy German submarines and surface ships such as the all-conquering Bismarck which was first sighted in North Atlantic from a Lough Erne-based Catalina. When it was sunk, Hitler ordered all his other battleships to pull out, putting an end to this aspect of naval warfare in the Atlantic.

By coincidence, our multi-award-winning destination BELLEEK POTTERY has quite a lot of info about WWII in Fermanagh in its splendid Museum, with coverage of the impact of uniformed British and Canadian airmen – plus American GIs in particular – on the pubs, businesses and local girls, including the largely female work-force of the Pottery itself.

In a museum devoted to the astonishing story of how a remote Ulster village became the World Centre of parian china ware, the focus is on examples of their prolific output since 1857 which has been admired by everyone from Royalty and US millionaires to the general public.

As student potters ourselves, Karen and I were enchanted by the unbelievable craftsmanship of the Exhibition pieces that wowed audiences at World Shows. Big mirrors framed with translucent floral wreaths comprising scores of delicate hand-made blossoms took Belleek’s top ceramicists months to complete, but their efforts gained international acclaim in the 1900s and the orders rolled in.

We saw for ourselves how enduringly popular are the Pottery’s traditional and modern products on the shelves of the vast Gift Shop alongside an American coach-party of Belleek enthusiasts. They were filling order forms for everything from Flying Eagles at nearly $20,000 to wee salt cellars at $5, all to be shipped directly to their homes tax-free.

Best part of our visit was the much-acclaimed Guided Tour of the spacious factory area conducted for our small group by Amber, whose mum happens to be the receptionist who checked us into Lough Erne Resort 14 miles away. Fermanagh is just a wee village! Indeed, it was the Resort’s duty concierge at Reception who gave us the 2 for 1 Tour offer flyer that saved us the price of the reviving coffee ’n bun served on Belleek ware later in the Café.

Amber showed us the moulds that produce much of the output and also introduced us to expert ceramicists Leah and Maura who demonstrated how they make distinctive Belleek favourites from grey clay that looks the same as the stuff Karen and I use in our SERC classes. Maura was creating an iconic basket-weave bowl similar to the one that was once displayed in my Aunt Minnie’s parlour on Belfast’s Beersbridge Road.

I was amazed that 100,000 items like these are produced annually here by a small team of craftspeople who are constantly interrupted by half-hourly tour groups asking the same old, same old,questions. An I-Spy children’s tour with “Mr Bloomfield”, named after Pottery founder,John Caldwell Bloomfield,is available free.Belleek Pottery is a must-see Northern Ireland Visitor Attraction which may actually be better-known as a Day Excursion Destination from Dublin. Well worth the trip from wherever you are.

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