Stock Kitchen & Bar
St George’s Market
Oxford Street
Belfast
BT1 4FG
028 9024 0014
stockbelfast.com
THE first time I visited Stock Kitchen & Bar, above St George’s Market, social distancing wouldn’t have been a problem, even if anyone had actually heard of it. It was last summer and chef Danny Millar’s elegant space in the gods of the old market hadn’t long opened.
There we were, smack bang in the middle of the July fortnight when Belfast somehow still manages to empty like a sink with the plug yanked out, in the no-man’s land between a very late lunch and early dinner on a sweltering Thursday, a table for two in a restaurant for two.
This must be what it feels like for the swanky dans who book out an entire place to impress the other side of the table. And we were treated like a small fortune had been shelled out for the privilege.
Brilliant staff, already some of the best food in the city, and chef himself coming over to say he’d thrown a bit extra into the mammoth seafood casserole because, sure, it’s just us.
That evening was an anomaly, and Stock has buzzed and throbbed ever since – rightly packing them in with spectacular ingredients, mostly culled from the market below, expertly treated.
Great barbecued wedges of verdant cabbage, crubeens bursting with flavour, turbots the size of street signs, cocktails that have you singing. And then, well, you know.
Like so many places, Stock navigated its way through lockdown by transforming into a takeaway of distinction with dinner boxes and meal kits, while more recently there’s Sour Bake, the pizza parlour of your dreams. They’re on the regular menu too and when they’re brought to another table a quick calculation is made about whether three courses plus a full pizza might be too much for a Sunday afternoon. Next time.
It was quiet again this Sunday afternoon and not just because the market had packed up and the lunch crowd had gone and no-one goes for their dinner at a quarter to four in the afternoon.
The government’s Eat Out To Help scheme, designed to get people back into reopened restaurants, seems to have also served to shift the busy time to those days at the start of the week when the chancellor chips in to your dinner kitty. So a Sunday’s not so busy because Tuesday was mental.
But however packed Stock is earlier in the week, the one-way system for entry and exit, the spaced out tables in the already ample acreage, the visored wait staff and the hand sanitiser at every table made for a completely reassuring dose of new normal.
It’s completely understandable that no matter how much of their dinner gets paid for, some people just won’t feel comfortable going to a restaurant now. Stock can’t be faulted on that score, nor for its food, but that was never in doubt.
It was actually the Sunday brunch menu which, like just about every brunch menu the world over, is a lunch menu with some eggs on it. And avocado because it’s 2020. And a fry because it’s Belfast.
Resisting the temptation to order those crubeens again, instead it’s a char-edged slab of sourdough piled high with rocket, tomatoes and a snowdrift of cheddar. The simplest of combinations, everything was the most it could be – bread, tomato and cheese, working to the peak of their capabilities. It couldn’t fail.
It epitomised the meal, and Stock itself. The very best of things, treated as well as possible, left to speak for themselves.
And so to steak, chips, Caesar salad. So easy to do badly, so perfect when done as well as here. The steak is a picanha, a South American cut from the top of the rump. A little chew, a bucket of beefiness and two magic words in front of it on the menu: “Peter Hannan’s”, Again, it couldn’t fail.
A neat square of golden potato terrine and a side of pure summer – peas, broad beans, romanesco – combined with the chicken, especially the thigh, to make for a Sunday roast dinner that felt a reward for something I didn’t know I’d done. Whatever it was, it must have been good to deserve this.
It’s always a bonus when you feel you’ve already been treated to something way beyond the point of indulgence long before the desserts arrive.
And when they do there’s a deeply chocolate tart was balanced in the crispest pastry and doused in cherries drunk on amaretto.
The other wedge across the table is a baked mango cheesecake and passion fruit sorbet, which may as well have come out singing Club Tropicana. Or maybe that’s the coconut margarita talking.
THE BILL
Wheaten bread £4
Heirloom tomatoes £5
Pichana steak £16
Roast chicken £12
Chocolate tart £6
Mango cheesecake £6
Coconut margarita £8
Strawberry margarita £8
Salty lemon tonic £3
Elderflower tonic £3
Service charge £7.10
Total £78.10
