The menu: Belfast’s Ox ticked everything in my box
The lure was not the most popular tourist attraction in Ireland, the shrine to the Belfast-built ‘ship that couldn’t be sunk’, but rather the recently opened Ox Cave wine bar immediately adjacent to it’s Lagan-side sibling, Ox restaurant, where he enjoyed one of the finest meals he has ever had on this island. Proprietors, chef Stephen Toman and sommelier Alain Kerloc’h, first met while working in the Michelin three-starred L’Arpege in Paris, where chef Alain Passard stunned the food world by dropping meat entirely from his menus in 2001. It has since returned but its provenance is strictly monitored, its place in the grand scheme of things infinitely more subservient to the mighty vegetable, just as it is in Ox. The Menu was especially entranced by a succulent hay-baked celeriac with onion and black garlic puree, the class of dish to sway even Hannibal Lecter himself into embracing the epicurean merits of total vegetarianism. www.oxbelfast.com
