Restaurant review: The Muddlers Club is packed with charm, finesse, and attitude
The Muddlers Club Belfast. Picture: Elaine Hill Photography
- Lunch for two plus three glasses of wine cost €330.75 (£259.50)
In a tavern in a back street of the Cathedral Quarter of central Belfast in the 1790s, the Belfast-born United Irishmen Henry Joy McCracken, Co Down native Samuel Neilson, and a few select others met in secret, plotting the insurrection we now know as the 1798 Rebellion. The code name they used was The Muddlers Club.
I love that the name lives on in the excellent Muddlers Club restaurant, a reminder of how important Belfast and the rest of the North of Ireland was in planning that rebellion. As Wolfe Tone wrote, its aim was “to unite Protestant, Catholic, and dissenter under the common name of Irishmen to break the connection with England”.
Chef Gareth McCaughey and his team at both front and back of house have been creating their own mischief in the space since 2015 and were awarded a star by the Michelin Guide in 2019. As you might expect of a space that used to hold secret assignations, I needed my phone to help me find the restaurant.
The room has an industrial chic feel with exposed ducting, bare brick walls, and bare wooden floors but it also has a lively and warm atmosphere, helped by carefully thought-out lighting (as noted by the Engineer). The open kitchen runs along one side of the room and the sight of the busy but chilled chefs clearly enjoying their work added to the charm.
Note that this visit occurred a number of weeks ago, so the strictly seasonal menu will have changed by now. We began with bread, as one should, nutty crusty sourdough and warm fluffy onion loaves topped with nigella seeds, plus hand-churned charred leek butter and extra virgin olive oil on the side. Good bread (and this was some of the best bread I’ve ever eaten) really is the best way to start a meal. I do wish the mid-meal “bread course” would go the way of brown Windsor soup and disappear.
As with all tasting menus at this level (£110 per person, approximately €127), there are too many flavours to mention but let’s highlight the amuse of featherlight chicken liver parfait with punchy, crunchy gingerbread as possibly my favourite of the three snacks. Similarly, our first course of caramelised scallop in an intensely flavoured chicken broth with salty crunchy chicken skin shards: This match is an oldie but it’s a goodie and I vigorously scraped the plate to ensure no morsel was left behind.
Meaty and sweet wild Wicklow venison carpaccio was given extra umami thanks to a mushroom ketchup and fresh truffle mayonnaise, while just-cooked halibut sat on a rich prawn bisque, fennel adding anise and a dill purée lending herbal freshness.
For our meat course, some 35-day salt-aged fillet of Antrim beef was tender and properly beefy, with braised short rib doubling down on the beefiness, while truffle slices added earthy fragrances with wild garlic and a purée of yellow turnip grounding the dish. Honestly, this was some of the finest beef I’ve eaten in the last 12 months.
A glass of Ch du Hureau Saumur red (£13.50) had an earthy red fruit punchiness to match the full-on flavours of the meat dishes, while the Engineer’s Biancardi Ponte Viro primitivo was also a solid choice, darkly fruity and ripe. These were the two entry-level wines by the glass from a nicely chosen (if short) list.
Following the many hits of the savoury courses came another hit with a pre-dessert of blueberry sorbet with blueberry compote, sponge cake pieces, and a delightful lemon espuma foam to lift things. I had no idea I liked blueberries this much.
Our actual dessert had lightly sweetened poached rhubarb, pink peppercorn ice cream, and creamy mascarpone, a fine finish, perhaps slightly overshadowed by the pre-dessert but we can’t hold that against it.
We had one final indulgence, a shared glass of dessert wine from a brilliantly chosen list. Dom Fiumicicoli muscateddu (£6), from Corsica, had scents of violets, allspice, and jam, a hugely complex wine that managed to be both luscious and elegant.
We left sated and happy, departing with a gift of the bread we had liked so much. The Muddlers Club was a joy to visit, packed with charm, finesse, and attitude.
A visit to Ox restaurant on another occasion recently also impressed, so off with ye to Belfast — there really are special things happening there.
You might even meet a real-life Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Lyonel Baratheon — aka Daniel Ings — in our case). Thankfully, we met him in our hotel lobby rather than on the battlefield.
- Leslie visited Belfast as a guest of Tourism Northern Ireland but visited The Muddlers Club anonymously and paid for his meal in full. See discovernorthernireland.com. Leslie was hosted by the Grand Central Belfast.
