Food you have to eat in Belfast this summer

For anyone lucky enough to grow up in Belfast, it’s easy to take the food for granted. Once you leave though, when you’re hit smack in the face with jokes about potatoes and the fact that the only food everyone thinks you produce is stew and Ulster Fries, you start to appreciate it a little bit more. You start to think wistfully, hungrily, of the foods you miss, the stuff you can’t get anywhere else, the stuff nobody does as well as Belfast.

Because sure we’ve got great nightlife, a rich political history, beautiful scenery – but more importantly than all that, we’ve also got some fucking great food. We’ve got stuff you can’t find anywhere else in the world, tastes that will stay with you forever. The best of the best:

Milkshake from Maggie Mays

Pictures don’t do them justice – thick, creamy, and you can balance out the sweetness with their amazing chips. Plus you get marshmallows on top.

Buckfast chicken wings

https://www.instagram.com/p/BF_ymcVwhqa/?taken-at=5773684

Buckfast is great. Chicken wings are also great. There is only one way to improve both these things and that’s by putting them together. Luckily, The Hudson has already created this magnificent marriage of flavours.

A pizza from Little Wing

I know what you’re thinking. It’s just big pizzas! It’s just calzones! No, it’s not. It’s something else. It’s pizzas that fit the whole table, and your mouth is watering the whole time you wait because they make them in an authentic stone oven right beside your table and just when it’s too much to bear you get to eat the best calzones known to man. I might have gone a bit far there, but it’s honestly very good.

Ice cream from Morelli’s

OK so it’s not technically based in Belfast, but they have it everywhere, and it’s basically our own version of gourmet ice cream. A Northern Irish Häagen-Dazs, if you will.

Brunch from Slim’s Healthy Kitchen

It’s got the word “healthy” in the name so you know you don’t have to feel bad about yourself after brunch. And there are seemingly endless supplies of avocado.

A burrito from Boojum

There’s a reason why there’s always a queue outside stretching down the whole of Botanic Avenue, rain or shine, even after the students have gone home.

A cake from Lily Pink bakery

Anything from Mourne Seafood Bar

Because Belfast is so near the coast, everything in Mourne Seafood Bar seems ridiculously fresh. You don’t have to drive 20 minutes out of the city, you can just enjoy the oysters and then go five minutes down the road to get drunk. Also ridiculously Instagrammable.

Fish and chips from John Longs

Just genuinely really good fish and chips. Also Eamonn Holmes and Sean Bean are fans, which is enough to make it taste better – even Ned Stark likes it.