Belfast: Good Eats, Great Drinks

We had the very great luck of booking at the Bullit Hotel, about and eight minute walk from the ICC and Hilton where the convention was taking place.

Obviously there is always a risk of being off-site leading to missing out, or at the very least making one feel like they are missing out. But the Bullit had a bunch of other fans there, including lots of close friends. The hotel breakfast was truly excellent, but even if it had not been, the company would more than have made up for it – on various days we were able to east with Claire and Mark, Alison, Steven and family, Andy, Sandra, Meg, and even Liz one one occasion, though her hotel was elsewhere.

The rooftop bar was also pleasant, with good pizza, the coffee was very good, and I am told the pastries were nice but theyonly seemed to have one cruffin each day.

But the standout, the thing that made this hotel more special than any other hotel was none of those things. It was the “secret cocktail bar”, Rattlebag. It was only secret from the lobby, the street entrance was quite large and well sign posted, but the inside door my the hotel lifts had no sign and therefore felt very speakeasy indeed. The first night a bunch of the savvier Bulleteers sent delighted messages about the wonders therein, so on night two – in spite of being in full Star Wars Night Sister costuming, I headed over with Tobes and Andy and spent two or so hours happily working my way through the drinks menu, pausing only to agree excitedly that we MUST bring Tammy Coxen here.

Reader, we did just that, and she chatted happily away with the lovely Christopher from Rattlebag who gamely spent the weekend putting up with our bullshit and between us we ordered the entire menu plus a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. I came back at least once more, possibly twice, but honestly its a bit fuzzy. What I do remember is that he made me a Turkish Delight cocktail, and had us try an artisanal poitín by the name of Shortcross, which Anna was good enough to tell us was available at duty free. I wonder how many bottles the frankly baffled duty free staff sold to fans the next day.

We dined only once at the hotel, the aforementioned nice pizza, as there was an embarrassment of culinary riches within a five minute walk. I had made a list of local foods to try, but mostly dropped the ball on that as the convention chaos whirled us from one night to the next.

We got lunch from St George’s Market, but it was about to close so all the best stuff was sold out, then discovered that the ICC bar had a surprisingly good sausage roll and cans of local beer.

John’s very wise philosophy of conventions is that you try to line your dinner plans for the whole weekend day one if at all possible. Schedules get wild, executive function dissapears, and bookings become difficult otherwise. With this in mind we booked for Cloth Ear and Ragin Ramen on consecutive nights, but got very lucky by ending up at Bootleggers on night one for a very nice dirty burger and great conversation. Cloth Ear was a bit more upmarket but still very comfortable, my chowder was delicious and the bread starter covered a lot of our “local food” bingo card. Both of these were basically one street away from the hotel, if that, and Ragin Ramen was squarely between them, which gives you an idea of how packed with good eats the area iOnce the convention was over we had a day and a half left for tourism. One was spent on a Causeway tour, which involved stopping at the Fullerton Arms where I had another quite nice and more importantly very efficient chowder, and which ended with a visit to Bushmills, were I found I like Bushmills quite a lot actually. Exhausted, we got a burger at Bunsen as our final dinner in Dublin – maybe not very original, but pretty great and a lovely callback to meals at the Dublin location during the Worldcon there.

One last Bullit breakfast (French toast), some touristing, and off to the aiport. You would think that would mean bad food, but damned if the tater tots at Fed and Watered aren’t actually delicious!

And now it is all just happy memories excepting the poitín and a flattened bag of Taytos.