A visit to the Black North, with snacks
Belfast, road trips and Protestant TAYTO
This is the 20th newsletter I’ve sent out! Thank you so much for reading. I am having a great time.
A few weekends ago we took a day trip up to Belfast. By the time you read this I will be back home in Brooklyn, preparing to move to Dublin permanently in July (and probably indulging in a lot of my favorite NYC foods in the meanwhile). Here are some notes and recollections from that day up north.
A bad novelty chip and some cursed coffee
One thing that makes me feel very secure is a sense of abundance when it comes to food. On road trips it makes me happy to know that should we suddenly become ravenous on the highway, we have many little snacks on offer. I have never been to Northern Ireland, so on recent a weekend when Peter’s parents were dog-sitting for us we decided to seize the day and take a day trip up to Belfast. We were in a rush on our way out, so all we had time to grab was a bag of Lay’s Cucumber Flavor chips from the pantry. I’d bought them a few weeks prior at an Asian market, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. This was road trip mistake number one: betting on an un-vetted snack.
About halfway through the drive, we stopped at a gas station and I ran in for coffee. It was close to Easter time, a Big Deal in Ireland, and the coffee shop had hot cross bun-flavored lattes on offer. I love princessy novelty coffees so I ordered one with oat milk. I didn’t know it yet, but this order was going to constitute mistake number two.
Back in the car, after we’d driven a ways, I broke open the bag of cucumber chips. Chips are basically my favorite food, and I’ve never met one that I wouldn’t eat at least a handful of. I placed a chip in my mouth. It had a synthetic, watery taste with overtones of clorophyll. It also wasn’t salty enough: I would describe the flavor as bland, yet disturbing. Peter tried one, too, and simply said “nope.” Tragically, we were now out of car snacks.
I picked up my hot cross bun-flavored latte, which had cooled a bit. (The worst thing about me is that I love room-temperature liquids.) We all know that winter is the best season for novelty coffee flavors. If a pumpkin spice latte is the most blessed winter beverage, this spring creation was potentially the most cursed. The latte was so sweet, sweeter even than a coffee at Dunkin’ when you’ve specifically asked for no sugar. It had a sickeningly fruit-forward flavor of fake raisins and oranges. I realized that day that I’d flown too close to the sun with my snack choices. What you want on a car ride are the safe-bet treats, the sure things. Peter kindly allowed me to drink his flat white instead.
Ship yards and car bomb shrapnel
I was excited to see the part of the world that Peter’s parents used to call “The Black North.” Peter was excited to go to the Titanic museum - the Titanic was constructed at Belfast’s shipyards, some of the largest in the world at the time. We drove straight north for an hour and a half before crossing the border into Northern Ireland, a border that is still totally open and porous post-Brexit. The border sign was flecked with red blotches of graffiti meant to resemble blood. The week before, the official terrorism threat level had been lowered from “severe” to “substantial,” the first time it had dropped in twelve years.
Dublin was founded by vikings and has been unraveling outwards ever since. Everything curves and spirals outwards from the city center at the mouth of the River Liffey. No street is straight, nothing squares off with anything else. Belfast is relatively new in comparison: it took off as a major city in the 1600’s and is filled with little squares that feel decidedly English in nature. The mouth of its river, the Lagan, opens up into sprawling ship yards. It’s very easy to see how the place became a center of commerce. In more recent years, the city has been dotted with various peace monuments - most totally hideous - and lots of street art, which is all relatively nice.
We spent the day roaming the Titanic Museum - which is excellent if you want to learn about ship building being cool, and less excellent if you want to learn about the actual sinking of the Titanic, which they basically don’t cover - and ate lunch outdoors in a pleasant little square. The sun was shining. Every pub seemed to have live music. We looked at the Parliament building and many beautiful old linen factories that now house Zaras.
We walked into the Hotel Europa, the most-bombed hotel in Europe which somehow survived the Troubles. A very kindly man at the front desk thought we were guests at the hotel and drew us detailed instructions on a map of everything we should see. We followed his instructions and walked to the Cathedral Quarter, where we saw many beautiful old Protestant churches. We ended up at a miraculous pub that had mirrors on the walls that had been shattered by car bomb shrapnel. More live music was playing, and we listened while drinking a responsible one pint each. We drove home as the sun was setting, and made it back to Dublin by dark.
Protestant TAYTO
One of my favorite things about Irish pubs is the heavy snack presence. There is always at least one type of crisp on offer behind the bar, and sometimes several. I tried Northern Irish TAYTO at The Duke of York in Belfast. These crisps are produced by an entirely different company than the TAYTO products of the Republic of Ireland. Their offerings are almost identical - although I’m not sure how this is legal - and their mascots are both a humanoid potato wearing a hat, although Northern Ireland’s TAYTO man has gloves on. Make of that what you will. We cracked open a couple of bags of cheese and onion crisps, a perfect accompaniment to our ciders. An incredibly drunk older couple at the next table over, clearly locals based on their accents, interjected to say we were eating “the best crisps in the world.”
Did I agree with them? Northern Irish TAYTO are a bit thicker and noticeably less crunchy than their southern counterparts. The flavor is quite similar, maybe even identical, but the texture is worse. Sorry to those people, but Catholic TAYTO wins this round.
(Related: we visited TAYTO park in County Meath last summer, and I wrote about it here. TAYTO recently announced they are no longer going to sponsor the amusement park, so this essay feels decidedly more nostalgic now.)