Seeking good food? Van Knows the way. 23 April 2004
Belfast Telegraph
Curran's Bar Chapeltown, Co Down
If you're wondering where on earth Chapeltown is, one way to orientate yourself would be to listen to the Van Morrison song, Coney Island. If you can ignore the fact that he dreadfully mangles the pronunciation of some place names, try following his spoken-word travelogue on a mental trip to one of the most attractive, yet often neglected, corners of our fair land, the Lecale area of east Down.
Van's entry point into Lecale is the town of Downpatrick and, on his way to Coney Island, he visits Strangford Lough, St John's Point and Ardglass. Coney Island itself is situated a few miles outside Ardglass on the road to Killough, but if you venture out from Ardglass in the opposite direction towards Strangford, you'll find the little settlement of Chapeltown.
The village is not much more than a few houses clustered around a church and a pub said to be around 200 years old. The bar has undergone considerable change in recent times and, in November, an adjoining restaurant was created in an area where former pub owner Edward Curran bottled and labelled his own porter in the 1920s.
I doubt if the landlord of 80 years ago would recognise his premises today. The bottling room and an adjacent area have been transformed into an opulent split-level dining room, richly decorated in warm hues of purple and gold, with heavy drapes, soft seating, strip wood flooring and chandeliers dangling from the beamed ceiling.
The restaurant is styled as a 'Seafood Steakhouse' and while the menu is dominated by these two staples, there's also a good selection of pasta dishes for around £7, a roast of the day, tempura chicken with dips, prawn or chicken curry, and daily vegetarian specials.
Curran's motto is 'serving real food for real people', which, in this case, seems to mean that the emphasis is on good homely food well cooked rather than any of that fancy nonsense. All of which is fine by me. Too many restaurants have been damned by over-ambition and there'd be something vaguely suspicious about a restaurant that specialised in Pacific Rim fusion cookery in a Co Down village of not much more than 100 people.
So what you have at Curran's is fish and shellfish landed just a couple of miles away at Ardglass, locally-sourced dryhung beef, and potatoes that come from farmer John Doyle up the road. All of it as fresh as you could want and not overly mucked about with.
With that in mind, we stuck to what Curran's seems to pride itself in doing well. Starters came from the sea - a smoky seafood chowder for my wife and a steaming bowl of mussels in a garlic cream broth for me. The excellent chowder was generously laden with white fish, smoked fish, prawns and mussels, and my succulent mussels even came with a few slices of baguette to mop up the flavoursome juices.
For the mains, I chose a rare sirloin steak and selected a red wine jus from the range of sauces, while my wife opted for Akkras of Cod and Prawns, which turned out to be a mix of white fish and shellfish in a light tempura-like batter. The steak was nicely chargrilled on the outside but still with plenty of pink inside. The waitress brought me a steak knife but the meat was so tender I hardly needed it. The cod and prawn concoction, meanwhile, was delicately flavoured with chilli and herbs and there was plenty of it. A single dish of seasonal vegetables - carrot and parsnip - was enough to complete the meal.
Farmer Doyle's spuds were first rate. The champ was light but full-flavoured, and the thick chips were real potatoes cut into pieces rather than those frozen abominations that let many a good restaurant down.
We finished off with a comfort food classic for me - bread and butter pudding - and a lemon tart for my wife. The bread and butter pudding had a lovely golden crunch topping and avoided any hint of stodginess, while the lemon tart, although pleasant enough, was perhaps a little too much like lemon meringue pie without the meringue.
Throughout the meal, the service was an appropriate mix of pleasant country friendliness and professional courtesy. The staff were very welcoming and dealt with everything most efficiently. As I write this article, I've tried very hard to think of any negative points about our visit to Curran's, and the best that I can come up with is that it was a little chilly when we first came in and they forgot to bring a bowl for my mussel shells, but hey, the place soon warmed up and they apologised for the mussel bowl oversight before I'd even thought about mentioning it.
Opening a new restaurant in a small village in a quiet part of east Down is always going to be a bit of a gamble but, if anything is likely to make it pay off, it's surely this restaurant's policy of producing no-nonsense good food using the freshest of local ingredients. If you follow Van's directions to Ardglass in the jamjar some day and find yourself famished before tea, I can heartily recommend trying what Curran's has to offer.
