specialist food drink belfast

It is a droll place, Arcadia. Sausages can find themselves labelled as "German Knackers", which is one of the worst jokes you can think of about food, and the bright colours of some of the salads and their curious textures can make the shop seem like a cross between a kiddie's sweetshop and the serious delicatessen it actually is. Indeed, it is one of the essential staples of the mecca of good food which rest at the top of the Lisburn road. Crammed from floor to ceiling with food, which fu...

This is a typically excellent butcher's shop - you expect nothing less in Northern Ireland - but it is especially valuable if one is trying to find game, which is one of Coffey's specialities. Confident, knowledgeable staff ensure you leave the shop with plenty of ideas as to what to do with it....

Eatwell is one of the most discriminating wholefood shops, and is especially valuable as one of few places in the north where you can buy organic vegetables, produced for Eatwell by John Hoey. But there are lots of other sweet surprises to be found in store....

Don't let the modest appearance of Walter Ewing's shop, or the fact that it resides in a part of town which has become increasingly desiccated over the last decade, to blind you to the fact that this is a good fish shop, much respected by the restaurateurs who buy their supplies here. In style Ewing's recalls those old country butchers where things were never on display, places where you could walk in the door and not see so much as a single piece of meat. The modern attitude of retaining ma...

This shop is one of the great staples at the top of the Lisburn road, packed to the rafters at lunchtime with office workers buying soups and sarnies, and at other times it is otherwise crammed with matrons aiming to pass off not only the well-behaved baking, but also the smart savoury cooking, as their own....

In Sawers, one is always struck by the pleasant realisation that here is a shop where they try to get things in season, endeavour to get things at their best, and then complete the process by making it enjoyable to shop here, thanks to amiable, confident staff. It is in the vital details, such as the excellent dry- and sweet-cured bacon, that their strength resides. This is brilliant bacon, and its quality is an indicator of the quality of everything else. The fish and charcuterie counters...