The Ulster Fry, Soda Bread and Champ: Northern Ireland at the Table

Northern Ireland eats like a farm that got a sea view. Big breakfasts, good bread, potatoes done properly, and fish on the coast. Children do well.

The Ulster fry is the breakfast. Bacon, sausage, egg, tomato, and the two things that make it Ulster, soda farl and potato bread, both fried in the pan with everything else. Order it once at the start and eat lightly until dark. Every cafe, every B and B, every hotel does one.

Soda bread is made with buttermilk and bicarbonate, no yeast, so it is quick and dense and slightly sour. Wheaten bread is the brown version. Potato bread is mashed potato and flour rolled thin and fried, and it is the one a child who will not eat anything will eat.

Dinner and the coast

Champ is mashed potato with spring onions and a well of melted butter in the middle. It is the side to everything and the meal on its own for a tired child. Irish stew, lamb with potatoes and onions, at a pub in the Mournes on a wet day.

Fish and chips at Portrush after the causeway. The Bushmills Inn does a proper dinner with a fire. St George’s Market in Belfast on a Saturday for oysters from Strangford and a bap with everything.

Fifteen, the fridge cake made with digestive biscuits, marshmallows, cherries and coconut, is the Northern Irish tray bake every grandmother makes. Buy a slab at the market and eat it on the coast road. Then a Tayto crisp sandwich, cheese and onion crisps between buttered white bread, which is a real Northern Irish institution and the one dare on this list.

Planning Northern Ireland with kids? Start with the full Northern Ireland family travel guide, or send me the ages and the dates and I will come back with what is really available.