Dishes
The Ulster Fry — the breakfast, found on nearly every café menu. Bacon, sausage, egg, black pudding, soda bread, and potato bread, sometimes with a Belfast bap on the side. A genuine post-night-out staple.
Champ — mashed potato with scallions, the standard side dish across the region.
Irish stew — beef or lamb with root vegetables, best with wheaten bread and a pint.
Vegetable roll — despite the name, mostly beef (with leeks and spring onion), sliced and fried or grilled. Hull’s has been making these since 1954.
Boxty — a potato pancake, also called “poundies,” particularly associated with Fermanagh.
Fifteen — a no-bake traybake: 15 digestive biscuits, 15 marshmallows, 15 glacé cherries, bound with condensed milk, rolled in coconut. A tea-time classic.
Breads
Potato bread and soda bread — both Ulster fry staples, also good on their own toasted. Veda — a malted, slightly chewy bread, mostly known within Northern Ireland. Belfast bap — a large, soft roll, originally created during the Famine to help feed people; still popular as a breakfast-roll base today.
Sweet treats
Yellow Man — a hard, honeycomb-like candy, traditionally sold at Ballycastle’s Ould Lammas Fair. Dulse — dried, salted seaweed, also a Lammas Fair staple; an acquired taste, genuinely nutritious. Barmbrack — a dried-fruit bread associated with Halloween, traditionally baked with a hidden charm inside to predict your fortune.
Seafood
Local seafood is genuinely good — Ulster seafood chowder (a creamy fish and potato soup) shows up on menus across the coast, alongside fresh cod, salmon, and turbot. Crab, prawns, and mussels are all regularly caught locally. Harry’s Shack, on Portstewart Strand, is a well-regarded spot for crab and other local seafood right on the beach.
Local drinks
Lacada Brewery, based in Portrush, makes craft beers including their East the Beast IPA — genuinely local, worth seeking out. Beyond that, Northern Ireland has a growing range of craft gins, whiskeys, and stouts if you want to explore further afield.
Where to try it
St George’s Market in Belfast is the best-known food market in the region if you’re passing through the city, but plenty of the dishes above are on menus throughout Portrush and the Causeway Coast — see our A to Z of places to eat.
