A note from Deborah. Read her editorial perspective
Portrush has a golf-course problem when it comes to dinner. Everyone stays at the Bushmills Inn or on the Portrush promenade, everyone books the hotel dining room for the first night, and by the second evening a foursome of Americans has decided the north Antrim coast is a food desert. It is not. It is a working seaside coast with a genuine seafood strand on its doorstep and enough proper kitchens within a fifteen-minute drive to fill three nights without repeating a room. What it does not have is a Manhattan reservation system, so a walk-in on a Friday at eight will not work, and what it rewards is a small amount of planning before you fly. We have eaten our way through this coast over the years, trip after trip built around a Royal Portrush round, and here is what we book, in what order, and why.
North Antrim, When The Round Is Over
Portrush sits on a headland between two strands, with Portstewart ten minutes west and Bushmills ten minutes east, and the three villages between them make up the food map of a Portrush golf trip. The distances are trivial. You can drive from the Bushmills Inn to almost every kitchen worth eating in inside fifteen minutes, and the ones you cannot drive to are twenty minutes down the coast. The area's food scene sorts into four honest categories: the hotel dining rooms at the Bushmills Inn and the Portrush resorts, the independent kitchens on Portrush harbour and in the village of Bushmills that fill up on golf weekends, the promenade pubs which run from serviceable to good, and the seafood you should be driving ten minutes west to Portstewart Strand to eat. Everything else is a fish and chip shop, and there is nothing wrong with a fish and chip shop after a fifty-mile-an-hour westerly on the back nine.
What this coast does not have, and this catches Americans out, is a Michelin-starred dining room or a chef-driven tasting menu ambitious enough to defend against Belfast's Cathedral Quarter forty minutes south. That is not the trip. If you have flown to Belfast for a Michelin week, you should be sleeping in Belfast. If you have flown to play Royal Portrush and have chosen to stay at the Bushmills Inn because it is ten minutes from the first tee, your dinner strategy should look nothing like your Belfast strategy. It should look like a plan for four honest rooms across three nights, and you should book them all before you fly. If you are still shaping the trip itself, read this next to our itinerary for three days around Royal Portrush, which frames how the round and the Causeway coast sit around these tables.
The Post-Round Table, Booked Weeks Ahead
The problem with a late tee time in July, when the light holds until ten and the round finishes at seven fifteen, is that most independent kitchens in Portrush have taken their last order by eight thirty and stop seating at eight. If you have not booked, you will end up in the Bushmills Inn bar eating burgers with the group you played behind, which is a fine evening and a poor use of a first night in the North. Our rule is simple. If the tee time is before two, we book a proper independent room for that night. If it is after two, we accept the hotel dining room, dress for it, and treat the burger group as company rather than an obstacle.
The room that will most reliably take a foursome at eight thirty on a golf weekend is Ramore Wine Bar on Portrush harbour, a busy modern Irish kitchen a five-minute drive from the first tee. The dining room is large by the standards of this coast, the menu is short and honest, and the wine list is broad without being expensive. You are not going to get a tasting menu. You are going to get a plate of Rathlin scallops with black pudding or a piece of local hake with brown butter and green vegetables, and you are going to eat it inside an hour so the kitchen can turn the table. That is exactly the pace a golf foursome wants at the end of a long walking day. We ring three weeks out for a Friday, and we always ring the restaurant directly, not through a booking aggregator, because the aggregator holds tables the kitchen would rather give you than a cover charge to release.
The Reservation You Make Before The Flight
There are two rooms on this coast we think are worth booking before your flight is even ticketed, and they sit ten minutes apart on either side of Portrush. The first is Mermaid, the small seafood room above Portrush harbour that runs a short menu of Rathlin oysters, Portrush langoustines, and a Coleraine hake plate that is the best fish dish on the north coast. The cooking is confident modern Irish with a light European hand, meaning you will see a brown crab tart in the season and a whole Portrush plaice on the bone plated with a restraint that keeps the ingredient legible. The second is the French Rooms in the village of Bushmills, a small chef-owned kitchen five minutes on foot from the Bushmills Inn, running a considered bistro menu of Antrim beef, Ulster lamb, and a short seafood section built off the same harbour boats.
Book Mermaid the week you book your tee time, not the week you arrive. On a Saturday in shoulder season the room is booked out ten days ahead, and on a Saturday in July it is booked out a month ahead. The dining room takes ten tables at a stretch, so if you are a foursome plus partners you will need to give notice. We ask for the eight o'clock seating on the night we are not playing the following morning, because the wine list is worth reading through and the seafood tasting is worth an extra hour at the table. The French Rooms is the second reservation, a walkable dinner from the inn, and the room we send friends to when the trip lands on a Monday or a Tuesday and Mermaid is dark. The bill in either room lands in the range of a good Belfast dinner, not a Manhattan one, and neither will chase you out at ten thirty.
Between Rounds, The Refuelling Question
If you are playing thirty-six at Royal Portrush in a single day, which we recommend at least once in a golf career on the Dunluce and Valley combination, lunch has to be at the clubhouse or a five-minute drive from it, and it has to leave you back on the first tee inside ninety minutes. The clubhouse dining room does a serviceable sandwich and soup service between rounds and a small hot plate menu in season, and if the weather is anything like normal you should eat there rather than trying to make it into town. It is the shortest walk to the tee and it keeps you warm. This is not a lunch to linger over. It is a lunch to survive the second round in a strong Atlantic westerly.
If the day is dry and the second tee time is late enough to allow the full ninety minutes, our foursome drives the five minutes down to Babushka Kitchen Cafe on Portrush East Strand, a small daytime room above the beach that does honest sandwiches on decent bread, a proper chowder, and a coffee good enough to justify the walk down the steps to it. Neither the clubhouse nor Babushka is going to be the meal of the trip. Both will feed you well, warm you back up, and put you back on the first tee awake rather than heavy. We do not do a full lunch between rounds at Portrush. It kills the second nine. A chowder, a coffee, and a walk back along the East Strand is exactly enough.
A Pint That Is Not At The Bushmills Inn
The gas-lit bar at the Bushmills Inn is fine, and it will fill up with the group you played behind and the group you played in front of, and after two nights you will want a room on the coast that is not a hotel bar. The Harbour Bar in Portrush, on Kerr Street above the harbour, is the honest working pub of the town, a room that has been serving locals and visitors for generations and that on a Friday night will have a session in the back corner that started because someone brought a bodhrán and someone else brought a fiddle. It is a five-minute drive from the inn and it is where we send anyone who wants a pint that is not being poured for an American in golf shoes.
The Distillers Arms, on Main Street in Bushmills opposite the inn, sits inside a stone building attached in spirit to the distillery down the road and does a properly kept Guinness and a decent Bushmills pour off the full range. It is halfway between the hotel bar and the town, quieter than the Harbour, and easier to hold a conversation in after nine. We use it as the drink before dinner when we are eating at the French Rooms or at the inn itself, and we use the Harbour Bar in Portrush as the drink after dinner when the round the next morning is not before ten. That is the honest sequence. A drink at the Distillers Arms to warm up, a dinner in town, and a pint at the Harbour Bar to close the evening.
Ten Minutes West, On Portstewart Strand
Ten minutes west of Portrush sits Portstewart Strand, a two-mile beach of hard-packed sand backed by dunes owned by the National Trust, and the reason to drive there for dinner is Harry's Shack, a National Trust seafood room built on stilts on the sand itself. The dining room is small, the menu is fish forward and honest, and the langoustines and mussels are being pulled from water you can see from the table. This is the meal of the trip, more often than not, and it is the one American visitors most often miss because the room is not on a hotel concierge list. The building is a shack in the literal sense, with a wood-burning stove in the corner and windows that rattle in a westerly, and it is the reason we do not schedule dinner in Portrush village every night of a golf trip.
Book Harry's Shack directly through the restaurant, not through a hotel concierge, and ask for a table between seven and eight thirty in the season the strand is warm enough for it. We drive over after a round that finishes by five, shower back at the inn, and are at the table by seven forty five. The drive back at ten in the evening runs along the coast road with the Atlantic flat to your left and the lights of Portrush visible on the headland ahead, and on a night with a moon it is worth the ten minutes each way on its own. If you have designated a driver, and you should have, the wine list is short but sensible, and a bottle of Guinness at the bar is worth ten minutes before your table is called. If Harry's Shack is closed for winter, which happens November through March, our second call in Portstewart is Ocho Tapas, a small Spanish-leaning room on the promenade that runs a short menu of Antrim ingredients cooked with a Basque hand.
The Booking Errors That Lose You Tables
Three things, in order of how often we see them. First, you are booking too late. The independent kitchens on this coast turn twelve to eighteen covers a night in the small rooms, and a Friday or Saturday in golf season is not a walk-in coast. If you have not booked before you fly, you will be in the hotel dining room for three nights, and that is a slow way to spend the North. Second, you are over-ordering pub food. The chippers on Portrush promenade and the pubs along Bushmills Main Street are honest lunch and midweek dinner options, and they are not what to do on the night you have driven from Belfast to play the Dunluce the next morning. Save the pub for lunch.
Third, and the most common by a distance, you are missing the seafood window. Portstewart langoustines and Rathlin scallops are best from September through April, when the water is cold and the flesh is dense. If you are here in July for a golf trip, you can still eat well at Harry's Shack because the kitchen sources from other beds along the coast, but the specific reason to drive to Portstewart is the local shellfish in the local season. If your trip is early September through late November, put a Portstewart dinner on the itinerary before you book the tee times. If your trip is July, Portstewart is still the second-best dinner of the week, and worth the drive on its own.
Sequencing The Three Evenings
The trip we have run more times than any other is three nights at the Bushmills Inn around two rounds at Royal Portrush and one round at another links in easy reach, most often Portstewart itself or the Valley course. Our food sequence, refined over the years, runs this way. Night one is the arrival dinner at the Taste of Bushmills upstairs at the inn, because you have driven from the airport, you have not showered, and you want to eat inside the building you are sleeping in. It is the correct decision that first night and we make it every time.
Night two is the reservation you booked before you flew, which is Mermaid on Portrush harbour if the night is a Wednesday through Saturday, and the French Rooms in Bushmills if it is a Sunday or a Monday when Mermaid tends to be dark. Night three is Portstewart, the drive west along the coast, langoustines and a whole fish or the Ulster beef short rib depending on the season, and the drive back along the coast road with the Atlantic silhouetted to the north. That is the sequence. One arrival night at the inn, one destination night in Portrush village, and one seafood night on Portstewart Strand. It works in April, it works in July, it works in October, and after many trips we would not change the order of it.
Further reading from the Notebook
- How to play Royal Portrush
- Three days around Royal Portrush
- Where to eat near Slieve Donard after a round
- Three days around Royal County Down
- Where to eat near Ballybunion
- Where to eat near Lahinch
- Portmarnock, shot by shot
- The concierge letter
- Where to sleep in Ireland
- Build your trip around this round
- Golf itineraries, five and seven day
- The Printed Edit, Greens and Gorse