A note from Deborah. Read her editorial perspective
Newcastle, County Down has a golf-course problem when it comes to dinner. Everyone stays at the Slieve Donard, everyone books the hotel dining room for the first night, and by the second evening a foursome of Americans has decided the town is a food desert. It is not. It is a working seaside town with a genuine seafood coast 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 the area over the years, trip after trip built around a Royal County Down round, and here is what we book, in what order, and why.
Newcastle, After A Round
Newcastle sits at the foot of the Mournes and along the Irish Sea, and the town is one long promenade of guesthouses, ice cream shops, chippers, and a small clutch of restaurants that actually deserve a booking. The distances are trivial. You can walk from the Slieve Donard lobby to almost every kitchen worth eating in inside fifteen minutes, and the ones you cannot walk to are twenty minutes down the coast by car. The town's food scene sorts into four honest categories: the hotel dining rooms at the Slieve Donard itself, the independent kitchens on Main Street that fill up on golf weekends, the pub food along the promenade which ranges from serviceable to good, and the seafood you should be driving to Dundrum Bay 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 easterly on the back nine.
What the town 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 north. 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 County Down and have chosen to stay at the Slieve Donard because it is three 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.
The First Dinner, Held Close To The Hotel
The problem with a late tee time in June, when the light holds until ten and the round finishes at seven fifteen, is that most independent kitchens in Newcastle have taken their last order by eight thirty and stop seating at eight. If you have not booked, you will end up in the Slieve Donard 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 Vanilla, a modern Irish kitchen on Main Street a five-minute walk from the resort. The dining room is small, the menu changes with the season, and the wine list is short but honest. You are not going to get a tasting menu. You are going to get a plate of Mourne lamb with dauphinoise 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 Single Reservation Worth The Effort
There is one dining room in Newcastle we think is worth booking before your flight is even ticketed, and it is Brunel's, a chef-owned kitchen five minutes on foot from the Slieve Donard. The room is not large. The menu is short and unapologetic. The cooking is confident modern Irish with a European hand, meaning you will see a Comber earlies risotto in the season and a Mourne beef short rib braised the right length of time, plated with a restraint that keeps the ingredient legible. This is the only room in Newcastle we would call a proper destination for the trip, and it is the room we send friends to when the trip is a special occasion or a first visit to the North.
Book Brunel's 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 June it is booked out a month ahead. The dining room takes eight 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 tasting portion of the menu is worth an extra hour at the table. The bill lands in the range of a good Dublin dinner, not a Manhattan one, and the room does not chase you out at ten thirty.
The Lunch That Bridges The Rounds
If you are playing thirty-six at Royal County Down in a single day, which we recommend at least once in a golf career, lunch has to be at the clubhouse or a five-minute walk 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 easterly.
If the day is dry and the second tee time is late enough to allow the full ninety minutes, our foursome walks the five minutes down toward the promenade to Maud's, an ice cream and coffee shop that also does honest sandwiches on decent bread, or to a small daytime cafe near the pier that does soup, chowder, and a proper toasted sandwich. Neither 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 Royal County Down. It kills the second nine. A chowder, a coffee, and a walk back down the seafront is exactly enough.
A Quiet Pint, Ten Minutes Off The Property
The Slieve Donard bar 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 in the town that is not a hotel bar. The Anchor Bar on Bryansford Avenue is the honest working pub of Newcastle, 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 walk from the resort and it is where we send anyone who wants a pint that is not being poured for an American in golf shoes.
The Percy French, on Downs Road opposite the resort, sits inside a Victorian building attached to the Slieve Donard grounds and does a properly kept Guinness and a decent whiskey pour. It is halfway between the hotel bar and the town, quieter than the Anchor, and easier to hold a conversation in after nine. We use it as the drink before dinner when we are eating at Vanilla or Brunel's, and we use the Anchor as the drink after dinner when the round the next morning is not before ten. That is the honest sequence. A drink at the Percy French to warm up, a dinner in town, and a pint at the Anchor to close the evening.
The Drive South To Dundrum Bay
Twenty minutes down the coast from Newcastle sits Dundrum Bay, a shallow inlet on the Irish Sea that grows oysters and mussels at a scale that supplies half of Belfast's better kitchens. Mourne Seafood Bar in Dundrum village is the room we make a point of driving to on our second or third night, and it is the reason we do not schedule dinner in Newcastle every night of a golf trip. The dining room is small, the menu is fish forward and honest, and the oysters 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.
Book Mourne Seafood Bar directly through the restaurant, not through a hotel concierge, and ask for a table between seven thirty and eight thirty. We drive down after a round that finishes by five, shower back at the resort, and are at the table by seven forty five. The drive back at ten in the evening runs along the coast road with the Mournes rising in the dark to your right and the Irish Sea flat to your left, and on a night with a moon it is worth the twenty minutes each way on its own. If you have designated a driver, and you should have, the wine list is short but sensible, and the local ale at the bar is worth ten minutes before your table is called.
The Small Errors That Undo A Dinner
Three things, in order of how often we see them. First, you are booking too late. The independent kitchens in Newcastle turn twelve to eighteen covers a night in the small rooms, and a Friday or Saturday in golf season is not a walk-in town. 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 and the promenade pubs are honest lunch and midweek dinner options, and they are not what to do on the night you have driven from Dublin to play the Championship course the next morning. Save the pub for lunch.
Third, and the most common by a distance, you are missing the seafood window. Dundrum Bay oysters 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 Mourne Seafood Bar because they source from other beds along the coast, but the specific reason to drive to Dundrum is the local oyster in the local season. If your trip is early September through late November, put a Dundrum dinner on the itinerary before you book the tee times. If your trip is July, Dundrum is still the second-best dinner of the week, and worth the drive on its own.
How The Evenings Sit, In Order
The trip we have run more times than any other is three nights at the Slieve Donard around two rounds at Royal County Down and one round at another links in easy reach, most often Ardglass. Our food sequence, refined over the years, runs this way. Night one is the arrival dinner at the Slieve Donard dining room, 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 Brunel's if the night is a Wednesday through Saturday, and Vanilla if it is a Sunday or a Monday when Brunel's tends to be dark. Night three is Dundrum, the drive down the coast, oysters and a whole fish or the Mourne beef short rib depending on the season, and the drive back along the dark coast with the Mournes silhouetted to the west. That is the sequence. One arrival night at the hotel, one destination night in Newcastle, and one seafood night on Dundrum Bay. It works in April, it works in July, it works in October, and after many trips we would not change the order of it. Read alongside our itinerary for three days around Royal County Down, which is where the arrival, the round, and the drive home fit around these evenings.
Further reading from the Notebook
- Royal County Down, shot by shot
- Three days around Royal County Down
- Where to eat near Ballybunion
- Where to eat near Lahinch
- Slieve Donard and the Mournes from Newcastle
- Belfast and the Causeway, in luxury
- 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