The Caterer Blog

Anyone who has sat straight-faced as a Liverpudlian guffaws at his own joke, watched a Yorkshireman happily get a round in, or met a Norfolk farmer with his own teeth, can vouch that regional stereotypes aren’t always accurate. And if you have visited Dublin in the last few years in order to soak up the legendary Irish hospitality, only to be blanked as you attempt to chat at the bar, you can console yourself that it wasn’t necessarily your stagnant odour. Every country goes through a honeymoon of tourism, when numbers are low and Americans a novelty, and a sad consensus of opinion is that southern Ireland left this period a few years back. Go to Dublin, they say in Belfast, and you won’t meet a Dubliner.

While Irish tourism boomed thirty years ago, when every ethnicity of American staked a claim to ancestry in the Emerald Isle, no one wanted to know about Northern Ireland. “Men with eyebrows on their cheeks, toothless simpletons, badly tarmaced drives, horses running round council estates, and men in platform shoes being arrested for bombings” was Alan Partridge’s summary of the country back in 1997.

But now, ten years after the Troubles ended, Northern Ireland tourism is booming. When Caterer sent me out there to report on it, I expected plastic versions of the Giants Causeway and delinquents in Guiness hats. But all i found out there was exceptional hospitality. Go and you won’t be disappointed. It’s like Prague 15 years ago or Dublin 30 years ago, when the population still cared and the barmen were local.