Quaint hilltop restaurant gives reasons to grin up north

Four Vicars sounds like tearoom territory, a place where scones are pronounced scons and served with Olympic standard preserves. The Armagh restaurant was, indeed, a tearoom in a former life but it has shrugged off the chintz and become something more ambitious.

I’m in the city for the John O’Connor writing school to talk to chef Dean Coppard about Australian food in front of a small audience. Armagh might seem like an unusual place to talk kangaroo and bush tucker but local writer O’Connor ended his days in Australia. I’ve tried not to eat too much of Coppard’s hearty Skippy stew before climbing Vicar’s Hill to number 4 for lunch.

A friend rang to rave about it after a recent trip to HomePlace, the Seamus Heaney centre in Bellaghy. His emotional visit across the border had included dinner in Four Vicars. “It was good, I mean really good,” he said. The restaurant is in a beautiful Georgian house on Vicar’s Hill beside one of Armagh’s two cathedrals. It’s up a hill so steep you’d nearly need crampons to climb it in icy weather.

Up some railed steps and in the front door the house opens into two handsome small dining rooms on either side of the door. We are led through to the back and to a glass-roofed extension looking out onto a terraced garden that falls away down the other side of the hill. It must be nice when the doors can be opened in summer? A rare thing, it seems. “It happened twice this year,” owner Kasia Reid says with a grim smile.

Kasia’s husband Gareth is the chef. He had a 15-year career in kitchens around the world according to the website, including Delphi Lodge in Connemara, before they came to his home county to open their own place.

In this smart room painted in shades of grey, oven-fresh brown bread arrives to the table. It has a biscuity crumb and the great flavour of something baked a short time earlier.

Then there’s a beautiful bowl of glistening game broth – all clarity and clout like carefully brewed tea. It has tiny cubes of celeriac and carrot, each precisely cut to cook at the same time, absorbing the delicate broth without losing their own distinct notes of root, one mineral one sweet. Grounding it all with a meaty resonance are two satisfyingly chewy dumplings of minced wood pigeon. It costs £4 (€4.70).

Across the table in front of my friend is a fine seafood soup. Chunks of good fresh fish and squid have been submerged, not in the typical cream but in a thick soup of chickpeas, tomato and chorizo giving us a Kilkeel soup with a Spanish flourish.

I don’t order chicken in restaurants because so much of it comes from miserable factory farm conditions. But here it’s free range so after the pigeon I’m keeping it fowl. The juicy leg and thigh portion has all the flavour that meat gets from being cooked on the bone, its skin glassy and crisp. Polenta and Parmesan have been stirred into a soupy mush and then baked alongside kale and shallots. Gentle fronds of Kilkeel crab are light and lovely on excellent toast with a sweetly pickled cucumber and a side of great chips.

We are in apple country in November so it has to be the apple tart for dessert. It’s a skilful slice of baking, biscuity pastry filled with a springy frangipane mix of almonds, apples and blackberries. House ice cream has been drowned in an espresso for an excellent affogato which is all creamy sweetness with bitterness, hot with cold.

In a roundup of his favourite towns a few years ago art historian Dan Cruickshank wrote about Vicar’s Hill terraced houses. They were, he said, one of the glories of Armagh and his favourite kind of architecture unadorned yet classical and full of “humility and self-effacing beauty”.

They’re busy preparing for a feather and fur (the game not the fashion kind) themed evening as we leave. I’ve been impressed with the quiet precision and care that went into our lunch. It’s a higher standard than you typically get in this price bracket, and even more welcome given the focus must have been on the bigger event later on. Northern Ireland’s food scene is growing in stature in quiet unexpected places. Four Vicars’ food is as good as its handsome setting, making for a restaurant more than fit for its home.

Lunch for two came to £45 (€52.73)