Ox, Belfast: The Michelin Star on the River Lagan

One Michelin star. One of just two in Northern Ireland. A tasting menu that changes daily. The chairs came from a local church. From the upper floor, the Harland & Wolff cranes are visible through the windows.

Ox is a Michelin-starred restaurant at 1 Oxford Street on the River Lagan, at the edge of Belfast's Cathedral Quarter. It has held its star since 2016. The chef is Stephen Toman. His co-owner is Alain Kerloc'h. There are no outside investors. It has been this way since they opened in March 2013 and they intend to keep it that way.

The Room

The downstairs dining room is white-painted exposed brick and bare wooden tables. No tablecloths. Upstairs, the same register but with floor-to-ceiling windows giving unobstructed views of the River Lagan — and, depending on the light, the Harland & Wolff cranes on the far bank, the Beacon of Hope sculpture, and the particular quality of Belfast's waterfront that the tourist literature has not yet learned to describe accurately.

The room seats 40. It was designed to not get in the way. It succeeds entirely in this. OxCave, Kerloc'h's wine bar, extends from the restaurant and has its own logic — natural producers, local microbreweries, and the same considered intelligence as the kitchen applied to a glass rather than a plate.

The Food

Toman left Belfast, trained at Taillevent and L'Astrance in Paris and The Camelback Inn in Arizona, then spent time in Copenhagen watching what Christian Puglisi was doing at Relae — the kitchen movement that treated foraging and supplier relationships as the starting point rather than the finishing touch. He came back to Belfast with a precise idea of what he wanted to build.

Intensity and clarity of flavour is at the heart of everything Toman does. The governing principle is that the ingredient leads the dish — not the other way around. Vegetables are not garnishes or sides. They are equal partners and occasional protagonists. A hay-baked celeriac with black trompette, truffle and lardo has appeared on recent menus in a form that makes the point more clearly than any description of the philosophy could.

The tasting menu changes daily. Not seasonally, not weekly. Daily — a commitment that requires the kind of supplier relationships and creative fluency that most restaurants cannot sustain. Toman sustains it. Courses can vary from table to table on the same evening. Mourne lamb, Ballywalter veal, foraged herbs, game in autumn — the produce is Northern Irish where possible and French in its handling: the precision of temperature, the rigour of reduction, the exactness of the accompaniments. What the French formation does not impose is its formality.

The tasting menu is approximately £110 per person. A four-course option at approximately £85 is available earlier in the week. Kerloc'h's wine programme extends across OxCave's list of natural producers and local microbreweries. The pairing is worth doing.

Belfast

Ox opened into a city that was still working out what it wanted to be.

The Cathedral Quarter in 2013 was early in its transformation — the art spaces and bars and independent businesses just beginning to establish the character that the area now has with confidence. Toman and Kerloc'h chose Oxford Street deliberately: a riverside address that looked toward the water rather than inward toward the city, that was near enough to the centre to be accessible and far enough from it to feel like a destination.

Belfast now has three Michelin-starred restaurants. A decade ago it had none. The city's culinary transformation is real — and Ox is the restaurant that most embodies both the ambition that started it and the rigour that has sustained it. There are no outside investors. Just Toman in the kitchen and Kerloc'h on the floor, doing the hours, as they have done since March 2013.

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Who it's for

• Anyone visiting Belfast who considers themselves interested in food — this is the non-negotiable table.
• Visitors to Ireland who want to understand that the island's best cooking is not confined to Dublin.
• Those who want the technical standard of Paris fine dining at a price point that Paris cannot match.