Historic gaol unveils new restaurant offering

Cuffs Bar & Grill is a new 80-seater licensed restaurant that has been opened inside the former Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast.

Situated in the old kitchen blocks at the notorious Troubles prison, Cuffs Bar & Grill was built following an investment of £350,000 from the Belfast Tourist Attraction and Conference Centre. A total of 30 new jobs have been created.

It was officially opened during the summer at a reception attended by Belfast’s Lord Mayor, Brian Kingston and the director of the strategic planning division at the Department for Infrastructure (DoI), Carol Ramsey.

Cuffs takes its place as part of a comprehensive tourist offering at the former prison and Phelim Devlin, a director with Crumlin Road Gaol Ltd., the company which operates the facility, says that the new venue will help meet a significant need:

“The restaurant project came to be because we found that we were using an outside caterer to look after our tourist visitors,” he told LCN recently. “People were asking us for more than we were able to deliver. They wanted a sit-down meal and the tour groups that visited us in the evenings were looking for the whole experience. After a tour of the gaol, rather than going back to their hotel, they wanted to stay on and be looked after here.”

There is a team of 10 in the kitchen at Cuffs under the supervision of head chef, Damien Blaney, who came to the gaol from a position at Cultra House. Open daily from 9am until 10pm, Cuffs offers a good range of dishes with an emphasis on locally-sourced ingredients and appealing price points.

“We’re open to the public as well, so people can walk in off the street and enjoy a meal in Cuffs,” adds Phelim. “We’ve been involved in a lot of outside catering work ourselves and we really felt that there was a need in this area of Belfast for something more to serve the local people. Most of the eateries are in the town centre, so we were very keen to get these facilities in place at the gaol.”

Work started on-site at the listed building in the summer of last year and lasted for 12 months. The new restaurant is situated in the basement of the building, underneath the main prison circle where the prisoners would have been housed.

During the course of the work, builders uncovered an unfinished escape tunnel that ran for five or six metres. Experts were unable to establish whether the abortive tunnel had been dug during the prison’s Victorian era or in more modern times, but it was extensively photographed and then covered up again to preserve it intact.

In terms of its design, the new restaurant has deliberately avoided the austerity that is evident in other parts of the prison complex:

“People wanted to know if we would stick with the ambience of the gaol when we were designing the restaurant,” continues Phelim. “But we were after something that would be a lot more comfortable for our visitors. There are certainly elements of the gaol environment here, but if you walked straight in here from the street, you wouldn’t know that you were in a gaol.

“We really wanted this to feel like a destination venue, a place that people could come to on a Saturday evening before going on somewhere else. We also want to see the restaurant incorporated into our other entertainment programmes at the gaol and as part of our wedding packages.”

Crumlin Road Gaol Ltd. has been looking after and developing the former prison for the last four years. In that time, they have welcomed around half-a-million visitors to the historic site. As well as preserving and showcasing the grim surroundings of the gaol, the company also runs a comprehensive programme of entertainment at the venue and makes it available for private functions and corporate hire.

Now that Cuffs is open for business, Phelim says that the company will switch its focus onto further development of its function room and business facilities:

“A couple of years from now, we hope to have our catering operations full developed and we hope to be making better use of the facilities available to us for events such as weddings,” he adds. “That’s an area of the business that we are very keen to develop and we are also looking at the possibility of making guest accommodation available in some of the wings.”