In the flesh, Wendy Erskine is as luminous as her prose. Tonight, she’s wearing a white silk blouse with a black bow, black leather skirt and ankle boots. Pale as a Sex Pistol with a slash of lipstick, she floats cream and coral in the liaison-dark lighting of the Hilton bar.
We’re meeting on a cold, damp Northern Irish Wednesday towards the end of February. ‘This is nice,’ Erskine says, sipping her margarita and eyeing the room, the staff, our fellow drinkers. I wonder if she’s weighing them up for material. Is the jolly, ingratiating barman harbouring a broken heart? Is the vacuum-tugging cleaner over in the lobby pulling a double shift to support an elderly mother who we will learn is incapable of returning her love? Tonight will take us to Ox, one of only two Michelin-starred restaurants in Belfast.
Belfast. Over the past seven years, across two superlative collections of short stories (Sweet Home, Dance Move) and a sickeningly assured debut novel, The Benefactors (a mystifying omission from last year’s Booker shortlist), Erskine has made the city hers in the same way that LA was Joan Didion’s, or Chicago Saul Bellow’s. Its people – the bluntness of their speech, the ellipsis of their thought patterns – are the plasma of her writing. She only published her first book as she turned 50. ‘It’s a nice narrative to say I bided my time until I was fully formed or whatever’, she sighs. ‘But it’s not true. I wish I’d got going earlier.’
We do get going. We drain our glasses and cleave the night.
When Stephen Toman and Alain Kerloc’h opened Ox back in 2013, Belfast was just beginning to glitter as a food destination. 13 years on, it is blazing. There’s Edo, Stove, Beau and Wine & Brine, along with the city’s other Michelin-starred restaurant, The Muddler’s Club. We’re eased into a table smack in the centre of the room, the soft thrum of the kitchen at our backs. What does she make of all the culinary changes in her city?
‘Well, one of the things that surprises me is that there aren’t too many places these days that do good “Irish/Ulster” food, beyond the Ulster fry. I met some French tourists on the train the other day and they so wanted to get an Irish stew. I was thinking – I couldn’t tell you a single place in the town where you could get that. But I could tell you five places that do Korean fried chicken.’
Erskine was born here in 1968, her father a bank inspector, her mother a teaching assistant. It’s a background she describes as ‘solidly lower-middle class by the standards of the day. But we were coming from more of a working-class place in terms of food.’
Did you grow up in a dinner-in-front-of-the-tv house?
