Breakfast for one at the Lock Keeper’s Inn

PEOPLE-WATCHING is a refined skill. A person needs enough confidence to sit and observe the world as it passes them by, but not too much to appear, well – creepy.

My friend Johnny has it nailed. When asked about a restaurant or coffee shop, he’ll tell me how good it is for his favourite sport. Never mind the quality or price of the food on offer, or the standard of service. If a rat ran across the floor, momentarily perching on a lady’s handbag before scampering into the kitchen, that point of interest would come second after: “I got a great wee table at the window with an almost panoramic view of the Lisburn Road, and wait ‘til you hear about this huge rat…”

Johnny would love the Lock Keeper’s Inn. And this week it is the epicenter of topical people-watching – or should that just be ‘person watching’? The Lock Keeper’s Inn sits on the leafy Lagan Towpath, several miles away from the hustle and bustle of Belfast city centre. A short cycle along the route, hugging the meander of the river Lagan, is enough to work up a fair appetite and it seems a perfect stop off for ramblers, south Belfast power-walkers and, this week, prying journalists.

The newly built coffee shop-cum-tourist centre is housed in a faux farm out-house and blends in well to the surroundings. A £1.6m joint investment between the National Lottery Heritage fund and Peter Robinson’s Castlereagh Borough Council made sure of this, summed up well in a council press blurb as, “a great example of the Lottery, the public sector and young talent working together.” Too right.

Orders are placed at the till, and you can pick from a wide ranging menu spread across chalk boards on the walls behind the counter. I was tempted by the ‘Freshly made Homemade stew served in a hollowed-out Belfast bap’ (£5.50), but opted for a plain bagel with bacon and cream cheese (£3.25) and an Americano coffee (£1.60).

Sadly there was no cream cheese.

I took a seat at one of the seven or so tables, and watched as two of Kirk’s famous lattes were made up for a couple of old ladies beside me.

Any Belfast coffee shop owner would kill for the coverage the Inn has had in the last week: front page splashes across the world, with the now famous latte along with Kirk’s cheeky smile spread across countless news-stands. Personally, I felt sympathy for the Inn’s staff. The minimum wage pay mustn’t be worth it considering the immense, er, spotlight (pardon the pun) which is now shining on their lives. Every table in the cafe had been filled in the 20 minutes I’d been there, and all eyes were on the action behind the counter – it was a people-watcher’s wet dream.

There were signs of fatigue and the under pressure staff had given up the pretence of business as usual. A Dublin radio journalist stationed himself at the end of the path, asking punters to dish the dirt on their trip to the Inn. “Did you see Kirk? What’s the mood? Do you think Iris will come?” he kept asking.

Avoiding eye contact with any of the gawking customers the waitress brought over my bagel, slamming it down on the table with enough force to answer three questions floating around my head: “No, Kirk isn’t here. Yes, it’s been a living hell and no, you can’t have a fork.” But who in their right mind eats a bacon bagel with a fork anyway I reasoned to myself?

The bacon was thick, succulent and not too salty, and the bagel tasted fresh, lathered in buttered. I topped it off with red sauce, though the tired looking waitress had kindly given me the option of brown as well.

The coffee tasted strong and fresh and with a light whisp of creme on the top, but really I couldn’t wait to tell the Dublin reporter about my salacious bacon.

It’s hard to think a nineteen year-old (now 21) was behind this venture. The Lock Keeper’s Inn runs as a tight, impressive operation. The food was great, the staff were professional, the cafe itself was quaint and comfortable. At the interview, when Mr McCambley was putting forward his plans for the cafe, a panellist was so impressed by his slick proposal he asked Kirk to explain who’d put it together for him, unable to believe that someone of McCambley’s age could have such keen business sense.

And as I left McCambley’s Inn, the tired old saying “the end justifies the means” popped into my head. This whole salacious scandal may yet cost Northern Ireland its first minister, a leading politician might have ended up having a mental breakdown as a consequence and the whole debacle may have presented Stormont with another excuse to push back Policing and Justice – the final hurdle in an eleven year struggle to implement the terms and conditions of the Good Friday Agreement. But
didn’t we get a lovely quaint riverside cafe out of it.

What I had:
Americano: £1.60
Bagel with Bacon and Cream Cheese: £3.25

Atmosphere: Febrile
Score: 4/5

Keith Anderson is a journalist based in Belfast. His blog is Keith Belfast