Holohan's Pantry Food & Whiskey Pairing | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 22 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 2 min
Ref: BWW/24/028

Some events leave their mark even before they begin — and Session 37 of Belfast Whiskey Week 2024, a fine dining whiskey pairing at the beloved Holohan's Pantry, was one that many had circled on their calendars long before July arrived. Planned as a landmark meeting of serious food craft and serious uisce beatha, it was unfortunately postponed ahead of the festival due to unforeseen circumstances. It didn't happen, but it very nearly did — and that story is worth telling.

About This Event

This Event is Postponed well in advance. Unforeseen circumstances has caused BWW to postpone this event - if you have a ticket for the event, someone will be in touch to discuss options. Sorry for this inconvenience.

Looking Back

Holohan's Pantry sits on the banks of the River Lagan in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, a restaurant that has earned its reputation through quiet confidence rather than noise. The kind of place where the cooking does the talking. For Belfast Whiskey Week 2024, the plan was to bring that ethos into conversation with whiskey — a specialist tasting dinner in which the kitchen and the glass would speak to one another in equal measure. At £55 a head, it promised to be one of the most considered and intimate sessions in the festival's programme.

Food and whiskey pairing events occupy a particular place in the duchas of what BWW tries to do each year: they ask people to slow down, to pay attention, to let flavour lead. Where a masterclass might build knowledge, a pairing dinner builds feeling — the moment when a bite of something changes what you taste in the dram that follows, or vice versa. It is a reminder that whiskey, for all its complexity, is still something meant to be enjoyed alongside life. Sessions like Session 22's Sexton Deconstruction Showcase and the Bushmills History MasterClass have shown how much depth an event can hold when the right brand and the right setting come together.

The postponement was announced well in advance, and BWW moved quickly to reach out to ticket holders directly — a small mercy in what was, no doubt, a frustrating situation for those who had been looking forward to it. These things happen. Kitchens are complex. Schedules shift. The seanchas of any festival includes not just its triumphs but its near-misses, and it would be dishonest to leave this one unacknowledged.

What the postponement did not change was the appetite — in every sense — for this kind of event. The pairing of considered Irish whiskey with serious Ulster cooking remains one of the more exciting frontiers in how we celebrate the uisce beatha tradition on home soil. Holohan's Pantry is a venue that understands restraint and depth in equal measure, and when the stars align for a rescheduled collaboration, it will be worth every minute of the wait. In the meantime, you can explore the wider BWW Whiskey Map to get a sense of just how rich the landscape of distilleries and expressions around Ireland and beyond really is.

To everyone who had a ticket for Session 37: the intention was sound, the venue was right, and the whiskey was waiting. Sláinte — and watch this space.