Redbreast x Roam Fine Dining | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

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

Filed: 25 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/444

There are evenings that linger long after the last dram is poured, and the Redbreast x Roam fine dining session at Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 was firmly one of them. On 25th July, the kitchen team at Roam — led by the assured hand of Ryan Jenkins — sat down alongside one of Ireland's most beloved whiskey families to conjure something genuinely memorable. This was pot still whiskey and fine food in conversation, and neither had anything to prove.

About This Event

A Fine-dining experience that will be remembered by all who share in the experience! Redbreast Irish Whiskey is the prestige Irish Pot Still Whiskey that is taking over the world. Each new release brings a flurry of excitement and stock is scarce. Each new addition to the Redbreast family feels like it belongs. The Core Redbreast collection is an absolute delight to taste, and with the craft of Ryan Jenkins and his team at Roam, they are conjuring up a rather special meal to reflect the complexities of these whiskies.

Looking Back

Redbreast Irish Whiskey is, in the simplest terms, the dram that turned a generation of Scotch drinkers into Irish whiskey people. Single pot still, rich, layered, and deeply expressive — it carries a kind of quiet authority that doesn't need to shout. Each new release generates genuine excitement, and stock disappears almost as quickly as word spreads. To spend an evening working through the Core Redbreast collection in a considered, unhurried way felt like a rare privilege, the kind of duchas — that inherited ease and belonging — that only the best whiskeys can conjure.

Roam, nestled in Belfast City Centre, is a multi-concept entertainment venue that knows how to hold a room. But on this particular evening, it held something more intimate: a table of whiskey curious guests ready to give themselves over to the experience. Chef Ryan Jenkins and his team had clearly approached the pairing not as an exercise in showing off, but as a genuine act of listening — to the whiskeys themselves. Each course arrived as a response to what was already in the glass, drawing out the orchard fruit, the spice, the long warming finish that defines the Redbreast character.

What set this session apart from a standard tasting was the cumulative effect of the experience. A fine dining format gives a whiskey room to breathe between courses, time for the palate to reset and reconsider. The uisce beatha was never competing with the food; it was completing it. Guests who might have come in knowing Redbreast 12 as a reliable favourite left with a different, deeper map of the range — its textures, its moods, its ambitions. At £55, it represented the kind of value that only becomes clearer in retrospect.

Redbreast has featured across Belfast Whiskey Week in a number of forms over the years — from immersive sensory experiences to cheese pairings — but something about the combination of Jenkins' cooking and the structured intimacy of this session gave the brand space to be fully itself. There was no theatre for theatre's sake, no distraction. Just whiskey, food, and honest attention. For those who attended, it will sit comfortably in the memory alongside the best meals they've had in this city. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who made it to the table.