Comfort food is all peasant & correct
Big bowls of flavoursome food warm the heart
The modern world can be mystifying. Every time I get all confused navigating the one-way system and bus gates of Govanhill, I think of my late mother.
She dreaded crossing the Kingston Bridge, grasped the steering wheel of the Cortina with white knuckles and referred to the area south of the Clyde in terms that are now deemed unacceptable for a family newspaper.
Thanks to Google Maps, I only get lost for minutes at a time. But while the streets are manageable, it’s harder to keep track of the microbusinesses that populate the streets.
The row of cafés and restaurants at the north end of Victoria Road are particularly fluid. Big Counter, our destination this evening, has been Bakery 47 and Lagom Kitchen. When the staff behind Errol’s Hot Pizza, a good few blocks further up, first opened this unit, it opened at weekends and served cheeseburgers.
In the summer, it kept the limited opening hours but pivoted to a more varied menu and began calling itself a “dinner house”. It still retains an air of mystery – there is precious little indication, from the street, what actually goes on there.
Instagram followers can watch the kitchen’s planning process as they post various updates, crossings out and all, until it’s finalised and ready to eat.
It is also, theoretically, possible to book via Instagram. I thought I had done this, and awarded myself several down-withthe-kids points. Then arrived, starving and ready for dinner, only to be told they had never heard of me.
Luckily, when you want fed at 6pm, this is rarely a problem.
Unlike just about every other restaurant on the planet, Big Counter does not second-guess what customers might want to eat. Most menus dance between stimulating the chefs and placating the more
conservative customers. No such considerations here. If you don’t want to share a whole fish with your dining companion, or fancy a pork chop the size of your head, you can piece together a few smaller dishes or go elsewhere.
This approach can be a gamble with Carb Boy, who sometimes announces previously hidden aversions to game or thyme or beetroot to keep me on my toes. But there were no complaints or petted lips, just a request for a plate of seafood beignets to get us started.
My mental Google search for beignet came up with some kind of fried dough, possibly the savoury doughnut that follows me from menu to menu. This was more of a fritter but a very enjoyable one, fishy and hot, with a punchy sauce.
The sharing main course was cassoulet, a strong choice for a grey winter evening. Big Counter does not put one pin in the map and stick with that region’s recipes but it has a strong European peasant energy.
Cassoulet, originally from the south of France, is an elaborate stew with duck (or other meat), sausage and white beans, exactly the kind of fiddly dish that sits at odds with our impatient lifestyles.
I shredded the plentiful meat off the duck’s leg while Carb Boy forked through the beans, approving loudly of the generous chunks of saucisson within.
It was rich without being overwhelming, thanks to the delicious fat leaching from the quacker and the bangers.
The side order of garlic fried potatoes were superfluous but very delicious – bronzed, crispy, boldly salted. Even better were the green beans, thickly coated in green olive tapenade, crunchy with toasted almonds. The portion was designed as a vegan main course than to keep a huge vat of stew company. However, I took this as a challenge and chomped my way to a clean plate.
Desserts are homely, without the technical fireworks of fancier places and thankfully free of the squiggled sauces and unripe berries used to “add value” in more modest establishments.
When Carb Boy discovered risalamande was a Danish rice pudding with cherries, he looked no further. I struggled to identify the almande bit but the ris was delightfully creamy and white. The cherries were pureed into a chunky scarlet lake. It was school dinner at a cool Scandi secondary.
My treacle tart was a strong take on the classic but a pastry base too far for someone so full of duck and beans and I had to admit defeat.
Big Counter is the antidote to chain restaurants, as quirky and individual as the area it inhabits. If you want to watch southsiders in their natural habitat, wearing unexpected trousers and dining on grilled cabbage, this is the perfect location.
But if you just want to eat as if your talented northern European granny had taken control of the kitchen, that works too.