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Newspaper article was key for restaurant
MOTHER India opened in 1990 and the restaurant has been the highmark for Glasgow curries ever since. It was by no means an overnight success. Chef and owner Monir Mohammed grew up in the East End and remembers a different city.
There wasn’t much fine dining in Finnieston back then.
His ambition was to stand out for the crowd.
“The Indian restaurants that were busy in those days all had the same menus but we wanted to be different,” he says. “It was slow at first, but it was a restaurant review we had in The Herald from Raymond Gardner in 1990 that changed everything.
“Within a few hours people were queuing at the door.
“Then they came back with their pals or their family and it grew from there.”
Monir says it is important to move with the times. Something that is apparent as we sit in Mother India Café on Argyle Street which opened in 2014, pioneering Indian small plates and introduced different styles of Punjabi cooking. “With Indian food you always have to going forward,” he says. “When we started, Indian restaurants were stuck in the same place, now we are going down a different road.
“A better road. It’s healthier, better presentation, more authentic. We have wonderful vegetarian dishes.”
“We’ve been here just over 30 years so the people I served in the nineties are not the same people who come here now” he says before acknowledging that there are customers that have a relationship with the business that spans the decades.”
Billy Connolly has been a regular visitor. Steven Spielberg once arrived in for dinner and wasn’t recognised by any of the staff – it was only later they found out. Star chef Anthony Bourdain turned up with a big production crew to film for his travel series.
For the most part, though, it’s the regular customers who maybe turn up on a rainy Monday night who Monir is delighted to see walk through the door: “The 80s and the 90s was a boomtime for Indian restaurants in Glasgow.
“We’ve kept going and people still remember us. “The hardest thing is to keep people coming back and maintaining your standards. It’s a privilege to still be a valued local restaurant.”
High spirits in industry
I HAD a conversation about my Best of Glasgow book last weekend for the Bookface brunch group in Glaschu, with views over a bustling Royal Exchange Square.
This began as a community for literary enthusiasts who swapped reading lists online during lockdown. It’s now grown into a series of real life events with added food and drink.
The event was a reminder of the renewed spirit of hospitality where people can gather together at the weekend – not something to be taken for granted after the travails of the past two years.
As I was admiring my Scottish smoked salmon breakfast I started a conversation about how our native seafood is the best in the world – when I had dinner in the three Michelin star Le Bernardin restaurant in New York their salmon was from Loch Fyne.
The point was reinforced on Monday when I went to a discussion in the Blythswood Square Hotel about sustainability in Scotland’s seafood industry with guest speakers Guy Grieve, founder of The Ethical Shellfish Company, Fiona Houston, CEO of Mara Seawood and Federico Lubrani from Slow Food Glasgow – expect more conversations on a similar subject ahead of the COP26 conference.
While I was there I learned that the landmark hotel’s Bo & Birdy
dining room will be relaunched with a seafood menu as iasg in the new year.
Meanwhile, one of Glasgow’s finest purveyors of delights, Crabshakk have confirmed to me that they are moving forward with plans to open on Vinicombe Street at the former Botanic Gardens Garage building.
They will be neighbours with Ka Pao, the successful sister restaurant to Ox and Finch. John Macleod set up Crabshakk on Argyle Street and as a long-time resident of the West End he was keen to have more of a presence in the area.
“They are currently on site and if everything goes to plan the new restaurant will be another flag-bearer for Scottish seafood in 2022.
Trusty Buck’s Stops Here
IT was a business created out of lockdown. Trusty Buck’s Hugh Kearns, a former pub musician, started a plantbased takeaway from a converted horsebox kitchen parked in his parent’s driveway in Pollokshields.
This grew into a unit in Dalmarnock, with a staff of eleven.
Now the takeaway business has closed. Hugh explained: “When the lockdown ended in May we found ourselves in a sector which took a downturn.
“The reopening of bars and restaurants followed by the return of live music and events caused a collapse of 50% in demand for home delivery service.
“This trading situation has now become unsustainable. While the drop in demand was foreseeable, sadly we were not in a position to pivot into something different when it happened.
“Everyone asks me why I don’t just open a sit in place now, but it’s not as simple as that. We’re talking about tens of thousands to do that and we don’t have that option available to us right now.”