EATING OUT AND DRINK

Peer past the fodder and multiple menus and there’s food to satisfy

WE wander across the road, under some scaffolding, heading on past that awkward and unwelcoming bar area, with a giant cardboard box in it tonight, and on, into Ad Lib’s restaurant. I’ve got to say it’s not for any other reason than someone told me the other day this place is 40 years old. And then I remembered it was the first restaurant I ever went to in Glasgow. Not 40 years ago, honest, but long enough ago for its whole burger vibe to have been firsttime-round cool to a bunch of teenagers in the big smoke for either a ZZ Top or Cheap Trick concert. It really hasn’t changed much. And it felt dated then.

Though as No1 son and myself slide into a booth at 8pm on this damp Tuesday evening with all but tumbleweed blowing through the place – and slightly worryingly through that open kitchen – I can’t help thinking what a lovely ceiling with its cornices and rows of square window panes up there. Wouldn’t this make a great and classy little French bistro?

Now Ad Lib was selling burgers when Wimpy was the biggest high-street food chain, when Neil Diamond was in the charts, when the microwave was the cooking item of choice. Remember that ping-ping sound? Actually, we’re hearing it right now from the kitchen over there. Uh-oh. Over the sound of Neil Diamond on the sound system, genuinely still rambling his way through Rose. You couldn’t make this up.

Anyway Ad Lib ploughed that burger furrow all alone through the barren years and yet somehow managed to be almost entirely forgotten when burgers became hip, despite selflessly – and I mean that most sincerely, folks – running the annual Glasgow burger competitions. So tonight Matthew, are we being 1970s burger people? Or hipster burger people? Er, no. For the very grumpy old-geezer reason that I never order from chalkboard menus that have the specials painted on. Like with paint, as the burger chalkboard menu seems to have.

Luckily, or insanely, depending on how much time you want to spend reading in a restaurant, there are three other completely different menus. Seriously. A real chalkboard menu with items written in, ahem, chalk; a smokehouse menu; and a paper placemat one on the table. They keep trying to take the placemat one away too. Hey, it’s a placemat. You can leave it after customers order.

I’d be lying if I said I read all the way through every item on every menu. I’d also by lying if I said I didn’t scan the Americana stuff and think they were a precis of the Brake Bros back catalogue, much like everywhere else these days.

We do have pulled pork and fries, which are exactly as expected. If they make this pulled pork themselves they want to get round to Tesco and get a bag of theirs (I’m told there’s at least one genuine burger restaurant in town that does exactly that when they run out). Not this one, I should add.

From a completely different menu we’re having lamb rump with a tumbler of green, garlicky chimichurri sauce to pour over it and sweet, sticky grilled okra underneath. Hang on. I know I’m not exactly sweetness and light tonight, but this is very good.

Big, rough-and-tumble breaded fishcakes are then split, peered into and tasted to reveal crushed potatoes, pinches of caper and dashes of lemon and salmon. They’re

Ad Lib was selling burgers when Wimpy was the biggest high-street food chain and Neil Diamond was in the charts

also very good. OK, the barbecued pork chop, served like everything else on a plank of wood, lacks flavour and is dry. But who remembers how to cook a pork chop properly these days? Not even Heston Blumenthal and I paid £50 for one of his not three weeks ago.

So, Ad Lib. Weird. They’re clinging on to the pulled pork and barbecued burger brigade nonsense. Ignore all that, though, and the homespun bistro food is good.

PHOTOGRAPH: KIRSTY ANDERSON Ad Lib was ploughing the burger furrow long before many of today’s food hipsters were born