The great Kosovan pasta mystery

TE SEBA

YOU may remember this place when it was called Turnip N Enjoy which got my award for the best restaurant with a daft name in all Glasgow. It was actually quite good and the people were nice but then it just kind of closed with little more than a poignant website post to record it was ever even there.

For a while it was nothing, but now suddenly it’s reopened again with the same pleasant people and a name that is no longer daft. The new one’s actually Kosovan and means, I think, Seba’s Place, and that’s what I was told by Seba’s wife who has served me this lunchtime.

Now, before you say Kosovo and pasta, I Googled this and Kosovans do indeed eat a lot of pasta. Whether they eat it with prosecco every day, I couldn’t rightly say, but I’m not completely convinced the Glasgow lunchtime crowd is ready for that heady combination.

Put it this way: there’s only me and one other couple in here just now. Though, honestly, almost a tenner for a bowl of pasta may be fine in the evening – but at lunchtime? Lunchtime menu – and prices, surely?

Anyway, pasta and prosecco is what it’s all about here and now on Glasgow’s Great Western Road, as outside the sun kisses the pavement and people rush about carrying lunchtime sandwiches to stuffy desks.

I’ve just leisurely eaten a great big bowl of pappardelle with ragu – not, you’ll note, that awful British concoction Bolognese sauce – and I feel an overwhelming temptation to describe it as silky, even though it’s actually much better than that tired cliche. The pasta is sleek, soft and delicious but, and here’s the cunning bit, someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to make a ragu from brisket that is rich, packed with morsels of tender meat and clinging, as it should be, to every strand. I eat it all and then scrape the very edge of the bowl with my fork.

However, given Te Seba offers exclusively pasta and that’s either pappardelle, fettuccine or lasagne, and this is basically the same thing just cut differently, I want to know where this Te Seba offers exclusively pasta – pappardelle, fettuccine or lasagne – but where does it come from? pasta comes from. Is it handmade in the back? At home? Is this info on the menu? Is it on the website? Can the staff help? Ummm. I don’t get any more information than an enigmatic assurance that it’s made locally. It certainly tastes fresh.

Frankly, though, if this is an attempt to rediscover pasta – and who wouldn’t want to have glorious pasta every single day – it may be an idea to boast a little about where that pasta comes from. If this is an attempt to do for pasta what has pretty recently been done successfully for pizza – call it gentrification, artisanation or MasterChefisation – then it needs a kick in the marketing pants. Funnily enough, and along those lines, there was more than a little wobbly moment when I sat down and tasted my opening dish here. Cacio Mac is what it’s called on the menu, cunningly combining the name of pasta’s hottest Roman (in magazineland anyway) dish with the hipsterish vogue for anything mac.

Intrigued, I waited to see what hand-crafted pasta shapes would be coming my way dressed simply and purely with pecorino. In fact it was a bowl of rigatoni with a light, gentle sauce made from pecorino. Fine, but to my tastebuds this was straightforward dried