Nick’s the new big cheese
Anna finds gimmicky new eaterie worth dipping into
Restaurant trends take a while to travel the 500 miles from London to Scotland’s central belt.
Months, years, sometimes decades pass before they make it further north, often mutating strangely along the way. Or else they die a slow, painful death somewhere past Stirling.
There are restaurateurs who operate in a vacuum, paying no attention to what others are doing. Others are desperate to import every fad up the road and recreate it for a fickle market that’s always looking for something new and diverting to post on social media.
Nick’s, a newly zhuzhed up neighbourhood eaterie in Hyndland, has just such a thing. Their gimmick is a huge truckle of Parmesan on its own sturdy trolley. Order the cheese wheel pasta and this magnificent item is wheeled up to the table. A skillet of toasty fettuccine in white sauce arrives from the kitchen. The waiter tosses this into the hollow centre of the cheese and thrashes it around until it’s thick with the melted Parmesan.
It’s theatrical and something we haven’t seen before (unless we are regulars at east London Instagram trap Gloria). Unlike many modish innovations, I thought it might also taste pretty good.
When I mentioned it to Carb Boy, he had his coat on before I had finished the sentence.
The live pasta show has arrived in Glasgow’s west end thanks to the company behind Brel, Sloans and the Griffin. It’s part of a gentle cosmetic makeover and menu revamp. The cheese wheel is not the only wow factor on the menu – there is also a DIY dessert station where the sugar-dependent can create their own sundae.
It all looks cheery and fresh, with exposed stone walls, neon, artificial foliage and mismatched chairs. The servers are also smiley and, crucially, genuine and friendly. One of the advantages of having a few different units is rotating the best staff so they can show the others how it’s done. Nurturing staff who can talk to customers rather than training them into script-spouting service bots makes an enormous difference.
The menu is as cheesy as the tagliatelle, tarting up the pizzas, pastas, salads and kebabs with west end in-jokes and creaking Glaswegian references. I almost didn’t order “Nick’s meatbaws” because the name was so cringey.
It would have been my loss because they were really good. Proper nonna-style blobs of
minced pork with a good hit of fennel, in a rich tomato sauce with a hefty pelt of mozzarella on top. With two slices of garlic bread, this was enough food for a main course.
Carb Boy’s mushroom bruschetta was similarly vast, two hunks of toast groaning under a heap of creamy garlic mushrooms, a handful of bouncy rocket and fat slivers of fresh Parmesan. It was also, in a homely way, very good.
Monkfish kebabs were one of the lighter main courses but, full of baws, two were too much for me. I took the second skewer of meaty white fish, courgette and red pepper slices home in a box.
The plating needs tweaking – the portion was so huge that the kebabs sat on the salad, rendering it mushy and unpleasant. Swirls of sticky balsamic dressing did not help. But the fish and its red pepper sauce were pleasingly hot and fresh.
The deluxe cheesy pasta lived up to its theatrical presentation and big sell. Carb Boy, who is always ready to improve on perfection, topped his fettuccine with crispy pancetta and peas. The result was a five-star version of the student classic and was worth the threat of indigestion and bad dreams.
My plan to DIY a dessert came to nothing – I was too full to make it dow n the steps to the sundae station.
Carb Boy, having protested that he might pop, rallied and ordered key lime pie. This American invention – like cheesecake but disappointing – is not one of my favourites. He pronounced this version as too lightly limed for his taste.
This did not stop him from scraping up every microgram and fighting me for the good vanilla ice cream that came with it.
I’d like to thank Nick’s for reminding me that gimmicks are not always bad. That fettuccine is a splendid piece of lactic overindulgence and a great bit of fun.
The meatbaws are good enough for me to forgive the toe-curling name and the starters would pass as a main course for anyone except a hollow-legged teenager. Or the men at the next table, who ordered an extra pizza instead of dessert, plus a second round of chips.
The waitress did not judge or snigger and had it all on the table in the nick of time.
Who needs London when Nick’s is on the 4a bus route?