Old spice favourite still paks a punch
Much-loved neighbourhood bar reopens after 20 years
AFriday night curry and pints with pals is a Glasgow tradition that feels as old as St Mungo.
It even has its own rhyming slang – going for a Ruby Murray and paying for the rounds from the Walter Mitty.
Senorita left Glasgow at the end of the 90s, when Murphy’s Pakora Bar in Finnieston was the last stop on many legendary nights of shame.
It closed in 1999 and she moved to Barcelona. Haggis deep fried in chickpea flour became a distant memory as she lived her best tapas-filled life.
Now she is back in the west of Scotland and the son of Murphy’s original owners has revived the format for 2022.
It’s next door to the original property and the menu nods to several of the developments that have changed eating out in the intervening decades.
But the basic idea is the same – a jolly place for some unchallenging spicy food and drinks.
The Accountant, who knows her way around a curry and has also spent a chunk of time away from Glasgow, joined us to see if its charm had endured or it had become a period piece.
On a Friday at 7pm, the place was bouncing. A mezzanine level and open kitchen mean that a reasonably sized unit feels quite small and boxed in. The low ceiling contained the noise of several jolly tables and it felt almost frenetic.
The menu has expanded beyond the original pakora format to include other snacky items and a few standard curries. Old favourites such as haggis appear in original and vegan formats. The drinks now go beyond lager to prosecco, cocktails and orange wine.
We embraced the chaotic energy of the quite bonkers menu and ordered all the things we fancied, with no thought of how they might go together. Plus a bottle of Bulgarian pinot grigio because you’re only old once.
In our excitement, we forgot about the popadums, added them
on later and then failed to fully appreciate the old school pleasures of these spiky shards with their minty chopped onion dip because they arrived after the first pakoras.
The three cheese pakora were actually fat croquettes of dense grated cheddar, mozzarella and possibly paneer. They got the meal off to a poor start because they were cold. The edges were just warm, while the centre remained fridge chilly. Which was a shame because if they’d had been squidgingly melted, they would have been a joy.
Even cold they were edible, especially swiped in the spicy take on ketchup that came with them.
The aubergine fritters, a stone cold classic, could have been more substantial. I know that these purple beauties are flavour sponges rather than an assertive presence of their own but cut into fine slivers they lost any character they might have had.
The herb chutney, however, was pleasingly minty and fresh.
Cauliflower pakora, a favourite from the first time around, has had a glow up and now comes with pomegranate seeds. I like pomegranates as much as the next Ottolenghi obsessive but I couldn’t see that they added much to a basket of deep-fried cauliflower.
Hiding the seeds in a deep basket meant their visual impact was lost. Plus, how to eat them together? This felt like innovation
for the sake of it. The duck samosas, however, improved on the OG. Putting rich, gamey meat and potatoes in a darkly spiced sauce and wrapping it all in a pastry triangle was a genius idea and I salute whoever had it.
Chana poori was an odd couple. Pooris – small, puffy fried breads – are great. Chick pea curry is a classic for the ages. But putting the curry on the bread flattened its lively layers. This came off like a collapsed Indian taco and seemed ambitiously priced at £7.
The samosa chaat was more successful. The menu didn’t offer much of a clue as to what to expect and, in the dim light of our table, we were not much the wiser. It was a damp dish of
broken up samosas with onions and splodges of yoghurt. Possibly some kind of cunning way of using up leftovers? Whatever its origins, we appreciated its homely charms.
So not every dish was perfect but this did not massively matter. Like its predecessor, this new version of Murphy’s is not somewhere to sit up straight and make tasting notes in a little book.
It’s a jolly, friendly place to eat fried food and wash it down with cold beer or unthreatening wine. On that basis, it does the job well. With a little more tweaking and some more heat applied to the cheese pakora, it will be like the last 20 years never happened.