The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Bistro This is what happens when a restaurant critic picks the wrong place for lunch with friends
AZUR BISTRO
IN a way this was my fault. Not only did I pick the restaurant based on no more than a whim I didn’t check the menu online first. Azur Bistro then. Casual French dining. And the sound of me letting out a groan when I wander up an hour early – OK, I also got the time for our lunch wrong – as I scan the menu on the stand outside the entrance. Not only does everywhere else on this bustling terrace in Princes Square look busy, while Azur, er, isn’t, but frankly the menu seems a little generic.
Creamy mushrooms, chicken liver pate, mussels and, groan, even soup du jour jump out at me. Awkward. Especially as we former Evening Times newsroom guys had a tiny, itsy-bitsy falling out, online punch-up even, over where exactly we were meeting for lunch.
OK, that bit is my fault, too. That’s the trouble with being a restaurant critic, think you know it all.
Anyways, an hour or so later Stormin’ can’t make it but Robbie, Gibbo and I are so deep in stories of the day: Eck hid under the newsdesk; the morning Scoop Vincent informed the very same news desk he was sick by phoning a message not to the office, but to the newsagent across the road and other such stuff that I barely register that we’re eating from some voucher menu. Yeah, we like to tell the same stories.
I’ve had a reasonable sweet French onion soup to start, Gibbo’s eating goat’s cheese parfait and Robbie a vegetable soup.
I also ordered a pane tomato on the grounds it might be a little authentic. It’s a baguette with tomatoes and enough olive oil to make it pleasant.
I’ve got to say this is possibly the least French feeling French bistro I have ever been in.
In fact, as a story was being told earlier about Big Roddy “tuning the drones” – don’t ask – I scanned the menu again to see what I fancied. Sole goujons, linguine, roast chicken breast, burger, mussels and ta-raa quiche. I think the general idea with bistros, certainly the ones I have been to very recently in France and even Glasgow, is to do something interesting with humble everyday ingredients – possibly even freshly source them.
There is seabass with crushed new potato – in January – on the a la carte menu and duck breast – with winter berry jus – but that’s about it. Hardly local.
As for that quiche, I would order it – ditto the pate – if I could have been sure it was made here today and not delivered from the back of a freezer van, but there’s no clue to the answer to that question on the menu. And I’m long past the stage where I can be bothered to indulge in some top badinage with waiting staff about what exactly madehere means. I always end up looking like a weirdo. Furthermore, the menus don’t look like they change much, if ever.
So, in the end it’s a croque monsieur for me and a couple of minute steaks for the others. All come with thin, crispy, salty chips.
The steaks are frankly not the best looking being a tad stringy, but the chef has seasoned them well. I should say in all fairness that all the food is cleanly and well prepared even if there’s not much to challenge a chef.
There were tidily turned little batons