The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Hits right notes with menu descriptions but hits almost none with the flavours
63RD AND 1ST
IT’S A strange night to be eating scallops off a cocktail stick, sandwiching a slice of what looks like that black pudding you get in a chip shop, surrounded by pillars and globe lights and club chairs in what is meant to be a New York loft. In Glasgow.
But I’ll laugh out loud near the end of this meal when I finally give in to their call to Try Them-You’ll Love Them – expecting hot, freshly cooked, crisp and sweet dough rings and getting a cold, gooey not-verygood chocolate doughnut. For a whole £6. D’uh.
As I walked here earlier it was through snatches of The Solider Song, cops gathering into dayglo clumps and long lines heading out of town towards the flood lights powering up in the East End.
Mid-week Old Firm game tension has a tendency to stop this city in its tracks, so I expect the restaurant cum cocktail bar to be completely deserted. But it’s certainly not.
In true speakeasy style, I can feel that there are many people filling tables around the fringes.
Though and because of the design, it’s almost impossible to work out how many.
Anyway, this is a new spin-off of the TGI Friday empire. For grown ups, apparently.
Full disclosure here. When at university, not yesterday, I was offered an interview for a management position with them.
But when the letter insisted I brought along a hat that “expressed my personality”, and I had neither, I gave it a miss.
So if you, like me, fear bubbly, hi-ya, high-five service then I’ve got to report it’s reassuringly normal, maybe a bit chirpy, but certainly warm and pretty quick.
Actually, before I’ve had time to read the marketing guff on their website a cheeky, chirpy little corn dog in its own box is being removed from a tray, on a stand, very Gordon Ramsay-esque, and onto my table.
They have, too, and this tickled me, a tasting menu for £35 which I would definitely have tried, but it only seems to come with drinks included and I’ve got my car waiting to get myself out of Dodge pronto.
What else have we got? A crayfish roll (£14), green chickpea hummus with crudities (£6) and, from the Robata
Grill, a 6oz rump steak for an undeniably reasonable tenner.
The corn dog? Honestly. A total dog. Rubbery inside with a strangely flexible texture to its fried coating, nul points on flavour of any kind and can’t see any mozzarella.
But I’ve never had one before so maybe that’s what it’s meant to taste like.
That green chickpea hummus comes with a little two-part bowl contraption revealing carrots, sugersnap peas, broccoli and so on underneath. It’s absolutely fine and I finish it off.
The steak, at first looks a bit unappetisingly dull, the slices faintly pink in places, a lot of mushroom duxelle on the side but it too tastes pretty reasonable and is textured okay.
I draw a line though at the £14 crayfish roll. A sludge of pink squirted, cold and squishy ingredients, devoid of any promised garlic flavour, dotted with chewy little (defrosted tasting) crayfish on a roll that tastes defrosted itself and which is actually only filled, as all the worst sandwich shops used to do, at the top third. For £14 too. Sheesh.
Here’s the really strange thing about this meal though. I thought I had ordered too much.
And with one Diet Coke included the bill easily tops £60 (12.5% service charge
automatically added) yet I feel like I have eaten very little. There were pretty decent chips included with that roll.
This is food to eat while you drink presumably, from another outpost defying the UK-wide withering of chain restaurants.
I couldn’t say whether the food is prepared from scratch here.
Or vacuum bag and freezered in a factory in England and driven up to be reheated. But if it is not the latter, it certainly tastes to me like it is. Strange stuff.