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'If local buzz is to be believed, this will put the city firmly on the culinary map'
While researching the Gannet, I find a recent story about a Glasgow man winning an actual gannet-eating competition: small, pickled, baby gannets, or guga, to be knocked back with milk. I'm basically bleee-ing for ever. The same morning, in a chic city-centre hotel and to a soundtrack of Stand By Your Man, I eat breakfast of black pudding, haggis and slabs of square lorne sausage with the complexion of a dipsomaniac corpse. (The Arthouse, should you think I'm making it up, where in a nice piece of symmetry it turns out the Gannet's chef-owners teamed up.) And I think to myself: seriously, Glasgow, you have only yourself to blame.
Oh, put away your pitchforks. There's nobody with more genuine affection for this city than me. Sure, I left it years ago, but, well, you know, restaurants… So I'm excited to hear about a place that, if local buzz is to be believed, at last looks likely to put the place firmly on the culinary map, and it's neither couthy theme-park Scots, estimable curry house or another of the city's endless Italian trattorias. Praise be.
The style is a bit industrial 80s by way of Brooklyn five years ago. We've enough metal ducting to ventilate Ibrox, plus rough wood walls (a lethal threat to tights and skirts), raw sandstone, moody oil paintings, and textured wall-hangings that look like untreated tripe. It's all very 50 shades of greige.
The menu is short, tiptoeing around anything likely to alarm a conservative clientele; the most out-there item is a pig's head croquette, nicely sanitised and deep-fried. One pal is so astonished by the paucity of a tortellini starter that he becomes stuck on a loop, going, "Three! Three!" like a budgie with a speech impediment. They're very good – fine, taut pasta, woody and fragrant Jerusalem artichoke, a buttery smacker of crisped sage – but tepid. And there are only three of them. More generous is my Scotch egg, a rich duck's one, slow cooked into the texture of a Creme Egg, with a thin coating of good black pudding and then crunchy panko.
They love an egg here: an Arbroath smokie (a good, but very salty piece of fish) comes with a cloying cream sauce and poached egg, the pooling yolk adding to the cloy. A similarly creamy pheasant risotto is crowned with another poached egg, perhaps an emollient too far. There's rosy rump of superb lamb, rather thrown away on a worthy bed of kale and roots. The standout dish is "Boarders" (sic) pheasant breast, as pink and succulent as Turkish delight, with more Jerusalem artichokes, their skins dried and fried into something like a savoury eclair and filled with the suavest artichoke cream. This is gaspworthy. These guys can cook.
This strip of formerly grungy Finnieston has become, against the odds, a dining destination, bristling with the city's coolest: Crabshakk, the charming bar and restaurant, the revivified Kelvingrove Cafe and the just landed attractive nouveau-chippy, Old Salty's. It's all so much more encouraging than the city centre, with its proliferation of Jamie's Italians, Carluccio's and Patisserie Valeries. The Gannet, with its relaxed approach and ambitious cooking, fits right in. They make all the right noises. In-house butchery, smoking and charcuterie-making. There's the concentration on Scottish produce, which, at its finest – the vivid rare-breed beef or sweet, seductive seafood – is something to behold. Even their vegetarian choices show real thought, and staff are uniformly lovely.
Glasgow is given to the sardonic "Aye, right" when confronted by the Michelin-bothering style of fine dining (for this, I salute the city). The Gannet ups the culinary game without any of the attendant pretensions. Apart from anything else, the noisy and overbearing bar at the front sticks the head into any such poncey notions. But ground-breaking or game-changing? We're not quite there yet.
• The Gannet 1155 Argyle Street, Finnieston, Glasgow, 0141-2042081. Open Tues-Sat, noon-2.30pm, 5-9.45pm; Sun noon-9.30pm. About £28 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service.
Food 7/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Value for money 7/10
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