Cafe casts no spell

THOSE who like their food and drink laced with a dash of heritage may feel well disposed to the “new” Kelvingrove Cafe with its slogan: Established 1896 – Reestablished 2012. Since its “reestablishment”, you can now make out the crackly ghost of the original fascia with the words “Ices A Speciality” picked out on the stone facade.

Homage to the past continues with the drinks offering, which guarantees that “our method of reverse production is quite unique and references a time and drinking culture of Glasgow nearly lost in time and revelry”. That sounds jolly, but I haven’t the foggiest what it means, although there is a further clue: “All ice used in drink service is produced in house. We use techniques and tools traditionally used by Ice Factories and Cafe owners in the 1930s in Glasgow”. Not sure that I would taste the difference, and the random capital letters aren’t mine.

Kelvingrove Cafe’s orthography is haphazard, not least because it doesn’t stick to English, hence there’s onion soup “encroute” and “gateaux” for a singular (savoury) cake, and “Our own Caviar with bilinis”. Blink and you might wonder for a second if your caviar comes with a peach cocktail (Bellini).

These communication issues are exacerbated by the fact that the menu adopts an American accent. It features US specialities (sliders, ribs, hot dogs and so on), but reading “Hush Puppies N Dip”, you might not realise that the N should be ‘n’ and puzzle over what, exactly, N Dip is.

Does “charred monkfish” really mean char- grilled, as opposed to burnt? Let’s hope so. For “Air-aged New York Strip” read steak. And ask yourself why soup comes “from the larder”, as opposed to the stove or fridge.

To be blunt, the menu reads as though it has been written by an enthusiastic amateur enamoured with US-style eateries, whose grasp of vocabulary relating to the provenance and preparation of ingredients is hazy. But so what, if the food on the plate works?

Well, one dish did impress, a warm lobster “sandwich” oozing lobster claw and coral with soft avocado in a fennel-seeded submarine roll from the reliable Tapa bakery, but then it needed to be special to justify the £16 price-tag. A “rack stack” of ribs (more of a free-form pile) yielded a decent amount of interestingly spiced meat, but they didn’t go especially well with the accompanying corn bread with cumin seeds, adding to my growing feeling that the composition of dishes here is somewhat eccentric, as is the menu, so egging you on to make jarring choices.

Thus I found myself eating New Orleans- style hush puppies- fried dumplings, supposedly containing pickled okra and corn, but neither of these were identifiable in what turned out to be very stodgy, dull, greasy starter that tasted like undercooked batter – and following it with the aforementioned “gateaux”.

This was essentially a plain, unexciting gratin of potato, beetroot and carrot, smothered by melted cheese of the elastic sort, with warm cream to pour over.

SIDE dishes tend towards the heavy. An appealing-sounding aligot (that cheese and potato speciality of central France) was greyish, and had puzzlingly little taste. The “rich chips” were bendy and limp, not improved by the addition of out-of-place truffle oil or grated parmesan.

Forget dessert, there was only one: churros (Spanish fritters/doughnuts) with salted chocolate caramel. Given the over- representation on the menu of dishes that are fried, stodgy, carb- centric and nutritionally programmed to spike your blood sugar levels in unhealthy ways, these weren’t hard to pass up.

So we settled for a humdrum cheese plate consisting of slight wedges of Mull cheddar, Strathdon Blue, an unidentified ewe’s milk cheese and Applewood smoked cheddar, one of the least subtle cheeses in the UK portfolio. For £10, it didn’t feel great value, or as if anyone was pushing the boat out on sourcing.

An odd miscellany on the plate, and the place is similar. Downstairs is quieter, but a bit disconcerting, like dining in a submarine. If you can bag a table in the upstairs bar, it’s cosier and more atmospheric.

However, you should take a megaphone if you want to be heard over the din.