Raeburn's Paisley
Whenever I have made rude remarks about once vibrant towns, ruined by brutal modernist architecture and woeful civic planning, readers respond with further candidates.
Paisley often gets a mention, and you can see why. It has the usual deadly municipal mess of pedestrianised high street, one-way system and naff shopping centre.
The latter is pretentiously named The Piazza, and sits on the site of the old jail. Judging from illustrations and photographs, it was a stunning monument which, had it been protected, would now be a huge feather in Paisley's cap.
But perhaps people are too hard on modern Paisley. Once an extremely wealthy town thanks to its renowned weaving and Coats thread enterprises, Paisley's architectural heritage is still extraordinarily rich despite municipal blunders.
Dropping into Raeburn's bistro and grill in New Street, for instance, we found ourselves looking out at the Bull Inn, an asymmetrical, free style tenement with a witch's hat roof, built in 1900 in the Art Nouveau style. It still functions as a pub and retains lots of decorative craft detail from that period.
Raeburn's served us an exceptionally good value meal that exceeded our expectations, which sort of encapsulated Paisley for me. If you open your eyes and look around you, you might be surprised at what it has to offer.
I sense a feminine hand in the kitchen. The cooking here is focused on getting the essentials right and keeps its ego under control. Call me sexist if you like, but many male chefs want to show off how clever they are and this doesn't always add up to food that you'd want to eat. The kitchen goes to the effort of baking its own bread, for instance, when it could quite easily buy in some duff baguette and get away with it. Raeburn's bread is so good, it's a hazard.
Don't eat too much and blunt your appetite. The kitchen is also confident enough to let seasonal ingredients largely speak for themselves. What better way to serve fresh, sappy Scottish asparagus than on the excellent bread, toasted and topped with good Hollandaise and a poached free-range egg? Many of the dishes at Raeburn's are undersold. Mixed seafood salad sounds a bit like one of the less savoury items you might find in a jar in Lidl.
But here it turned out to be luscious shelled langoustines, soft squid marinated in lemon and fresh green herbs, and a dollop of sweet white crab meat, sitting on a nest of lively, turgid salad leaves, supplied by the impressive Robin's Herbs on Arran. Such generosity, yet part of the £10.95 for two courses daytime menu.
A salad of warm smoked haddock, new potatoes, bacon, black pudding, cherry tomatoes and poached egg reminded me just how great warms salads can be, all the potential fattiness and salt of the meats and the fish cut by the freshness of the salad leaves and a vigorous whole grain mustard dressing. The ingredients sparkled; undyed haddock, crisp dry-cured bacon, sweetsharp tomatoes.
There's a lot to go wrong with stir-fried noodles but here they were silky and athletic, coated in a natural-tasting orange and star anise sauce that wasn't relying on blockbusting condiments like soy sauce . They came with crisp and creamy pork belly, lightly seasoned with restrained amounts of Chinese five spice powder.
There is a curiosity about the cooking here, a commitment to utilising fleeting, seasonal ingre- dients, but always grounded in time-honoured custom. The feathery, aniseed-scented herb, Sweet Cecily, was traditionally used to sweeten rhubarb. It had been used in bulk to produce a fragrant green ice cream with a haunting flavour somewhere between Japanese green tea and Florence fennel. It was terrific, teamed up with a thick compote of outdoor rhubarb and a buttery, biscuity crumble topping. A mouthwatering lime and mascarpone ice cream partnered a sticky, barely coherent chocolate brownie. The duo went together surprisingly well.
Raeburn's gave me what I like in a meal. We were satisfied, but not stuffed, and what we ate felt right for the time of year. Waylaid by the food, we didn't leave enough time to do justice to Paisley's stunning Coats Memorial Church, its observatory, or see the antique shawls that lie behind the grand Ionic pillars of its fine museum. I'll definitely be back.