Abode, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

A fine lunch to beat the crunch

Review published on 20/10/2008 © Sunday Herald

Here's a tip for dining out in the recession: eat lunch in expensive restaurants. Counterintuitive, perhaps, but some of the best bargains to be had at the moment are in the most surprising places. Of course, lunch has long been a good deal in many fine dining establishments.

Sure, the choice will be more limited, the quantity reduced, but you have the same chefs, the same raw ingredients, the same standards as you'd get in the evening, only at vastly reduced prices.

Look what's going on in the prestige Michael Caines restaurant in Glasgow's Abode. Head chef Craig Dunn offers an "Amazing Grazing" menu, with three choices at each course, for a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming £9.95.

Not one of those tedious broiler-chicken breast and farmed salmon jobs either, but interesting options centred on nicely-sourced ingredients. Plus you get all the folderols that come with plush, serious restaurants: the swanky dining room, the attentive service, the basket of bread and disc of unsalted butter. You can up the ante by going for three courses with two glasses of wine for £16; not the usual crap house wine, but decent wines matched to each dish.

Unlike so many places that are surreptitiously expensive - all those outfits where you walk in expecting to spend a tenner and come out light of 20 - Caines's Amazing Grazing menu offers hugely better value than you might assume.

Comfortably installed on the plush seats, knees tucked in under the white linen table cloth, we had a serene lunch, an interesting one too. It hit just the right note for lunchtime, with neat, scaled-down portions of elements that feature on the expensive à la carte menu. We began with two neat little slices of an expertly seasoned porky terrine with the creamy, satisfying flavour of French rillettes.

Its richness was cut by a burgundy-hued apple puree that tasted as though it had recently had an intimate encounter with star anise. The butternut soup - a proposition that is so often bland, sweetish, and too close to baby food for comfort - had a depth that came from the use of a properly made stock. The introduction of bold, resiny rosemary, possibly in the form of an infused oil, lent it a lovely savoury quality.

The main-course daube of beef - that's stew with biggish chunks of meat and lots of wine in it - made good sense for the season and the weather, as did its accompanying parsnip puree and parsnip chips. But we were in the mood to keep it light. A caramelised onion tarte Tatin with a goat's cheese salad was a risky choice since so many dishes with similar descriptions come down to crude assemblages of nasty cheap pastry with the sort of cheese you'd be served in French prisons. But this tarte was quite special, consisting of airy, buttery pastry with a myriad of distinct layers, the outside layer and the soft onion within very decisively caramelised. The curdy cheese on the top, a tangle of sprouty, frisky, lightly lubricated salad leaves and a sprinkling of small, highly-perfumed chanterelle mushrooms, made it feel like a proper dish, not a casual snack.

For the other main course, a small fillet of very fresh mackerel came with a marvellously crisp, hard-fried galette of potato and a puree of Savoy cabbage. This latter item is an idea I mean to steal.The colour was lovely and the combination of green frilly leaf and paler centre gave it a mellow but full character.

So far, so good, but the desserts really blew us away. I'm salivating as I think about those nutbrown, crunchy millefeuilles with their intensely nutty praline filling, just slipping down nicely with a mouthful of dark, bitter chocolate sorbet. The other dessert was equally memorable. Here we had a luscious, fleshy pear cheek that tasted as though it had been poached in liquid butterscotch, a shot glass containing an uncompromisingly dark chocolate sauce with the woody, tobacco-box character often found in Caribbean cocoa beans, and a quenelle of tonka bean ice cream.

This bean is sometimes likened to vanilla. Here it reminded me of nougat, or home-made marzipan with a whisper of liquorice. It was gorgeous.

Food like this, priced like this, puts a smile on the face, even in the midst of a recession.