An Lochan, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Caught red-faced

Review published on 22/11/2007 © Sunday Herald

Did you ever start eating a dish in a restaurant, only to find yourself wondering why on Earth you ordered it, knowing it was a bad choice that would leave you kicking yourself because, if you had stopped to think about it, the dish wasn't going to work on the plate? This is what happened to me at An Lochan in Glasgow.

An Lochan’s evening menu is short, with just five starters and main dishes, plus the odd special, so the options are rather restricted. A further tasting menu adds courses, but not much qualitative choice. I settled on the Plate of Fish, not because it actively appealed to me, but because it sounded better than anything else. It featured snapper and sardine (an odd selection because they are unlikely to be landed in Scotland) and brill.

It was to come with hollandaise and pak choi, again, not an obvious choice. Hollandaise is classic with white fish, but it was never going to go with sardine, which needs bold flavours to cut its oiliness. And why partner this French emulsion with oriental pak choi?

In the event, for any restaurant, let alone one specialising in fish, this was a poor show. Fish goes through three stages. At its best it is gloriously fresh and full of flavour. Then follows a middle stage where it has lost its sparkle and becomes very dull to eat. Thereafter, it smells.

The snapper and brill were at stage two. The sardine was on the verge of being over-pungent with age. All three fish were tediously cooked.

Predictably, the wateriness of the pak choi – a vegetable only worth eating, in my view, when it is swathed in soy, sesame oil, black-bean sauce, garlic or similar – had wrecked the hollandaise, causing it to split.

Overall, there was only one dish that earned compliments. Six oysters, grilled on the shell with garlic butter, cannot have demanded a huge amount of the kitchen but this was nevertheless a sound, if not revolutionary idea that made for lip-smacking eating. As for the rest, a dreadful blandness permeated the offerings. Dishes were described in verbless, unilluminating style – “chowder/smoked haddock/mussels” – with no clue to what strategic approach binds them together. I suspect this is because there is no grand plan, dishes here being more a modular assembly of variable cut-and-paste components, never conceived of as a whole.

Our “Arthur’s langoustine/crab/avocado” starter was fairly innocuous but curiously mute in flavour. You couldn’t object to it, but it was underwhelming. Who, you wonder, is Arthur anyway? Or Guido who smokes the salmon? Or Mary who dives for scallops? This supplier chumminess is coy and wilfully selective when the menu is silent on all the pressing fish issues of the day, such as whether the fish is farmed or wild, sustainably caught, from a well-managed fishery, or even native to these shores.

Why would a thoughtful fish restaurant bother serving rainbow trout at all, when this is surely one of the most debased farmed fish, its only virtue being that it is cheap? Surely the chef should have spotted that my brill was a tiny, juvenile specimen that should never have been caught in the first place, if we want there to be any mature specimens swimming around in the future, that is.

Our sample meat dish, one of the worst confit duck legs that I have tasted, didn’t win me over either. It isn’t hard to serve good confit. All you have to do is buy it in from a supplier of French food who sources well, then cook it properly.

Among other things, that means getting the skin good and crisp. But here the dull-tasting confit came with unappetisingly flabby, unrendered skin, softened further by a topping of red onion “marmalade” (in reality, the onions seemed quite plainly braised), partnered with dry, undercooked Puy lentils and dessicated chanterelle mushrooms. This dish demonstrated, once more, a deficit of strategic thinking, not to mention cooking skill.

A solid chocolate tart with tough pastry engendered no more confidence in the dessert department. The wine list showed no special flair either. If you aren’t careful, the bill will creep up.

It’s not a winning package.

© Sunday Herald