Art Lovers' Cafe, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Loved up

Review published on 19/07/2007 © Sunday Herald

From beyond the grave, Charles Rennie Mackintosh continues to exert a magnetic draw.

You could have knocked me down with a feather when I walked into the cafe in the House For An Art Lover on a Tuesday lunchtime at 1.45pm to find this substantial restaurant space positively humming.

Drag out restaurateurs from Glasgow city centre to witness this astonishing phenomenon and they would be profoundly depressed. This arts venue is doing better business than many well-quoted restaurants. Lunchtimes are very evidently flourishing at Bellahouston Park. The profile of the diners is conspicuously different though.

Instead of the customary city centre tables of men in suits, out here we are on the territory of ladies who lunch. Not only do they appreciate the delights of Mackintosh's architecture and the well-kept, lavender-scented gardens of the park, they won't be palmed off with tea and a scone.

Table after table was working its way through a major lunch. This is a surprisingly serious restaurant with an ambitious menu.

As befits a venue that is a homage to Mackintosh, the decor is ultra simple and modern. Crisp and white, it eschews any cliched 'Mockintosh' touches for the clean-cut look of a Harvey Nichols restaurant. A wall of half-moon sash windows catches sunlight and produces interesting light and dark contrasts throughout that are very Mackintosh in spirit. The only problem is the reverberating noise from hard surfaces.

Our attitude to the food oscillated alarmingly from delight to disappointment. We licked our lips at chargrilled asparagus topped with a smooth ravioli filled with wild mushroom and thyme and finished off with a creamy, wine sauce with a great melting cheese glaze. We purred with pleasure at the pearly red mullet fillets, sandwiched with intense tomato pulp, and fried in crisp pancetta.

They came with silky spinach, a soothing leek and potato gratin cake and a cracking vermouth butter sauce aromatised with rosemary. Seared scallops and black pudding with potato and cauliflower puree got the thumbs up too, with special mention for the vinaigrette with golden sultanas, which added an interesting sweet note. We might have come to blows fighting over the walnut oil-fried Jerusalem artichokes in a starter salad.

But then there were the dishes that didn't work. You can probably guess without even tasting it that poached Dublin Bay prawns would be overwhelmed in a salad with assertive blue cheese and largerthan-life sun blush tomatoes. A ballotine of chicken had the stickto-your-teeth bouncy dryness that you get in over-worked, overcooked chicken flesh. Its likeable potato rosti and robust, winey tarragon gravy perked it up, but not enough to save it.

The kitchen really lost the plot with the puddings. Spied from afar at other tables, they looked like miniature abstract sculptures. Viewed close up they looked like throwbacks to the Eighties when spun sugar was de rigueur. Every dessert seemed to contain at least three elements. The cardinal fault here, however, was a heavyhanded dependency on gelatine.

My raspberry jelly – which tasted not at all of raspberries and very faintly of rosewater – was so firmly set you could have cut it with a knife. Its accompanying milky chocolate mousse also had a rubberiness about it. A shame, because the raspberry ice-cream element was extremely good.

It was the same story with an iced rhubarb parfait. It too tasted as though some extra setting agent had been used; odd really, since the freezing should do the job. Its "strawberry and mascarpone risotto" was a desperately solid rice pudding capped with a further rubbery red topping. Our "apple ravioli" turned out to be a tartlet of that ghastly 'puff' pastry that doesn't stand up to attention properly and lacks the multiple buttery leaves of the classic pastry.

An able vanilla ice-cream came to the rescue.

The cooking here is hit or miss, the service pleasant enough but a bit amateurish, given the aspirations of the menu. Unusually cheap main courses keep the bill within manageable limits.