Bella Fresca, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Real cafe society

Review published on 17/11/2009 © Sunday Herald

The gentrification of our cafes continues apace. Once it was all greasy fry-ups, marshmallow teacakes and Cona coffee. Then we went through the whole Starbucks thing, temporarily enthralled by its coffee-flavoured milkshakes for grown-ups and super-sized muffins. Now the choice is between the cafe reborn as tearoom, complete with whimsical vintage china and tiered cake stands, or the upmarket deli cafe where you down lemon polenta cake with an espresso made from Arabica beans of impeccable credentials.

I don’t mourn the death of the greasy spoon, but there was something appealing about the ordinariness of such establishments. I love the whole deli thing with its bottles of chastest-of-the-chaste olive oil and £3 Bourbon vanilla pods, but it’s all a bit exclusive. Sometimes you just want a normal cafe at the top of the road.

On Glasgow’s Paisley Road West, Bella Fresca is in a humdrum parade of shops overlooking Aldi. It is an unpretentious, honest Scottish-Italian cafe with a menu offering straightforward, home-cooked food. When we visited on a Saturday, it was rammed. Restaurateurs who are toiling to get enough customers to stay afloat would look at this and weep. Bella Fresca has a clientele that spans all age groups and, I suspect, most of them are repeat customers.

There is no secret to this cafe’s success. It serves popular dishes at manageable prices and cooks them well. Sandwich bar and takeaway/shop on one side and restaurant on the other, it might almost be an establishment in Manhattan’s Little Italy, with that feeling of genuineness that comes from one-time immigrants now assimilated into local culture.

It was years since I had eaten minestrone, but Bella Fresca’s was a reminder of how good it can be. This clear, thin tomato consommé with cannellini beans, carrots and lots of cabbage had been made tasty with the addition of a little ham. The sort of soup that can make a lunch all on its own. The other starter was a special, a “small” bowl of fleshy mussels deftly cooked in wine and cream with a generous dusting of vigorous flat parsley. They came with above-average bread, nicely served with a finger bowl with lemon in it, at a cost of only £3.95.

Bella Fresca does daily specials. I hesitated over the vegetable risotto, but the comforting familiarity of the spinach and ricotta cannelloni won out. This one was too wet with a liquidy tomato sugo, a creamy sauce that was runnier than a bechamel ought to be, and too-soft pasta. The better option was spaghetti with polpette (meatballs) that were loaded with garlic and with a slightly spiced taste – perhaps from fennel.

An Italian cafe would not be an Italian cafe without decent toasted sandwiches. The panini and ciabatta used here are pretty standard, but the fillings – like mortadella with mozzarella and Parma ham with provolone cheese and rocket – are more interesting than usual and flattened in the heavy-duty toaster to great crunchy effect.