Blind Pig, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Going the whole hog

Review published on 10/09/2009 © Sunday Herald

For years, although a day never went by without a chef like Rick Stein or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall popping up on our screens telling us why we should be embracing locally sourced, seasonal food, their message seemed to sink in more with home cooks than chefs.

It’s not as if what they were saying was that original. As far back in the 1980s, David Wilson at the Peat Inn was a great advocate for using local suppliers, but until quite recently you couldn’t help get the feeling that most chefs hedged their bets when it came to local produce.

The entrenched approach which filtered down from the top end of the eating out market was that if you wanted citizenship of the restaurant aristocracy, then you had better import your cheeses from Paris or stud your menu with global foodie arcana like truffle, or EU-protected ham from acorn-guzzling pigs, or rare olive oil of unquestionable chastity. It’s as if chefs in fancy restaurants couldn’t bear to serve any ingredient most people regard as commonplace, as if they had to justify their existence by serving arcane foods not widely available to the home cook.

In the past three years the slow-burning local food movement has ignited in Scotland’s smart restaurants. There are several factors here, but if I could isolate only one, it would have to be the arrival of Tom Kitchin in Edinburgh. While other serious chefs were chatting quietly about local and seasonal, Kitchin turned up the volume to a level that couldn’t be ignored. His passion for it, so engagingly expressed in his new book, From Nature To Plate, has made his restaurant distinctive, a monumental success story, and it has given other chefs the confidence to believe that diners can indeed be excited by hare, cabbage or eel. Kitchin confounds the observation that you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. His signature dish – unthinkable only three years ago – of crispy pig’s ear has proved more irresistible to diners than the familiar, safe bet, silk purse options that crowd menus in elite establishments.

All this energy and enthusiasm for local, seasonal ingredients is percolating down, and it’s exciting to see how this is influencing more mainstream menus. At the Blind Pig in Glasgow, for example, a new mid-market restaurant, it is actually quite hard to pick out any ingredient that isn’t in line with the local/seasonal brief.

My warm crostini was topped with a soft, white Scottish goat’s cheese and sat on a perky salad that was more green herbs than workaday lettuce. It was dressed with a lovely tart dressing of fresh raspberries and a scattering of toasted hazelnuts. OK, there aren’t many productive hazel trees in Scotland these days, but we used to have loads and they cropped at this time of year. Maybe some enterprising grower might rediscover them on our behalf? The other starter took scallops, one of the stars of our coast, and set them on creamed sweetcorn (which is only worth eating fresh in late summer), a well matched duo.

Of the main courses, belly pork with crisp crackling spoke of the general willingness these days to use once-forgotten economy cuts and the accompaniments – glazed carrots and a creamy potato and sage gratin – might have come from a Scottish allotment. The other offered a light, summery treatment of sustainable pollock, steamed “en papillote” in foil on thin slices of waxy potato and fennel, and enlivened by the addition of piquant chilli.

For dessert, there was something to please the stick-to-your-ribs British pudding brigade in the form of an able Bakewell tart with suitably friable pastry, which came with a little jug of eggy custard and a smear of raspberry purée, or a lighter, more quintessentially summertime offering of quivering Pimm’s jelly, full of red berries, with a scoop of invigoratingly zingy elderflower ice.

To measure the success of any revolution, culinary or otherwise, you look at the extent to which it has enthused the mainstream. New openings like the Blind Pig show that the local/seasonal agenda has done precisely that.

A hog's breakfast

Review published on 17/11/2009 © Sunday Herald

"Quick, Dad - weird," says Luca. "There's a man with a girl's thing on." Cal and I turn our heads to catch this amazing sight and realise it's just a waiter with an apron. Ah, the world as seen through the eyes of a six year old is far more interesting than this one.

Anyway, we wait, and wait. And watch. There's a meerkat thing going on, customers' heads raised all over the place, alert, swivelling, watching the uber-cool waiting staff. Not because they're uber-cool, but because they're uber-slow. They glide to and fro with complete calm on their handsome faces while we all wait and watch.

The people at the table next to us are waiting for their desserts, and will try to cancel them in a moment. The people by the door are waiting for their bill, and will eventually get up and fetch it themselves. We're waiting for our lunch, and will eventually get it, but too many tables lie uncleared around us, dishes sitting on the pass uncollected, staff conversations taking place right over them in a way that makes me shudder. It's not even busy.

Is The Blind Pig a victim of its own success? Offer decent, thoughtfully presented food in the west end of Glasgow and people will come. And wait. But not for ever. Will they come back? Hmm.

It's not as though the food, when it eventually arrives, is mind-blowing - what we get are just some fashionable and sensibly assembled dishes. A starter of chicken terrine with red onion chutney is smoky from the bacon and firmed by the meat inside, and there's a nice sweetness from the chutney, but served straight from the fridge it's too cold.

The smoked salmon and shaved fennel salad would have been better if there was enough fennel to make a liquoricey impact on the favour, but to be fair both starters are pretty. We watch them being teased and tweaked and stacked at the pass, or what is actually a kitchen hatch in a picture frame. It's all dancing fingers around the food up there - too many, actually. And the pass is far too high, meaning the food is placed directly below the mouths of the staff as they talk right over it.

Overall, though, The Blind Pig has something, being smartly decorated with lots of black paint, shimmering chandeliers, glittering mirrors and straight-backed, thinly padded seats which are an absolute triumph of style over comfort.

Never mind. Luca's lunch of stacked pancakes, maple syrup and bacon has arrived and is excellent - fresh pancakes and crisp bacon hanging together in a sweet, gooey, delicious mess. Then it's back to waiting. For ages. All for a honey-roast loin of pork that is simply average pork chops in a sea of artfully carved vegetables and a puddle of thin sauce with a couple of tiny, watery potatoes thrown in. There's the same veg in the rump of lamb, the same tiny potatoes, the same slightly disappointing feel to the whole thing, but this is the £12.50 for two courses Sunday lunch menu and we're just glad we got it before dinner time.

It's not a great experience, on the whole. The writing was on the wall when we walked in and stood at the front door staring at a fairly quiet dining room for far too long before being noticed. That's not a criticism of the waiting staff - they're confident and pleasant, but there are simply not enough of them. You can't criticise the kitchen staff either - there aren't enough of them either and they fire the food out faster than it can get delivered to the table.

Perhaps the two-room, one-kitchen layout is wrong. Perhaps we caught them on a bad day. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps... Today, dining at The Blind Pig has been something of a culinary car crash, an experience we're not going to rush to repeat. Judging by the faces of some of the other punters, we're not the only ones.