Bo’Vine, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Withering vine

Review published on 17/05/2010 © Sunday Herald

The owners of the Hilton hotel chain seem convinced that there is still something worth wringing out of the 1960s steakhouse concept.

Personally, I think that’s one cultural relic best left interred, and nothing I see happening at Bo’Vine, the new restaurant in the Hilton in Glasgow’s west end, has persuaded me otherwise.

Bo’Vine is trying to be an Angus Steakhouse for the 21st century, what with all the chesterfields, the gentleman’s club chairs and the Iron Man-esque bull’s head on the wall. Superficially, it has all the accoutrements of a serious restaurant. There’s the glam hostesses greeting you from behind the lectern at the door, all the menu blabber about 24 day-aged Scotch beef, that never-ending chorus of “Is everything all right with your food?” (except when everything isn’t all right and you can’t catch anyone’s eye), and high prices that might be justified if there was cooking to match the aspirations, which there most definitely isn’t.

Before I deal with the shortcomings of the food we were given, let me say that it’s theoretically possible that Bo’Vine has chefs capable of cooking, if properly resourced, and a front of house team that could sail through the busiest dinner service if it had been properly trained.

But I see no evidence of either on my visit, so in the absence of any insider intelligence about what has gone so badly wrong here, I blame the Hilton management and, in particular, its policy of accepting large tables of diners.

When we visited, there was a table of 12, another of 10, several sixes and fives, plus a series of tables of two, most of whom arrived in the space of half an hour. This pile-up would never happen in a well-run restaurant. The kitchen is bound to be hammered and quality control goes out the window. It was an accident waiting to happen. And it did.

The final confirmation was when our waitress announced our dessert orders were in a lengthy queue and we might need to wait some time as “the chefs are cracking up a bit”. That’s when we gave up and asked for the bill. We couldn’t wait to get out.

One starter was OK, but then what can you do wrong with Stornoway black pudding and crab apple purée? Well, actually, it came with a really revolting concassée of woolly tomatoes. Still, that dish pipped the pricy game pie – chunks of dry rabbit floating in a salty-soupy gravy under a lid of quotidian mash and a smidgen of something ¬purporting to be artisan cheddar.

I ordered the veal chop, having first established that it was UK-produced and free-range, but, in retrospect, I don’t think you can rely on there being anyone on the premises who could really vouch for ingredient provenance.

I can’t tell you if the veal was any good because, having ordered it “pink” it arrived close to raw or “bleu” as the French might say, as though it had fallen on the grill and been hastily removed. It was so raw and cold in the middle that its accompanying cafe de Paris butter stubbornly refused to melt. A rib eye steak got similar maltreatment.

Accompaniments? Disastrous. The chips were the colour of chocolate, the spinach swimming in gritty water, and the cherry tomatoes tasted like soapy dishwater. The watercress looked like a victim of a central buying policy. It was the anaemic, gangly, pallid sort they grow hydroponically in the Netherlands on soil substitutes such as rockwool. I buy great English watercress every week, emerald green and vital.

Does anyone in the kitchen ever try eating the woeful stuff they serve, or is it regarded as ornamental?

Where to begin with the inadequacies of the front of house service at Bo’Vine? To give you a taste, our dessert order was taken when our table still had many of the main course plates and the dire “house bread” and greasy, salty butter on it. When someone eventually clocked that the main courses were problematic, they were deducted from the bill without a murmur and free desserts offered. It’s as if the table staff are all too aware that Bo’Vine needs to make amends.