Cafe Lava, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Lunchtime treat

Review published on 20/06/2005 © Sunday Herald

It seems we can’t, or won’t, make the time to eat lunch in a civilised manner like sensible Europeans.

Instead, it’s off to Pret, Boots, M&S, or the petrol station forecourt for a chilly, plastic-packed sandwich to eat at the desk. Or maybe a ‘meal deal’, a crap sarnie, accompanied by some chemical drink, often masquerading as a fruit drink, and the ubiquitous packet of laboratory-flavoured crisps.

The very language of the lunchtime takeway market erodes the population’s food literacy. A gradual debasement creeps in when a ‘fresh sandwich’ can be trucked hundreds of miles from its factory of origin and then go on sale with a three-day ‘best before’ date. And don’t get me started on those omnipresent purple-grey spongy objects that pose as blueberry muffins.

To inject real pleasure into our lunchtimes, what we need – apart from a 39- hour working week and statutory one-hour lunch breaks – is more establishments like Café Lava.

Café Lava, I suppose, is a jumped-up sandwich bar, albeit a very agreeable and stylish one at that, with a few tables. It’s the antithesis of the chain equivalent, the kind of place that you’d be delighted to find on a corner near you. An individual café that offers a ray of sunshine in the working day, and will have you looking forward to lunchtime.

We dropped in for a quick coffee and left an hour-and-a-half later. It took a few minutes to notice the tell-tale signs of good food. We spotted the juicer with its oranges stacked up for squeezing. Our eyes settled on the Tupperware containers and baking tins brimming with home baking. ‘All our cakes’ reads the menu ‘are baked by our own fair hands’. As is the bread, and from organic flour to boot. The heartwarming smell of home baking that wafted out from the tiny kitchen – it turned out to be a bramble and coconut tart – underscored the possibilities still to be investigated. The sandwiches, we realised, were made up to order. You can’t get fresher than that. Then we clocked the attractively priced daily specials; soups and a hot dish.

In the end we had a three-course feast, and it only came to £20, including the orange juice squeezed as we looked on, a cloudy Chegworth Valley apple and rhubarb juice, espresso and so on. For starters, there was an honest-to-goodness Scotch broth and a pleasing bacon, avocado and heart of little gem lettuce salad, dressed in a mustardy vinaigrette. These came with the quite delicious house breads, loaves fit to test the resolve of carbohydrate refusniks and reducers, especially when served with captivating unsalted Elle et Vire butter.

My Cumberland sausage sandwich consisted of manifestly high-quality sausages, grilled on the spot, squashed onto wholegrain mustard-smeared slices of that excellent bread. Even more of a turn up for the books was the special, undersold as ‘roast pork with apple mash’. It tasted like something you would get in an Italian osteria: melting shoulder of pork, spread with crushed fennel seeds, lemon and herbs, rolled, then slow-roasted. The barely perceptible apple incorporated into the mash made the potato less stodgy and more interesting.

The baking? Fab. Worth throwing calorie control to the winds for – the sort of genuine home baking that chains try to emulate, but can’t. Chewy buttery almond and white chocolate bars with a volcanic crust, studded with tart cranberries. Dense triple chocolate brownies stiff with rugged chocolate chunks. Even proper blueberry muffins, made from flour, butter, sugar, eggs, berries, vanilla and nothing else. With cakes like these, it’s probably fortunate that Café Lava isn’t on a corner near me.

© Sunday Herald