China Blue, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Stuffed justice

Review published on 25/11/2009 © Sunday Herald

It’s lunchtime and Renfield Street is busy and a bit tacky. Amusement arcades, discount shops, rain falling relentlessly from fat, low clouds, soaking through my coat and deep into my shirt.

A right turn, a push through a door covered with handwritten signs in Chinese, up some narrow stairs and into a restaurant straight from the 1970s. This can't be it, can it? Red tablecloths, gold Chinese inscriptions, a British family forking up sweet-and-sour torpedoes over there and a menu laden with catering pack dishes right here. But wait.

There are also two tables of Chinese people (and more arriving), heaped, steaming platters of Thai-style chicken steak with noodles being carried to them. I make an inquiry, scrunch up my face at the standard Chinese lunchtime specials and flip the menu open to reveal three pages of unfamiliar dishes.

Within minutes I'm eating prawn-stuffed bitter melon, so bitter it's puckering my tongue, forking up hard-boiled eggs and light, puffy fish balls from a huge bowl of coconutty curry that's dripping with noodles and starting a slow burn in the back of my throat. Some further explanation is perhaps needed.

Okay. This is a Malaysian restaurant within a Chinese restaurant. It doesn't advertise and only operates during the day. Odd? You could say that - there's pan mee on the menu, homemade noodles with fish, pork and vegetables; and guong fu, which even the internet won't be able to fully explain later on but which seems to be a type of noodle.

Plus, my stuffed bitter melon starter didn't come on its own. Also on the plate were aubergine, chilli and yuba, a form of bean curd, all stuffed with delicious sweet minced prawn. If I wanted to I could have had pepper pig stomach or chicken feet with Chinese mushrooms. The latter dish, the waiter assures me, is delicious once you fully appreciate the pleasure of sucking the flavour from the feet of chickens. Hmm.

Of all the cultures washing through Glasgow these days the Chinese are the most elusive. There's a Chinatown a stone's throw away from here, but it's not really a town. There are scores and scores of Chinese restaurants which in the main don't serve anything vaguely resembling Chinese food. And of course there are the takeaways on every street corner, run by hardworking small families who spend their weekend nights feeding drunks who couldn't care less what they eat as long as it has rice or curry and is hot and cheap. What Glasgow lacks is a decent number of authentic restaurants.

The Asian Gourmet down by the motorway fills when the casino spills, but it's still hard to navigate, geared totally for the Chinese customer and rather scary to the timid diner. There's the vast See Woo in Possil, which I have seen filled with hundreds of Chinese people despite it being one of the largest restaurants in the UK. The fact is there's a whole community that works late, plays hard and eats out at the start of the week, often deep and long into the afternoon while the rest of us are toiling away at our desks.

And, of course, there are the wheels within the wheels of that community, the Chinese Malaysians bringing that delicious mix of Indian, Chinese and Malaysian food, of which Asia Style, possibly Glasgow's most consistent restaurant, is the best-known exponent. There's also Rumours, in Bath Street - a more mainstream, more accessible and probably equally good variation. And now there's China Blue - during the day, anyway.

It's not without its problems. My starters come with black-bean sauce. It’s how they serve them to non-Chinese customers, says the waiter. Normally they come in a soup with six other stuffed items for around a fiver. Many people will blanche at the food descriptions, sigh at the decor and struggle with the location, but this is another refreshing restaurant serving good, diverse dishes. And we need more of them.