City Merchant, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

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Review published on 29/09/2009 © Sunday Herald

I visited the City Merchant in Glasgow on my way home from the Eat Bute food festival, which is held in the grounds of Mount Stuart, the island’s astonishing Gothic palace.

Blimey, food in Bute hasn’t half moved on since I stayed in a guesthouse in Rothesay as a child. The opening dinner – cooked by Jeremy Lee, the Scottish head chef of Terence Conran’s Blueprint Café in London, Australian Skye Gingell, who has made Petersham Nurseries in Richmond a must-visit food venue, and Irishman Rory O’Connell, scion of the influential Ballymaloe cook school in Ireland – was stunning, and everything but the condiments came from Bute.

We feasted on the finest langoustines I have ever tasted, creel-caught, naturally, fondant black-faced lamb served with rainbow chard and floury Golden Wonder spuds from Mount Stuart’s abundant kitchen garden, a wheel of cloth-wrapped organic cheddar made in the island’s creamery, and a quivering pannacotta, infused with scented geranium and flanked with fragrant raspberries.

All good things must come to an end, but I wanted to prolong this pleasurable moment and arriving in Merchant City on a gem of an autumn day, we sat down at a table on the pavement outside the City Merchant and ordered langoustines. This establishment makes great play of the provenance of its raw materials and although its langoustines didn’t quite have the dreamy perfection of those on Bute, they were pretty damn good and served at a temperature where one could appreciate their sweet juiciness.

We also very much liked the smoked salmon from the Marrbury Smokehouse which is wild-caught from the Cree, not that slippery, oily, farmed stuff, and suffused, but not dominated by, a lovely woody smoke. Having got the sourcing so right, it’s a mystery why anyone would serve such magnificent fish with triangles of pappy sliced bread of the most workaday sort.

If you pay for decent salmon, why not stump up for better bread, supposing, that is, that the kitchen can’t bake it. If ever a dish called for Ballymaloe-style Irish soda bread, this was it. So the bread went back uneaten as did the accompanying pile of pickled cucumber and onion, which was unappetisingly brown (possibly from balsamic vinegar) and tasted raw, so it overpowered the salmon.

A simple main course of grilled Dover sole showed the kitchen can get the main elements of a dish right. The fish was nicely cooked and fresh, and its melting Café de Paris butter, red from paprika dotted with unidentifiable herbs and seasonings, lubricated it and made the obligatory side vegetables (boiled potatoes, carrots and parsnip) reasonably likeable when otherwise they would have been terminally dull.

The other main course – breast of duck – was not so successful. The bird was competently cooked to even pinkness but it was served with an elderflower and lemon sauce, not in itself a bad idea except the pinky-brown duck juices trickled into it to produce an unpleasant-looking puddle on the plate. It was meant to come with a potato and celeriac mousse but instead there was what seemed to be a timbale of grainy mashed potato with caraway seed inside a breadcrumb coating, which was a bit odd.

Desserts, yet again, were a mixed bag. The coffee pannacotta had just the right wobble, even if it did taste more like instant coffee than a stiff espresso. But we agreed that much of the allure of this Italian dessert depends on the milky taste of cream, which is enhanced by gentler fragrances, such as Mount Stuart’s geraniums or a whisper of rose water perhaps, a quality that is lost with a vigorous flavour like coffee. Still, the pannacotta pipped the brownie with crème Anglaise because the former was about as arid and over-baked as they come and the latter cloyingly sweet.

Hit and miss is the phrase that comes to mind for the City Merchant. Nearly good but still not good enough. My glass of Prosecco arrived flat. When I pointed this out it was replaced instantly with a fizzy one. But there’s a prevailing slackness at the City Merchant that drags the place down.