Cookie, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Clever Cookie

Review published on 12/04/2010 © Sunday Herald

A couple of weeks back I found myself in a self-styled Slow Food restaurant that wasn’t much cop. Bang on cue, up pops another one, in Glasgow this time – Cookie, in Pollokshields. It also takes its lead from that inspirational Italian eco-gastronomy movement, the heart of the operation being an open kitchen in an old shop premises, quirkily kitted out like an end-of-year art school show, that operates as a deli, restaurant, food events venue, takeaway and shop. “Our pleasure is reuniting diners with cooks, makers, growers and farmers in a shared love of good food,” it says. You may have heard all this before. It’s fashionable these days to climb aboard the right-on food bandwagon.

But what distinguishes Cookie is that its proprietors have family connections with estates in Umbria and a collective of local producers there. So most of Cookie’s wines, all its olive oil, preserves and cured meats come direct from family or friends there. Indeed, the supply chain is so direct that the house wine is bottled from the barrel in the cellar. Sounds filthy? Too right. We sipped it very gingerly at first. But now I would happily write a reference for the house red – a lively, characterful Sangiovese (from their mate Alessandro) which was a very palatable drink indeed, with a strawberry ripeness to it and hints of violet on the nose, and good value too at £13.50 a bottle. You can go up-market on a wine list which is unusual and thoughtful, try out a Canaiolo, say, a rare Umbrian grape variety you would struggle to find here, offered at an exceptionally low mark-up.

Rough and ready, Cookie has the feel of an Italian enoteca (wine bar) and the informality associated with that genre. The menu – very Italian this – is either indecipherable on the blackboard, or oral. The choice is small, but rich. Be warned – do not be entirely waylaid by the grassy Umbrian extra virgin olive, or the home-baked bread, which is better than any I ever managed to find in Umbria. The crumb is slightly golden in colour, moist and pleasingly spongy; the crust magnificently chewy. You can tell it is made with a flour that didn’t lose all its taste and integrity in some industrial roller mill. If I lived nearby, I’d never stop eating it.

The bread and oil came with a generous pile of silver anchovies and proper mercury-mauve-khaki coloured olives with the stone still in. The antipasti platter was a two-person job, and memorable. It featured salumi, coppa and cured ham of a standard that is very rarely imported in the UK, cured meats with a personality and pedigree that show up 90% of what we get here for the dross that it is. The meats were flanked by nutty farro (wheat grain), chunks of beetroot, cubes of a terrific nutty, grainy Pecorino-type ewe’s cheese, and a pile of rocket. We had also ordered stuffed red peppers – how could we have known the antipasti would be so huge? – but they were easily demolished, molten peppers collapsed around a porky, bread crumb filling with a mosaic of capers, pine kernels and olives through it.

I toyed with chicken, but when I queried whether it was free-range, the reply was “barn-raised”, for which read “intensive indoor”. So it had to be the shin of beef, braised slowly, which turned out to be a great “brasato”, every cell impregnated with winey flavour, the cartilage in this cheaper cut making it melting and juicy. Potato purée would have made a better partner than red cabbage and parsnip fritter, although you could appreciate the seasonal thinking behind the vegetables. Meaty Italian sausage seasoned with a touch of fennel and peperoncino came in a rustic bowl of lentils, but these were too much of a mush, and too plain. They needed celery, carrots, parsley – something – to do the sausages justice.

After this substantial meal, home-made clean-cut lemon and passionfruit sorbet, not too sweet, was just the job.

If only we all had somewhere like this on our doorsteps.

Getting fresh with a new clientele

Review published on 24/05/2010 © Sunday Herald

Success? Sometimes it can be a terrible disadvantage. Look at Cookie here. Only open minutes. Shoehorned into a former garage on Glasgow’s south side. Bristling with fresh Italian produce and already being punted as the new restaurant of the year by some whose heads are quickly turned.

I feel the weight of expectation as I walk in the door. And yes I did look at the mixed internet reviews. Anyway, let’s continue.

Past the deli counter with its Umbrian produce, nimbly avoiding the table that’s first offered – because I’m not a contortionist – to squeeze into another situated under a looming and spectacularly ugly coffee roaster. This is a place to make new friends. With the people at the next table.

Yet there’s undeniably a great feel to it. Lots of wood, paintings, brick, and the buzz of an open kitchen. I’m thinking I could live here. If the damn table didn’t keep wobbling.

There’s an also an edge. The staff seem a bit skittish, the menu is so vague that after three reads I still can’t make sense of it or find the main courses, and it’s slap bang in the middle of the notorious Nithsdale Triangle.

Where? That, ladies and gentlemen, is the area of Glasgow where there are already three excellent cafes groaning with home baking and successfully playing every hand-knitted, made-on-the-premises trick in the Bumper Book of How To Win Friends And Influence Restaurant Critics. Open here and you better be good. Seem too smug and the thunder of stilettos heading to rivals down the road will drown out the ring of the cash register. So, is Cookie good? Actually, yes.

Full marks for the décor and the setting. It would get double full marks for the Umbrian produce, if we were actually in Umbria. In Scotland the buzz words of slow food, food miles and all that jazz – which have been bandied about in relation to Cookie – means that we should probably all be eating turnip and mutton pies. Local produce.

Anyway, I don’t order the antipasto because I don’t have a scooby what’s in it. The menu really is that useless. But the fresh, crisp crusted bread with olive oil is fantastic. The omelette Arnold Bennet with chunks of smoked haddock on a sweet, almost dolcelatte flavoured cheese, is outstanding. Though it’s not made with the haddock actually in it Savoy-style – and by that I mean the hotel where it was invented and not the region in Italy where it, er, wasn’t.

Italian stuff then? If you want to know what the pastas are then you gotta ask. Groan. That menu again. I settle on a variation of tagliatelle with ragu which is full of chunks of superbly tender meat as it should be, but is cautiously seasoned, which may be a slight weakness in here.

Why? Well, the mackerel with new potatoes is a lovely crisp, pan fried fillet with a sea of potatoes and a very small dollop of sauce vierge – that’s burstingly fresh in a tomato and lemony way – but not nearly enough of it and the whole dish feels that it lacks something. Flavour?

But then I did just eat in Edinburgh’s Seadogs where they do fishy flavours stunningly well.

And it’s nul points for the second bowl of bread which is dry and flat and minus nul points for the chocolate cheesecake which is almost flavourless and heavy enough to sink a battleship.

Confused? Well, there’s more to Cookie than all this. There are pasta making classes and life and enthusiasm and all the things that signify someone is trying very, very hard to do this right. And hey, hats off to all that.

In fact hats off to Cookie. Few restaurants become an overnight success without sorting out the detail. This is a new venture and great things may yet come of it.