Dining Room, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

The good food guy

Review published on 13/10/2009 © Sunday Herald

I have long been a fan of Jim Kerr’s cooking. He is a man who likes to eat, not one of those chef-technicians who fiddles around with your food while savouring bridies and Irn-Bru in his spare time. But he does have a habit of turning up in odd, and ever-so-slightly problematic, places.

I still remember a really good meal he cooked in the original Dining Room on Byres Road in Glasgow – which, if I remember correctly, featured an extraordinary pannacotta scented with essential oil of rose. The premises were ridiculously small; various restaurants have come and gone since, presumably because the space is too tiny to make any money. But then it seemed as if Kerr was going to the other extreme when he took up residence in the cavernous Mar Hall at Bishopton, what with its super-sized, soaring ceilings and grandiose, echoing corridors.

Somehow, Mar Hall never felt like the right setting for Kerr, or his cooking. Neither the prices nor the set-up was ever going to be funky, and it was inevitably going to appeal to big pockets, most likely corporate. Kerr, on the other hand, is a cosmopolitan chef whose cooking style betrays a taste for gutsy European traditional food and an ongoing love affair with the clean, pure flavours of Japanese cuisine.

Now he has gravitated back to his natural city centre habitat, once again using the Dining Room name but setting up shop in basement premises on Bath Street that were most recently home to Manna, one of the weaker offerings in restaurateur Alan Tomkins’s portfolio.

Dining Room still looks like Manna, and the feeling of familiarity is intensified by the front-of-house man, who bears an uncanny resemblance to our much-loved Scottish actor Bill Paterson.

Scanning the menu, I was slightly disturbed at the pricing. £15 for a turnip gratin? That’s steep. But then I clocked the fixed-deal menus, which constitute astonishing value for money. Two or three courses off this menu, for lunch or pre-theatre, costs only £12 and £16 respectively – amazing when you see what’s on offer.

We began with the cocktail of white crab meat and watermelon, which sounded awfully like the à la carte crab and watermelon salad that costs £6.95. It was a typical no-need-to-fuss Jim Kerr special: fresh white meat, sweet melon, delicate salads. By contrast, a thick broth of yellow split pea and ham was peasanty, a reminder of how our traditional soups can be emotionally satisfying in a way fancier food is often not.

Kerr’s sweet potato and smoked haddock fishcake was inspired. It gave a body swerve to the customary potato stodginess that usually afflicts fishcakes, and the sweetness of the potato worked nicely with the smokiness of the fish. A chiffony sorrel sauce added a sharp edge to the proceedings, making the dish feel rather luxurious. Meanwhile, an altogether more down-to-earth steak burger pleased with consummately well-seared steak, impregnated with that addictive charcoal-grilled smokiness and topped by a melting cap of first-rate farmhouse cheddar cut from a truckle.

I had forgotten just how accomplished Kerr is with puddings. He takes them very seriously and seems to have no shortage of creative recipes up his sleeve. On the lunch/pre-theatre menu, you could have iced chewy chocolate cake with caramel mascarpone, which costs £6.95 à la carte. This might be one of the best chocolate puddings I have ever tasted, a near-perfect synthesis of agreeable chewiness, intense dark chocolatiness and mellow nuttiness.

As for the caramel mascarpone, this is an idea I’ll be experimenting with at home. Mind you, I was also blinded by the brilliance of the peanut butter and bitter chocolate tart, which consisted of a marvellously brittle crust (with peanut butter in the pastry) holding a velvety chocolate emulsion that was barely sweet. I loved the way it came with a simple quenelle of crème fraîche, another example of how Kerr knows when to stop embellishing a dish.

I’ll be back for dinner like a shot.