Eat Deli, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Home sweet home

Review published on 05/05/2009 © Sunday Herald

The recession has forced a sea change in our eating habits. Supermarket sales of ready meals are down by 40% as people figure out, belatedly, that paying £4 for a wad of over-processed industrial food that has the cheek to call itself lasagne, or similar, doesn’t represent the greatest bargain.

Sales of ingredients for “scratch” or real cooking are up. Without money to burn, a growing number of once cash-rich/time-poor consumers are concluding that they do, after all, have time to wash lettuce or make soup. So supermarkets are having to work much harder to maintain sales of convenience food with strategies such as meals for two for a tenner, compensating for the overall decline in ready meals sales by poaching from the restaurant sector and exploiting the idea of “eating out while eating in”.

At Eat Deli in Glasgow, there’s a model for how the independent sector can outdo the multiples at this. It’s in the mould of the city’s Delizique and Heart Buchanan, un-cloned delis that kit you out with a nice, genuinely home-made meal, infinitely better than anything you’ll get from M&S or Tesco’s Finest. Something that costs more than if you had cooked it yourself, but considerably less than a restaurant meal.

Late afternoon on a Saturday, we popped into Eat for a cuppa and to check out the cakes – of these delights, more later – but ended up buying dinner. We didn’t go for the daily set meal for two for £24. It looked good (asparagus and pine nut tarts, a choice of free-range chicken bake with a dark, crisp potato lid or a robust lamb ragu with haricot beans and rosemary, followed by a plump trifle with a luscious layer of egg custard) but then so did everything else on offer.

Instead, we made a rather random selection of other options and took them home for a taste trial. Deciding was hard. Fish pie, coconut lamb curry, goulash, salads, chunky beef and parmesan meatballs ... there was quite a selection. Verdict? There wasn’t one duffer in the pack.

Eat does wonderful things with breadcrumbs that bear no resemblance whatsoever to KFC. Its feta, sun-dried tomato and potato “cakes” are the veggie option we’ve all been looking for; interesting and tasty enough to make a decent meal with salad. Eat’s fishcake was a pleasure too, the potato and fish fresh and moist, its potential dullness cut by lemon zest and herbs. Have this in the sleek deli and it comes with Eat’s own chilli jam. A buttery, crunchy breaded escalope of herby free-range chicken needed only a wedge of lemon but went surprisingly well with a salad of puy lentils and roasted butternut squash.

Eat is big on savoury bakes, burritos and frittatas, and lasagne is a speciality. Our ricotta and spinach version was terrifically good, restrained with the pasta and generous on the ricotta and bechamel sauce. The spinach was whole leaf, not chopped up. The whole thing felt satisfying but light, succulent and healthy.

Paralysed by the choice of cakes, we ate far too many. This sort of decision is torture. How do you choose between a wantonly gooey coconut sponge with cream cheese topping and the carrot cake, all moist and cinnamony?

There was a similar challenge with the muffins. Would it be the green-speckled courgette one with lime zest icing, the fudgy toffee apple, the squidgy orange one with its curd-like topping (we plumped for this one – every crumb was wonderful) or the pretty mixed-berry?

That’s not even considering the monumental chocolate marble cake with its shiny, drippy Sachertorte-style coating. It was an equally tough call to decide between a textbook bakewell tart and pears and amarena cherries, set in a moist almandine-filled crust. The latter won out and testified to the kitchen’s sure hand with pastry.

I love home-cooked food. When it comes to soul-feeding goodness, it trumps eating out every time. But if I lived nearby, I’d be a good customer at Eat. It’s like eating in, and I mean that as the most sincere compliment.