Fanny Trollopes, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Winter warmer

Review published on 15/12/2009 © Sunday Herald

You can only spin out autumn for so long, making the most of apples and pears and knocking up a salad from the hardier greens. When even the most vigorous herbs start shrivelling in the frozen ground, you have to embrace the depths of winter and change what you eat.

For me, the annual transition starts with breakfast. Cold muesli gets unceremoniously ditched for hot porridge. This always stirs up the usual debates about the "correct" way to make our national breakfast. I used be in the purist camp, the only approved ingredients being pre-soaked pinhead oatmeal, salt and milk. Now I look on a bowl of porridge as a blank wintry canvas to which I can add any heretical thing that I fancy - frozen summer berries, fresh pear, Grenadian nutmeg, Canadian maple syrup, raw cane sugar from Barbados, plum compote - bring it all on.

The management of Fanny Trollopes, one of the old-timers on Glasgow's restaurant-lined Argyle Street, understand only too well the Scottish craving for transformative winter food that warms and comforts, both physically and mentally. With temperatures barely hitting zero outside, we sat and watched a stream of refugees from the elements walk into Fanny's cheering warmth and clucking with approval at the specials: "Just what I feel like eating".

In winter, Fanny's is a restorative land of hearty soups, gutsy stews and proper custard. The kitchen is very accommodating. Obligingly it offered main courses scaled down to starters which eased the burden of decision-making somewhat. The portions here are as generously proportioned as the eponymous Ms Trollope, whose portrait hangs on the wall and whose colourful life story is narrated on the restaurant's website. A starter serving of the main course oxtail stew with mash was monumental value for money at £4 - a meal in itself by my standards. The meat fell from the bone bathed into a pool of gloriously sticky gravy that reeked of wild mushroom.

Another slimmed-down main course of Ramsay's of Carluke ham ribs in a broth with soft but still intact white beans and carrots freshened up with some newly sweated leek and a whisper of tarragon was a featherweight by comparison; but like the oxtail, it offered all the flavour that you get from meat on the bone. You can forget all those boring boned-out, lean escalopes, fillets and steaks as far as I'm concerned. They never rival the flavours or textures of unboned cuts with a bit of fat.

I had already eaten a meal but there were still the main courses. Three bouncy fillets of brill for £10.95? That's a bargain in these fished-out times. They were lovely too, brushed with butter and roasted golden brown then teamed up with a creamy-winey fricassée of mussels, tiny diced vegetables and dill. Across the table there was proof that haunch of venison can be tender and succulent, another substantial serving of meat on a sweet parsnip purée with a glossy port and redcurrant reduction.

Truly satiating food like this makes pudding redundant, doesn't it? But hang on a minute, everyone knows we have two stomachs, one for savoury and the other for sweet. So you will understand how we managed to find space for Fanny's crustyedged bread and butter pudding which came not only with a true egg custard but also cream. Made with bread that was a cut above your usual sliced white pap, it was surprisingly un-stodgy. Not a slimmer's item, certainly, but I'll eat cress for the rest of the week if I must.

As for the dark chocolate and praline mousse, it was a tour-de-force, commandingly dark but meltingly airy with crisps of caramelised hazelnut shot through its innards. It vies with the chocolate peanut butter tart that Jim Kerr makes at Glasgow's Dining Room for my best chocolate dessert of 2009 medal.

Fanny Trollopes is BYOB, so its endearingly low food prices are not underwritten by mark-ups on booze. Heroic - that's my verdict on Fanny.