Firebird, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Burning bright

Review published on 21/12/2006 © Sunday Herald

I took a London friend to Kelvingrove Art Galleries recently and she was bowled over by the experience. She couldn’t get over the fact it was free and was even more amazed that it didn’t try to sneak in extra charges by making certain themed areas into ‘special exhibitions’.

If this was London, we agreed, we would be looking for £6 just to get over the threshold. She was staggered by the absence of queues and the freedom to walk around without treading on other peoples’ toes (This was a Tuesday, mind you, but even at peak times, Kelvingrove can absorb a huge number of people).

Furthermore she was dumbfounded to find world-class objects in what she had wrongly assumed would be a small-time, regional museum. I was wary about taking her to the café, but the beans and chips dump of my memory had been transformed, serving up decent tea and a reasonable home-made lemon tart. But best of all, we agreed, was the place itself. Even without its amazing collection of artefacts, it is a wonderful building to be in, especially in the bleak, damp, windswept depths of winter, when its warm, womb-like charms really come into their own.

We decided to have dinner just across the road at Firebird. I promised her a pizza from the wood-fired oven, but for the time being – and it’s been quite some time already – the oven is out of commission. We installed ourselves close to the flickering fire which, despite being a phoney gas effort, still managed to create a mood of warm intimacy in what is otherwise a fairly stripped back and basic bar/dining room.

Initially, the menu had us worried. A smoked duck salad with quince glaze sounded promising, but why include roast potatoes and chorizo? If you put ‘orichette’ on the menu, please learn to spell it properly. It’s ‘orecchiette’, the Puglian pasta meaning ‘little ears’. And we weren’t convinced that we would enjoy it with its heavysounding Puy lentils and Italian sausage. A Euro mish-mash. What about linguine with duck ragu? It sounded like the sort of thing you’d get in family-run trattoria in some Piedmontese hilltop village. We didn’t dare hope that it would be that good and so were pleasantly surprised to find that it was. Leg meat had been braised with wine, winter herbs, vegetable and stock to produce a lovely, natural sauce, and the ratio of perfectly cooked pasta to ragu was just right – the linguine being there more to hold the ragu than to dominate.

We shared this as a starter, then moved on to the venison and chicken. These days, I never order chicken unless I’m convinced that it is either proper free-range, or better still, organic. I still haven’t recovered from seeing the sordid interior of a broiler chicken shed – the source of nearly all the chicken we eat – with the glazed-eyed stockman walking through the moving carpet of chickens, fishing out dead birds. I’ll stump up for organic poultry without a murmur. Firebird’s chicken was organic, which is commendable. Few establishments make that effort, however high their ambitions and their prices. The breast and thigh had been stuffed with a smooth, chestnut, onion (and possibly sage) stuffing and served up with a bosky wild mushroom and potato gratin with the sort of bubbling, brown crust that you can’t stop picking away at.

The chef demons t rated a justified confidence in the tenderness of his venison by quickly char-grilling a leg steak. It was nicely pink and juicy, and came with excellent casseroled winter vegetables – turnip, carrot, parsnip. A peppery-sweet beetroot and horseradish purée provided further delicious lubrication for the meat, the f ire of the horseradish making a good foil for the sweetness of the vegetables.

A hot, syrupy, chewy, dark chocolate brownie got the thumbs-up, and an unpromising-looking apple, cranberry and pecan crumble turned out to be better than it looked. The wine list, we agreed, was thoughtfully sourced, the mark-ups moderate. My friend is now quite taken with Glasgow. Great cultural assets, she thinks, and streets lined with surprisingly good restaurants. I haven’t yet disabused her on the latter point.

© The Herald