MacSorleys, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

A fine attempt

Review published on 19/04/2010 © Sunday Herald

MacSorleys is one of Glasgow’s great old pubs, a heritage gem. It opened its doors in 1899, serving oysters, champagne and Peacemaker, its own brand of whisky. Miraculously, much of the old MacSorleys remains: the vast bevelled and etched windows, a gleaming mahogany horseshoe bar with Art Deco fittings and the original beautiful mosaic floor that had been covered for decades. The whole place has been revamped in a thoroughly sympathetic manner with soft furnishings in peat-coloured Harris tweed and wall coverings supplied by style-setting Glasgow designers, Timorous Beasties.

MacSorleys is quite a special environment, and chef/patron Sam Carswell clearly means to make it a distinguished place for food also – not an easy project, since it is widely known as a music venue. Let’s face it, your live music crowd is more into nursing a pint and nibbling on some crisps than sitting down to a decent tuck-in, while those in search of a good meal might not expect to find it in a music pub and/or be irritated by the noise. This is not to say that live music and serious food can’t happily co-exist, just that it’s an oil and water mix that requires a clever chef and management to turn it into an emulsion. Nevertheless, Carswell is pluckily pressing on with a menu that offers seven starters and main courses, plus an additional pub menu with eight options, plus a couple of daily specials. That’s probably too many balls to keep in the air when MacSorleys is still establishing its market.

Carswell’s food philosophy is spot-on: seasonal and Scottish, preferably local ingredients. So far so good. But then we come to the style of cooking. MacSorleys is the perfect venue for a gastropub of the type pioneered by the Eagle in London, serving great ingredients given straightforward, gutsy treatment. This is not an inferior, lower-status offering than the folderols and curlicues of Michelin Guide-fixated restaurants, but an art all of its own. Few chefs trained in the fine dining mould find it easy to make the transition to this more relaxed, but still demanding, style of cooking. You just have to look at Carswell’s menu, and much of his presentation, to see that he comes from a fine dining background and is having difficulty detaching from it sufficiently to fully exploit the gastropub genre.

There is no doubt that Carswell can cook beautifully. A starter of nicely seasoned, richly-flavoured meat from braised pig’s trotter, roasted in cured ham and served with a deliciously oily salt cod brandade, would have been brilliant had it stopped there. But it came with vanilla-infused chickpea cream, a borderline addition in taste terms, and “saffron-steamed” crayfish, which managed to taste vinegary and almost unpleasant. Neither addition improved the basic trotter/ brandade dish – they just muddied the water. Fine dining fussiness was exemplified in the Ayrshire goat cheese mousse with carpaccio-thin slices of beetroot and beetroot jelly which didn’t gain from being served as three prissy little piles.

As with many fine dining chefs, Carswell is weak on vegetables. The juvenile chard leaves and pea shoots that garnished starters needed dressing, but they were in their birthday suits. Sprouts, carrots and squash that accompanied tender saddle of hare and a hot-pot of its leg tasted pre-blanched then dunked in water at the last moment. Ditto the broccoli and root vegetables that turned up with a deconstructed steak pie. The shin of Orkney beef was impeccably full-flavoured and melting, but was it improved by having its pastry lid glazed with saffron and sesame seeds? I don’t think so.

In the dessert department, you’re on stodge territory. Clootie dumpling with home-made vanilla ice cream might have been comforting but a brioche toffee thing was a claggy, cloying hybrid of bread and butter pudding and cheesecake that made a rather drab offering.

There is much that is good about the cooking at MacSorleys, and the sensible restraint of the main course prices makes for a fair bill. If Carswell can dump the fine dining baggage and grasp the gastropub nettle firmly, it could be a winner.

A feast for the stomach...if not the eye

Review published on 04/05/2010 © Sunday Herald

So finally we wander into MacSorley's and they are definitely serving food. Hurrah. It's not a promising start, though. The big, dark bar is empty and the big, pale barman is a bit startled when I ask for a menu at lunchtime on a Sunday. And it's not even the fancy cockerel-and-pigs'-trotters menu that has, among other things, been getting this place talked about. In fact it's a pub grub classics menu.

Still, I'm feeling a vague sense of relief that the a la carte isn't available. It's not that I can't see a chef in the back (though I can't), it's just that the whole place has that bed-head feel, as though we've wandered through someone's open front door the morning after a wild party.

In short, it's all a bit sluggish, sleepy and slow. Even worse, it seems so still and empty that I am fighting a growing paranoia that the barman himself might be knocking out a few dishes in between serving those pints.

Hold on - false alarm. There's a flash of whites in the kitchen, a flickering of activity, even a bright chat taking place at the open door. That's definitely a chef in there. There's a quickening of pace and a taking of orders, and suddenly everything seems to be switched on.Hurrah, again.

In fact the barman's back over, writing down the orders, there's cutlery on the table and since we asked he has even brought salt and pepper. This is a relief, because if you're going to order a jambalaya with spicy Lorne sausage - yes, you read that correctly - and gammon and eggs with a tonic wine sauce early on a Sunday then it has to be done right. You don't want to take any risks.

So, are we scared? Yeah, a bit, though I was in a few weeks ago and had a very nice lunch of potted meats and hams, baked breads and even homemade pickles. I'm back again because people keep mentioning the place.

That said, Joe is hoisting a quizzical eye at the decor as if to say: hmm, it's a restored pub. According to some bumph I read somewhere, though, MacSorley's is one of the oldest pubs in Glasgow, and indeed there are beautiful, swooping stained-glass windows and the floor is quite nice. Bits of it, anyway, but not the part where they have clearly moved the horseshoe-shaped bar much, much further back and left an untiled black mess.

The contrast of old stained glass and woodwork with what look to me like new and brassy pub-chain fittings isn't too bonny either. To be brutally frank it may be fantastic for a gig, and when I came in here the other week to try to get dinner there was a band setting up in front of a room full of what could easily have been thrash-metal fans or folkies (who can tell these days?), but it's not quite got the best feel for food. Yet.

And so to the food, served on a shiny wooden pub tabletop in deep, white china dishes, with a tad of teasing and towering. Despite the setting it's very professionally presented. But how does it taste? There are delicate, pale-pink slices of sweet, baked-on-the-premises gammon, crushed potatoes mixed with even paler broad beans, a runny poached egg and that sauce - is it Buckfast? I don't know, but it is a deeply garlicky and winey sauce that completes an absolutely delicious plate of food, every drop of which is eaten.

The jambalaya is steaming hot, flecked with tomato and spice, and contains hunks of chicken, chunks of chorizo and a couple of small squares of that cheeky Lorne sausage that are nothing if not fun and perfectly in keeping with the flavour of the whole thing. It's good too.

Overall? The setting is weird, it's pub service and the menu is intriguing, but what's most evident is that the cooking is very, very good, so good and fresh, in fact, that it should overcome all the other difficulties.