Malmaison Glasgow, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Maison blah

Review published on 29/06/2007 © Sunday Herald

I scanned the online menu of Glasgow's Malmaison and thought it looked promising.

Now I am annoyed with my own naivete. Had I also looked at those of other Malmaisons throughout the UK, I would have noticed the worrying similarities.

First of all, there were routine misspellings dotting the menus from London to Liverpool. Mach rather than mache (lamb's lettuce), that random apostrophe inserted between the final 'e' and 's' of feves and moules "mariner". Listen, if you can't handle the French, then use English. These amateurish mistakes would be forgivable on a scrawled blackboard menu, but the Malmaison is meant to be a slick outfit.

Orthography apart, the menus indicate that a formulaic style has been decided centrally to establish the Malmaison food brand; essentially old-style steak house and left-bank brasserie, with the odd seasonal ingredient and local food highlighted to impart a sense of provenance. It could work, but in Glasgow, it tasted as if the chefs either didn't understand it or couldn't be bothered cooking it, or alternatively, that the management thinks it can cut corners and get away with it.

I’ll return to the service issue later, but when our starters eventually arrived, I knew we were dealing with a slapdash, penny-pinching outfit. The humdrum green(ish) leaves in a salade gourmande were several days past their peak of vitality. Dumped on top were slices of Spam-pink meat, said to be smoked duck, a few strands of poultry, said to be confit rabbit – with absolutely nothing of a confit about them – and an unpleasant-tasting disc of what looked like bloc (the cheapest form of foie gras), dry on one side where it had come into contact with air.

This salad was also meant to contain truffle and crisp potato, but didn't. Across the table, grilled Toulouse' sausage had the tough skin and spongiform juiciness of a frankfurter. It came with clapped out rocket and a tomato, caper and shallot' salad, in which the last two ingredients were so microscopic as to be missable.

My main course was said to be wild trout, suspiciously cheap at £12.50. I confirmed with our waitress that this meant wild sea trout. Along came fillets of a fish, so puny and thin that they looked oddly like farmed rainbow. If this fish was indeed wild, then it was such an immature specimen that it must have contravened every regulation about mesh size, and no thinking chef should serve it.

The greasy fish sat on bashed down peas and broad beans, with an unannounced appearance from some desiccated trompette de mort mushrooms. The whole dish was drowning in oil and butter, desperately plain, and the promised citrus dressing – yes, you've guessed it – was once again missing.

The dry-aged T-bone steak of Galloway beef, served with a slice of beef marrow on top, was vastly better, cooked rare as requested, with a flavour that indicated good breed and feed. Its hand-cut chips looked and tasted very much like those you would find in a thousand other catering outlets. Their accompanying Bloody Mary sauce' – I had hoped for some fresh tomato, spiked with Lea and Perrins and vodka – was indistinguishable from tomato ketchup.

Desserts were better, but not enough to compensate for what came before. A reasonable, if not brilliant, Bakewell tart came with really rather good Comice pear sorbet. A Turkish delight pannacotta was pleasing, but here again, it deviated from the description: the promised raspberry jelly had turned into a runny pile of defrosted, unsweetened raspberries. This at a time when the fresh Scottish equivalent is widely available.

The front of house appears to be run, if you can call it that, by slightly resentful, possibly overworked twentysomethings. When I first tried to book, the computer was down. Having eventually made my reservation, we arrived to find they had lost the booking.

You get the feeling that there is no one on the spot, actively managing the place. It is at least a decade since I visited the Malmaison. It seemed smart then. Now it feels like a dungeon and smells of chips.

Does the Malmaison hotel group have a troubleshooting squad? It certainly needs one.

© Sunday Herald