Mao, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Mao

Review published on 11/12/2002 © Sunday Herald

Money management is a tricky skill. Wise and thrifty types axe eating out promptly as an obvious way of cutting their cloth to suit their budget. Even if your bank account is looking healthy, eating out has become ludicrously expensive in the UK.

If you're feeling hard up, the standard menu at Mao - generic south east Asian - is quite affordably priced. It's interesting too, spanning kumera (sweet potato) cakes, nasi goreng, tempura of lemon sole, duck and lychee watercress salad and steamed Hokkien noodles. Tempting though that sounded, we were drawn to the lunch menu priced at £7.95 for two courses with four choices for each course. Not boring choices either, with starters consisting of mini spring rolls, Thai chicken salad, Nam Pla (fish sauce) seafood terrine and Asian soup followed by hoisin chicken, vegetable udon, chilli roasted salmon and Thai green curry for main courses.

A better bargain would be hard to find. It was good fresh food by any standards. Had I been asked to pay 50 per cent more for it, I wouldn't demur and if it was 100 per cent more, it wouldn't be out of line with current price levels given the quality of the food and the kitchen's aptitude with Asian flavours.

The acid test, of course, was the soup of the day. Asian broths are hard to get right, since their success rests on the basic bouillon, a challenge to most non-Asian chefs. This one was clear, pungent and aromatic, fragrant with invigorating Kaffir lime leaf and seasoned up with fish sauce. In it was very lightly cooked, still succulent chicken, firm mushrooms and authentic amounts of fiery fresh red chilli.

This was a bowlful to give you that endorphin rush you get when you climb to the top of a munro, but without the effort. The Thai salad went well afterwards, a hyper-fresh, crunchy combination of shredded carrot, pepper and tomato mixed with ruby chard, an abundance of aniseedy holy basil and chilled chicken breast meat, all set off by a refreshing zingy, limey dressing. Spring rolls looked somewhat flat and under-filled, but wrapped in curly lettuce with mint, basil and coriander, then dunked in soy dipping sauce, they made a very satisfactory mouthful.

I could smell the main course before it came to us, that seductive perfume that you only get from the most fragrant rices. In this case it was jasmine, each grain smooth, polished and separate, just holding together and no more. The Thai green beef curry that accompanied it was wonderful, a rich, chilli-hot coconutty sauce in which citrusy lemongrass predominated, but with rich supporting notes of lime leaf and galangal. The meat was impregnated with flavour, had clearly been cooked in the sauce (not a foregone conclusion in many restaurants), and fell apart in the mouth in the most agreeable manner. Vegetable udon noodles were correctly cooked to the right degree of springy firmness and the vegetables with them - pak choi, courgette, pepper, red onions, scallions and bamboo shoots - had been too. They retained their crunch and anointed in a rich, savoury and pleasantly sticky sauce, once more quite spicy, you didn't want to leave a scrap.

Two courses were so satisfying, we didn't need dessert but tried it anyway, in the interest of research. A generous slab of very decent, and notably freshly-made white chocolate cheesecake added only £2 to the bill. The place is bright, modern, cheeringly warm and open every day. I got a very favourable impression of this Irish mini-chain when I tried it out in Dublin two years ago. This visit reinforces that. Someone at Mao obviously has experience of real Asian food and refuses to dumb it down.