Merrylee Road Bar & Kitchen, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Yuill be unimpressed

Review published on 09/03/2009 © Sunday Herald

It’s quite a while since I've been in a restaurant where the food is so all over the place as it is at Gordon Yuill's new enterprise on the south side of Glasgow, Merrylee Road. The south side is in dire need of good eating-out spots, but Merrylee Road does nothing to address that situation. On a Wednesday night, it was humming - but for how much longer I don't know, once people get over the thrill of the new. Our service was slow, despite front-of-house being Mr Yuill's core competency; even getting tap water was challenging. Our meal was uniformly poor, a synthesis of crude, slapdash cooking demonstrating nil flair with flavours and seasoning, and was rotten value for money.

The premises are promisingly kitted out.

Walls are decorated with what looks like school gym wall-bars; ceilings are lined with painted wood. Low-slung lights are reminiscent of Scandinavian style and the 1950s. The floor space has been chopped up into more intimate booth-style tables using dado-height partitions. Glass table tops on linen give that swanky 1930s luxury feel. This all works, but the food? Dearie me.

The menu is peppered with Americanisms - like eggplant instead of aubergine and bell pepper instead of plain old pepper - but in essence you're looking at one of those all-things-to-all-men propositions. So you get the tartan thing (haggis-stuffed chicken supreme), the safe-bet British thing (fish and chips, burger), the mongrel pan-Asian thing (tiger prawn and pak choi green curry), the hopelessly unseasonal and pointless Italian thing (mozzarella, beef tomato and basil salad) and car-crash vegetarian ensembles - but I'll come back to those.

Choosing with some difficulty because nothing strongly appealed, for starters we came up with gnocchi and a smoked haddock risotto. Mingy portions looked lost in vast soup plates. The gnocchi seemed home-made but were buried under what felt like a random selection of whatever was in the kitchen: braised onions, caramelised garlic cloves, chopped tasteless tomato and stringy spinach. All this came apparently innocent of seasoning and topped by some generic Parmesan-type cheese which was so rubbery it was an embarrassment to its genre. While the risotto rice was cooked to a mush, the flake or two of haddock was fine - but the circle of greasy sauce tasted more like a roux gone wrong than what I guess was meant to be an emulsified butter sauce.

Twice-cooked belly pork was inedible, unless you like chomping your way through tough, dry flesh and inadequately rendered skin. The appearance of a dish described as" eggplant, wild mushroom and blue cheese tart with a Kalamata olive and roast garlic dressing" reminded me of when I once left a slice of cheap supermarket pizza in the back of the oven, forgot about it, then came upon it later after I had cooked something else. The topping, if you can call it that, was thinner than the pastry and had formed a volcanic crust in which it was barely possible to pick out the aubergine.

The slice was mean and ungenerous and not improved by the accompaniments - a minute frisée endive salad that seemed to have been thoroughly peppered but not dressed, a tablespoon of something black that resembled what you would get if you put cheap stoned olives through the food processor, and a teaspoon of rank tomato sauce which I took to be the roasted garlic dressing. This veggie delight cost £6.95, a fair price if the dish had delivered what it promised, but I wouldn't have paid £1 for mine. A side dish of "skinny fries" had that particular odour which reminds me of old cooking-oil fumes pouring out of the vents of institutional catering enterprises.

Desserts, at £4.95 a time, were so inferior and so over-priced that they could have left you smarting at the insult: a square of lemon cream Chiboust (about a centimetre thick and two inches square) on a spoonful of berries that seemed to have been defrosted, and a leathery croissant bread-and-butter pudding with cloying heather honey custard.

Like its 1980s-style brandy snap baskets, Merrylee Road is in a low-grade time warp. It won't do. We have come to expect better.