Morrisons Supermarket Restaurant, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Left on the shelf

Review published on 14/09/2009 © Sunday Herald

Bright ideas? Best left at that. Take this one: let’s review a supermarket restaurant. Well, the menus are getting bigger, the prices are getting lower and the gap is narrowing between the food they serve and what you’ll get in mainstream restaurants. Could we actually come and eat in supermarkets as a destination?

Er, nope. And here’s why, worked out over four painful attempts to visit a branch of Morrisons in Glasgow, during which the food varies between awful and nearly OK, the service never actually qualifies as service, the opening hours are bewildering and seem to change on a whim, and – most of all – the gap between what’s on the supermarket shelves and what’s on sale in the restaurant is enormous.

Visit one: Tuesday night. Floor-washing night, apparently. Or so the teenagers standing about with a mop seem to think. This means I am ordered to sit by the window while the rest of the restaurant is cordoned off. Yep, you’re right: eating alone in Morrisons is not yet the height of cool. Through the kitchen door I can see my Kashmiri chicken curry being emptied from a small plastic tub. Not a problem; we’re all relaxed in here. What is a problem is that it’s microwaved to extinction, a mess of dry, hard chunks of meat with only one lump retaining any moisture. Appalling. And the great floor-washing debate ends with no floor-washing being done. Sigh.

Visit two: cancelled. For two reasons. First, I can’t get anyone to come with me – and even if I could, the restaurant closes at 8pm. Or is it 5pm? Or 6pm? Come to think of it, is that huge fitted kitchen ever open in the evening? The serving hatch bears a sign saying to order at the cash till. Nobody seems sure and I ain’t taking the chance.

Visit three: hey, it’s nowhere close to busy but there are people occupying tables. It’s a huge restaurant, this, fitted out in a kind of low-rent, fast-food style. There’s also a man in front of me in the queue returning a tuna sandwich and saying quite loudly: “It’s too slimy.” Hmm. Cue a long, pointless debate among the staff over whether a manager should be called.

Let’s pause to be clear about this. I didn’t come here to sneer – the opposite, in fact – but I am struggling to get my head round what’s going on in that kitchen. My branded McIntosh mince and tatties is a sizeable portion. The only problem is it looks like it was assembled by two people standing at opposite ends of the room. The mash seems to have hit the plate at high speed, splattering over the sides in long, gooey fingers which are now actually touching my table. It was brought to me like that. Taste? Extremely poor. Is anybody bothered about what reaches the customers?

At least I still have Morrisons’ “famous” fish and chips to enjoy. The fish is clean and white and encased in a seasoned batter. Sadly, it doesn’t taste like it originated from anywhere near the supermarket’s well-stocked fish counter. The chips are just limp and taste a bit old.

Visit four: the restaurant has been refurbished in the past few days. To my untrained eye, this seems to consist of a coat of paint. Most importantly, at last there’s something from the supermarket’s rotisserie counter on the menu. Hurrah. Roast chicken. Call me old-fashioned, but why serve up poor food when there’s a whole supermarket of fresh and interesting ingredients in here? There’s a butcher, for goodness’ sake. A vegetable section. There’s also belly pork, ribs and all sorts of chicken varieties roasting just yards away.

One roast dish is better than nothing, though, so what does it taste like? I have no idea. It’s just after 5pm. The sign clearly says, and I now know to read it twice, “Closes at 6pm.” The girl at the hatch says the kitchen closed at five. I ask her twice, just to be sure – but hey, why argue? I’ve had more than enough.