Nick's Italian Kitchen & Bar, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Sweet nothings

Review published on 18/01/2010 © Sunday Herald

Italians show a degree of indifference towards desserts. Look on pannacotta and tiramisu as a sop to non-Italians in quest of a pudding. In Italy, when you have worked your way through all the savoury stages of a serious meal – antipasti, primi, secondi, contorni – chances are you’ll have run out of steam by the time you get to the dolci. Instead, perhaps, you nibble at Pecorino with ripe pear, or dip some biscotti into sweet wine. That tends to be it.

Italian restaurants in Britain, however, feel somewhat obliged to do desserts, though their hearts are rarely in it, and it has been the custom to serve the bought-in article. The “real” ice cream, historically made from scratch, now more often than not starts life as a commercial “pre-mix”. My heart sinks when I see one of those tall, thin glass cabinets filled with hauntingly familiar cakes.

You will see one such cabinet at Nick’s, the new Italian spot in Glasgow’s Hyndland, which would otherwise be a better-than-average restaurant for its category.

Asked if desserts were made on the premises, our waitress said no. “Try the fruit tart though,” she said, “it’s really nice”. It wasn’t, unless you like soggy refrigerated pastry with a thin layer of defrosted forest fruits on top. To pay £4.50 for that is heartbreaking. Rather than going through the motions, the management at Nick’s should put up a sign that reads: “Desserts? Don’t bother”.

The sad thing about rotten desserts is that they make you judge the meal more harshly in retrospect. If we hadn’t tried them, I’d have had a more flattering overall take on Nick’s.

The crisp flat bread, with olive oil, garlic and fresh rosemary, makes a good impression and there is an appealing northern Italian aspect to the menu. I very much enjoyed my Piedmontese tortellini al brodo, silky little parcels of ricotta-filled egg pasta floating in a full-flavoured chicken stock which tasted home made.

Having checked that the veal was free-range, I went for escalope Milanese, where the meat is beaten out, coated in flour, eggs and breadcrumbs, then fried in butter. It was quite good, but it was crying out for a slice of lemon and a green salad. Instead, it was crammed on the plate with a pile of over-cooked penne mixed with an unexceptional Bolognese-style ragu.

This was a prime example of pointless deviation from tradition. To start with, it conflates two categories, the primi (usually pasta or risotti) and the secondi (meat or fish). In Italy, this meat ragu, so abused in the UK with additions like mushrooms and dried herbs, is served with tagliatelle, not spaghetti or any other pasta. And with good reason: it goes better. Another Piedmontese favourite, brasato al Barolo – beef braised in the eponymous wine – was served with plump gnocchi and competently executed, if underpowered on the wine front.

Pricing at Nick’s is erratic. At £3.95, the tortellini in brodo was good value. At £9.25, the lobster tortelloni wasn’t. The egg pasta was good, but any crustacean in the filling was barely visible, let alone tasteable, and the creamy pink sauce, though perfectly pleasant, seemed to owe more to tomato and basil than lobster.

The place itself cultivates a Manhattan grill mood – brick walls, dark, cosy, urban. It works well, and if the food was taken up a level, it would be a very likeable all-round package. Front of house goes round in circles, with servers popping up regularly to ask you the same question. Perhaps they are distracted because they have to extricate bottles of wine from the cellar by clambering over furniture. Entertaining, if odd.

Take a bite out of Italian ristorante’s beefy menu

Review published on 11/01/2010 © Sunday Herald

Since it opened last November, Nick’s has been the talk of the steamie. (Actually, since we’re in Hyndland, it’s probably more accurate to say it’s been the talk of the Steam Room at the Western Baths.) Who, for example, is Nick?

And is this former beauty salon, ironically once called Eden and now renamed by new owner Lawrence “Antipasti” McManus, a neighbourhood restaurant with bar – or a neighbourhood bar with restaurant?

Last Sunday evening it looked distinctly like the latter. The bar area in this beautifully designed space is dominant, its exposed brick and waxed wood artfully lit to create a welcoming wine-bar atmosphere (though it has to be said that any actual warmth is killed off by icy blasts coming in every time the glass door opens).

Even though the west end is treacherously ice-bound, the place is hoaching with a rather raucous fortysomething crowd, and nobody seems to mind being overlooked by a huge black and white photograph of the smiling playwright John Byrne.

The wine by the glass list is good, and a Sicilian Nero d’Avola (£3.45 for a small glass) is light enough to enjoy as an apperitif while we’re waiting for the rest of our party.

A quick glance up to the mezzanine level restaurant, cleverly designed as a private space, confounds the theory that the bar is the main business. It’s absolutely packed, and apparently with a different crowd altogether. There are couples, families and groups of girls. We booked in advance, and our table for six is ready and waiting for us. Ten minutes later we’ve ordered our drinks and are perusing the menu, though in the end they take longer to arrive from the bar than the food does from the kitchen.

From the imaginative brasserie-style menu I choose calamari fritto with fennel salad (£4.95), a tasty combo of crunchy minty/aniseedy salad and light tempura coated fish, with the flavour shining through.

Generous portions of gambas pil-pil (£5.95) and Italian sausage with fagioli beans (£4.25), all presented with toasted foccaccia on dinky wooden platters, are all pronounced delicious.

For mains, two of the boys in our company go for the home-made, hand-pressed beefburgers which have already made something of a name for themselves in local foodlore. They’re not disappointed, though one half of the bun is rendered soggy by a pile of damp, undressed, salad leaves.

One of the boys wishes he’d gone instead for the beef and barolo stew with potato dumplings (£12.95) when he sees it served up to the delight of our third man, who declares that if he could eat nothing but this for the rest of his life, he’d die happy. Confusingly, however, he leaves all his baby carrots.

Two of us girlies choose lobster tortellini (£9.25), which come with big fat prawns hidden in the cream and vodka sauce. The cream is loosened by the alcohol, making the sauce surprisingly light but robust enough to match our sturdy fresh pasta pockets stuffed with meaty minced lobster. Droplets of deep green virgin olive oil are a nice visual touch. Our sixth dish, a rigatoni with chicken (£8.95) is, by contrast, distinctly average.

A huge helping of vanilla ice-cream makes up for that disappointment, but the rest of us are unable to contemplate any of the puddings, which include tiramisu, strawberries and cream or lemon Madeira cake.

Coffee is, naturally, by Illy. Which just goes to prove that chez Nick, the devil is in the detail.