One Ten Grill, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Starter for ten

Review published on 21/07/2008 © Sunday Herald

One Ten, the restaurant in the newish Mark's Hotel in Glasgow, left a bad taste in my mouth, in the literal sense.

It started with the pre-prandial focaccia and olive paste which tasted of old garlic – the tired, bendy, stale, pungent stuff that taints your breath and repeats on you for hours after.

Had we sampled this before I ordered my pumpkin, sage and confit garlic ravioli, I would have plumped for another option. But being an optimist – and seasonal food being the zeitgeist – I jumped to a very wrong conclusion.

This being the height of summer, I assumed that the raison d'etre for the dish would be that the chef wanted to showcase the new season's crop: that's fresh "wet" garlic at it most juicy, so surprisingly mild that you can eat it raw, in an aïoli, say, or roast whole bulbs, then squirt the gooey cloves onto bread to make a fabulous summery spread.

I guessed wrong. The fetid aroma emanating from my ravioli had noses twitching across the table. One cautious nibble was enough to confirm the malodorous presence of an aged, infirm member of the allium family, generating a pong fit to turn you into a social pariah for at least a week.

It got worse. Pasta dough as thick and leathery as industrial-purpose rubber gloves, submerged in a lake of elementary tomato and smoked paprika sauce. When our curt, distracted waiter removed the offending dish, almost untouched, without raising a quizzical eyebrow, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps he was used to removing barely-eaten meals.

The layout is problematic, suggesting that the restaurant is there to prop up the hotel, not shine in its own right. It is essentially a corridor between the bar and the kitchen with uncomfortably upright booth seating looking out onto this restless thoroughfare, killing off any potential dining-room atmosphere. The vista offers a prime view of a computer screen and the table where staff assemble room-service orders. One waiter was walking to and from the kitchen, eating as he went. You'll have gathered that One Ten is an amateurish outfit, but not in a likeable way.

I get the feeling that the kitchen does the minimum. A crab and dill "remoulade" was a dead ringer for ready dressed crab, blitzed with mayonnaise. The promised aniseedy herb must have gone walkabout. "Salad leaves" consisted solely of lolla rossa, that useless, impotent lettuce in need of Viagra that should be struck off any thinking chef's shopping list.

At £5.50, a pear and blue cheese salad was a spectacularly lazy effort – a very effective advert for eating at home. With more lolla rosso, lip-puckeringly vinegary and gritty caper berries, crude chunks of those hydroponic tomatoes the Germans call "wasserbomben", this was only one rung up from the deadly salads you get on planes.

Dishes are even less interesting than they sound. Lacklustre, overcooked cod was touted as sitting on a rosti which turned out to be a bizarrely sweet, fried slurry, presumably of potato. Its advertised sauce vierge – a classic maceration of olive oil, lemon juice, macerated tomatoes, fresh green herbs and shallots – looked more like thinned-down pesto, once more with that stale garlic whiff.

Our desserts didn't taste of garlic, thankfully. If you are fond of a hit of sugar to send your insulin levels soaring, then you would like the sticky toffee pudding with date ice cream. A competent crème brulée was not improved by a hard oat biscuit that took me back to the melting moments you used to bake in first year Home Economics.

On a week-day night, the other diners seemed to be people away from home on work, possibly residents in the hotel. This type of clientele is never good for food. Business people pass through, and rarely come back. They don't actively want to stay there. Most likely their employers struck some price deal with the hotel. Trade like this scarcely keeps a chef on his or her toes.

Of a table of nine next to us, half unwisely opted for the ravioli. Polo mints all round at their conference the next day, I'll bet.

© Sunday Herald