The Bath Street Pony
207 Bath Street,Glasgow,
G24HZ
0141 221 9444
Price Ratings
£ – inexpensive
££ – mid-price
£££ – expensive
££££ – very expensive
Reviews
Horses for courses
Review published on 01/02/2010 © Sunday Herald
There are no second chances for restaurants that don’t get off to a good start. Like doorstep salesmen, they have a very brief window of opportunity to sell themselves before the door slams in their faces, so the pitch must be right. If they miscalculate on pricing initially, they risk being forever perceived as prohibitively expensive, even if they rejig the price structure and put on conspicuously cheap menus thereafter.
Getting saddled with a reputation for being dead and empty is also fatal: people crave the reassurance of numbers. The marketing message on the calling card must be simple, too. The eating-out public wants an easy label for the type of food and vibe on offer. Is it an exciting new Mediterranean restaurant or a just a kebab shop with aspirations? Is it a special treat establishment or a useful pitstop that lends itself to repeat business? Fudge these distinctions at your peril.
Bath Street Pony, which has recently opened at the sleepy end of Glasgow’s eponymous restaurant strip, strikes me as having got it about right. The first thing that works is its pricing. For instance, £6 will buy you a decent lunch, £8.95 a two-course, pre-theatre menu. You can get a very superior flatbread sandwich with salad to take away from its Pony Express menu for between £2.95 and £3.95 – attractive propositions in this economic climate and user-friendly enough to vie with the considerable opposition.
Then there’s the food, which is familiar enough not to be scary – that in-vogue Italian-meets-Manhattan formula – but just different enough to prick the curiosity. Reasonable prices don’t seem to come at the expense of provenance either. The chicken, for instance, is free-range. The premises are stylish, but not so self-consciously slick that you feel that you must be a beautiful person to enter.
The cooking is honest, the line-up of dishes unpretentious, yet they are neither crude nor unimaginative, and lived up to the promise of the description with lots of evidence of care and attention to detail.
Three winningly bouncy scallops came bathed in brown-buttery juices on a salad of rocket and fennel, the latter roasted until it was fondant and caramelised. The grilled goat’s cheese bruschetta with roasted pear was not quite what I expected. I had imagined that, given the presence of pear, the customary tomato topping might have been dropped, but it hadn’t.
Doing so might have made for a more coherent, focused dish with more clarity of flavours. That said, the bread was airily crisp and the chalky cheese and sweet Conference pear made a most seductive combination that was further enhanced by salad leaves anointed with a well-balanced honey and lemon dressing.
Lamb chops tasted as though they had come straight from a charcoal barbecue. Their fat was properly crisped and they were tenderly pink within. It was a delight to pick up the bones and gnaw them. They came with a light gravy impregnated with the flavour of fresh mint, excellent sautéed waxy potatoes and an interesting, well-dressed green salad with slivers of roasted vegetables through it. A straightforward, uncomplicated dish, nicely executed.
Bath Street Pony does a good line in affordable comfort food: baked three-cheese macaroni, meatballs, minestrone and various dishes using robust Italian sausage. We tasted sausage braised in wine with whole cherry tomatoes, in a tangle of pappardelle with shavings of parmesan and crispy breadcrumbs. It struck the right seasonal note – a pity that the pasta was slightly overcooked. It takes nerve to serve pasta as al dente as Italians do.
For a place that claims not to be big on puddings, Bath Street Pony put in a creditable, if undistinguished, performance. A vanilla-studded pannacotta with brambles had a suitably wobbly set. We couldn’t track down any honeycomb in the honeycomb cheesecake, but otherwise it offered a nice, if rather plain and bland, fresh cream taste.
When you look at what you had and what it cost, Bath Street Pony definitely stacks up. I’d say it’s off to a flyer.
Pony gets off to a flying start
Review published on 26/01/2010 © Sunday Herald
If restaurants are like iPods, some sites are permanently set to shuffle. A new place opens, muddles along for a few months, then closes. A half-hearted refurb later, it reopens under another name, flickers briefly, then returns to the dark.
Older incarnations get buried under new signage, new menus, new decorative bric-a-brac; they become unremarkable fossils, of interest only to restaurant critics who like to keep score and taxi drivers wary of prematurely updating their vital mental map.
"Bath Street Pony? Didn't that used to be Tom Tom?" the cabbie might say, and they'd be right (other correct answers in this category include Brick and Over The Road, and that's just in the last five years).
Such impermanence can be habit-forming, self-fulfilling, vexatious. When you open on a site notorious for high turnover, are your initial patrons coming to support your new venture or just to play spot the difference? Through sheer happenstance, I've been to what is now the Bath Street Pony in all of its former guises: for an unmemorable birthday party, a New Year's Eve bash and a wary meet-andgreet with a partner's parents.
It's one of relatively few Bath Street bars with street-level rather than basement access, distinguished further by glass frontage, yet for all its architectural quirks it was a hard place to love, never particularly welcoming or comfortable. With hindsight, I realised I'd never actually gone there through choice.
Now reshod as an urbane bar/café/restaurant with a strong Mediterranean influence on the food, the Bath Street Pony decidedly breaks with the site's chequered past.
It helps that the interior seems genuinely different rather than haphazardly rehashed, with big lounge booths under cosy lighting and a serious-looking bar. The menu, too, has a confident feel; a punchy selection of pizzas and pastas, a section boldly labelled House Classics and descriptions of Italian meat and seafood platters to share that seem to delight in their listy exhaustiveness.
My companion opts for the thick-cut Italian sausage cooked in red wine and rosemary to start, while I plump for the calamari. His dish comes with a slab of doughy bread to soak up the sauce, while my squid is accompanied by a satisfyingly garlicky aioli. The sausage is properly pungent and peppery; the Italian theme extends to our crisp Moretti draught lagers. Though tempted by a main course of Mediterranean sausages with a fig salad, I go for Scottish lamb chops.
Even this local dish isn't entirely devoid of continental influence, arriving with an Italian mint sauce (not that I could detect all that much difference). Over the table, my friend tucked into the self-proclaimed "kickass" chop-steak burger, preloaded with cheese, lettuce, pickles, gherkins, crispy pancetta and apparently organic ketchup, with fries thrown in too. Both dishes were generously proportioned, well-cooked and eminently satisfying.
The Italian accent also dominates the desserts, including a seasonal fruit panna cotta, chocolate and almond cake with marscapone and the classic affogato (vanilla ice cream drowned in espresso). Will this sensual assault keep The Bath Street Pony out of the glue factory in the long-term? With the wittily named Pony Express speedy lunch deal to tempt nearby office workers and plans for live entertainment in the basement function room, it's got a lot of plates to spin.
But even just based on the evening dining experience, the Bath Street Pony has already managed to carve out its own dynamic identity in a few short weeks. This is one nag that looks set to go the distance.