Two Fat Ladies at The Buttery
The Buttery is one of Glasgow's oldest, most enduring and celebrated restaurants, well known for its relaxed atmosphere and unique interior of oak panelling, stained glass and wonderful mahogany and marble bar. The new restaurant will retain these features and team them with the excellent dining to be expected from The Buttery and Two Fat Ladies (the West End and City Centre restaurants now institutions in their own right).
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From The Sunday TimesAugust 10, 2008
Restaurant review: Allan Brown at The Shandon Belles
Allan Brown
I found myself in the Brighton branch of YO! Sushi the other week, attended to by a pleasant young fellow named Oscar who hailed from one of the Japanese islands. The Japanese, I’ve often found, harbour a curious fondness for Scotland, particularly its contemporary music. At university many was the time those of us in the office of the student newspaper took delivery of letters from Osaka and Kyoto — exquisite, calligraphically elaborate missives on scented rice paper — enquiring with unintentionally hilarious sincerity into the health and well-being of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions or the Pastels.
It seemed very much an article of faith among the youth of Japan that these superstars were treated with the highest degree of idolatry in their homeland. One rather got the impression the Japanese pictured the Scots supplicating with the devotion once accorded to the Emperor Senka whenever Deacon Blue or Altered Images deigned to walk among us. I never had the heart to relay the information that more commonly the musicians of the Scottish beat scene were to be found working in record shops and living on Weetabix. The disillusionment may well have precipitated outbreaks of Mishima-style hari-kari.
In a similar spirit, meanwhile, and having registered my accent, Oscar was keen to disclose that he’d been saving up for years in order to treat himself to a cook’s tour of the Highlands. I’m not sure how discriminating Oscar’s palate is; he was excited beyond reason, for instance, to hear that there’s branch of YO! Sushi in Glasgow; this exciting news clearly redoubled his commitment to the entire scheme.
But otherwise what Oscar yearned for, in a manner bemusing to those obliged to live with such stuff all year round, was restaurants with tartan carpets and clan family trees and stags on the wall and prestige salmon that had been slaughtered by an honourable warrior wielding his sword in the time-honoured manner of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Del Amitri. The Japanese have a love of difficulty and obscurity and doomed fortitude against all reasonable odds; hardly surprising, then, that they have a soft spot for Scotland.
I was reminded of Oscar and his odd project on visiting The Shandon Belles. The place doesn’t play the Caledonian card too stridently but I’m sure it’s precisely the type of place Oscar dreams of when being served lunch by robots amid the neon noise of Tokyo. It’s in the basement of The Buttery, or Two Fat Ladies at The Buttery as it’s known now, itself the epitome of clubby, oak-panelled, overstuffed hush. The Buttery has always done hip-baronial better, more discreetly and discerningly, than everywhere else, and more so since the sympathetic tidying-up it has received since being taken under the bingo-wing of the Two Fat Ladies chain several years back.
The Shandon Belles is the next stage of the project, a revival of what used to be known as The Belfry, the bijou cafe space in the restaurant’s basement. The fixtures and fittings come from the same church that provided the pews upstairs but, heretically some may say, they’ve been painted a light grey. The prevalence of exposed chunky brickwork gives the place the feel of an Ideal Homes Flintstones cave though there are all manner of well-judged decorative touches lightening the ambience. The mixture of ancient and modern updates with some considerable style the template of the upscale Scottish eating place.
More so given the menu. The Shandon Belles is designed to be a cheaper, faster version of the parent restaurant but the menu is spun from much the same sort of stuff: seafood and named-supplier meat. Even if the recipes are more rudimentary and the dishes less fiddly, the standard is equivalent. The cullen skink is not the gloopy soup-stew you find commonly but the purist’s admixture of potatoes, cream and judicious flecks of haddock. There was the welcome presence of chicken livers, presented on a nest of diced Stornoway black pudding and bacon. The mains offered slow roast pork belly, lamb chops and Cajun-spiced Shetland salmon. I went for the seafood linguini in a garlic and parmesan sauce and was gratified by the freshness of the pasta and the ample presence of mussels and squid. Dessert was the Shandon chocolate and ginger pot, a thick, lethally flavoursome paste of spicy sweetness.
For a cafe, meanwhile, the service was 60-quid-a-head standard, as impeccable as the food, which came in some considerable distance south of 60 quid. As with all the Two Fat Ladies restaurants you were left with the suspicion that you were in the hands of restaurateurs who really know what they’re doing. Oscar really ought to stick it on his itinerary forthwith.
The Shandon Belles, 652 Argyle Street, Glasgow, 0141 221 8188, dinner for two with wine £50
“…one of the best places to eat fish in Glasgow…”- The List
