Telephone: 0141 552 1101
Address: Corinthian, 191 Ingram Street, Glasgow.
Dinner for two, including wine and service, £75.
In the old days, the grand, imposing building on Glasgow's Ingram Street was where dodgy geezers went to be tried and sentenced for serious crimes such as larceny and murder. Today, reinvented as a veritable wining-and-dining complex called Corinthian, the old Sheriff's Court is now a place where the crimes are actually committed. Granted, bad cooking probably does not warrant a long stretch inside. But the offence of grievous bodily harm upon a lovely little sea bream really ought to carry with it some form of judicial penalty.
It was not what I had hoped for from Glasgow. The city has developed a fearsome reputation for its restaurants, which can only be secured now that an outpost of the Gordon Ramsay empire has pitched tent at One Devonshire Gardens. In theory, I was not spoiled for interesting places to try. In practice, it was a Sunday night and most of them were closed. In any case, for those interested in the bizarre excesses to which Britain's burgeoning restaurant business is prone, there was something irresistible about Corinthian. It is, for a start, the first restaurant I have seen advertised at an airport. There is a huge illuminated billboard - announcing its many bars and private rooms and members-only facilities - that is right in your face as you come off the shuttle from London.
But then there is nothing shy and retiring about Corinthian. The pillars are huge. The arches are wide. The ceilings are high and grand and carry every flounce and flourish you could wish for, plus enough gold to keep Tutankhamen happy. Indeed, the only thing wearing more gold than the ceiling was the clientele. Corinthian is flash.
The menu tries to be equally so, and that's where it falls down. This really is a remarkable setting. It's vivid and theatrical and, if you're looking for a special night out, vivid and theatrical is sometimes exactly what you want. Stefan King, the chap behind the conversion, should be congratulated for having the balls to do it. Now, though, he should turn his attention to the kitchen.
The problem is one of complete over-adornment. Just reading the list makes you dizzy. Take a starter of confit Cajun salmon. Confit salmon could be nice. Cajun salmon equally so. But both? Likewise a main-course dish advertised with both Thai spicing and Indian lime pickle displays a scatter-gun approach to the global larder.
I began with the most successful dish of the whole meal - what was described as a 'cassoulet' terrine of black pudding and ham hock. It was rich and unctuous and the white beans slipped in between the two other ingredients offered a calming influence. It was completely let down, however, by a pool of a grimly over-reduced meaty sauce, which stuck to the roof of my mouth. We would become very familiar with it before the night was out. My companion Steven, the Observer 's new Scotland editor, chose red mullet fillets on a tian of leeks with a red pepper sauce. It was fearsomely cold, and therefore completely tasteless, as if it had only just waved goodbye to the fridge.
After a long wait, during which we had a lot of time to admire the ceiling, our main courses were delivered and, before we could say anything, our waitress departed. We stared at the table. Something was definitely missing. It reminded me of the joke about the old Jewish guy who calls over the waiter and demands he try the soup. 'What's wrong with it,' says the waiter. 'Just try the soup,' says the man. 'But what's wrong with it?' The old man barks at him: 'Try the soup.' 'OK,' says the waiter. 'Where's the spoon?' The old man claps his hands with grim pleasure. 'Exactly,' he says.
There was no cutlery on our table. I looked for waiting staff, but the room is so big they were probably obscured by the curvature of the earth. Eventually we got up and nicked knives and forks off a table half a kilometre away. It was a bit of a pity we did, because it meant we could eat. Steven had ordered the roast duck breast. The meat was fine, served pink as he had requested, but it came on a lake of that appalling sauce which, in turn, was studded with unnecessary lumps of beetroot. This was a dish that simply did not work.
It was a veritable triumph next to mine: that roasted sea bream on curried noodles with a sauce vierge. I will admit I ordered it because it sounded terrible, but if it's on a menu it ought to be edible. The bream was over-seasoned and the tough and chewy noodles had been flavoured with something that tasted like it had come out of one of those packets you get in a pot noodle. That's not hyperbole. That really is what it reminded me of. Beneath the approximation of a vierge lay another river of that meat reduction, as if no dish was allowed out of the kitchen until the sauce guy had been allowed to screw it up. (Incidentally, if these were three different sauces, the effort was wasted, because they tasted the same to me.)
The mixed puddings that I tried were more successful, as in not offensive, being mostly ice creams and sorbets. Steven was less impressed with his macadamia-nut ice cream. 'It's like skiing at Aviemore,' he said. 'It promises snow but delivers ice.'
All of this wouldn't really matter so much if Corinthian was cheap. But, of course, it isn't. The fact is it costs an awful lot of money to over-gild the lily. They have to get it back somehow.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
