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September 30, 2015
Ribs, burgers and pizza are part of the gospel according to the new St Luke's.
Ribs, burgers and pizza are part of the gospel according to the new St Luke’s.

Sheesh, you go away for a few days and a whole new crop of bars, restaurants and music venues crops up in Glasgow by the time you get back.

Top of the newbies list is St Luke’s. Dating to 1836 and formerly a working church, the East End venue was deconsecrated in 2012.

Skip to the beginning of 2015 and Tony and Michael Woods set about giving the Bain Street building a new lease of life as an arts venue, restaurant and bar. After a £1.2 million refurb, St Luke’s opened in its new guise a couple of weekends back.

Aiming to put on comedy or acoustic acts and with a capacity of 350, St Luke’s is a going for a very different market from its near neighbour, the Barrowland.

Let there be ribs

For the purposes of the 5pm Dining blog, it is the food and drink side of the business that counts.

Open seven days a week, St Luke’s Winged Ox Bar and Kitchen takes its culinary cue from our friends across the Atlantic.

There are ribs, wings, burgers, pizza and two hand sandwiches filled with pulled chicken, beef brisket or slow cooked pork shoulder.

We chuckled over the Biblical references in the menu.

Matthew 5:9 is quoted at the top of the pizza section. However, instead of reading ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, the St Luke’s version has it as ‘Blessed are the  pizza makers’.

We also liked the sound of The Last Supper – a sort of mixed grill comprising ribs, wings, brisket, pork shoulder, the house slaw, fries and brioche.

Amen to that.

From ping pong to pop-up

We will also have a quick shout out for Proud Mary. Taking shape on Queen Street, it is billed as Glasgow’s ‘first and only table tennis bar’.

As well as ping pong, or whiff whaff as Boris might have it, Proud Mary will offer a late night menu featuring dishes made with locally sourced ingredients and ‘exclusively curated musical programming offering the best of the city’s emerging DJs, producers and artists from new wave to acid rave, indie, rap, punk, funk or reggae’.

A mid-October launch has been mooted for Proud Mary.

Finally, the sharp-eyed contributors to Yell Glasgow have noticed that something is afoot at 182 Queen Margaret Drive.

They reckon that Crosslands bar could be about to experience some kind of Lebowski’s pop-up and recommend that interested parties keep an eye on this Twitter feed.