Sharpen your knife and your appetite. Tomorrow, the first ever city-wide Glasgow Restaurant Festival gets underway for four weeks of unique dining experiences across the city, all dished up by Glasgow’s best chefs and favourite restaurants.
Over the next few weeks, the 5pm Dining blog will be bringing you the lowdown on the people and the plates with a series of interviews and videos which lift the lid on the festival.
Vintage spiegeltent
Much of the action will take place in a beautiful vintage Spiegeltent which has been erected on Candleriggs Square in the Merchant City.
As well as oodles of delicious food, there will be a bar, live bands and, somewhat randomly, a nine hole crazy golf course.
There’s nothing quite like getting a hole in one on the tricky windmill obstacle to get the gastric juices flowing.
Week one (tomorrow to 31st March) will see Glasgow’s favourite guerrilla chefs taking up residence in the Spiegeltent for a series of Secret Dining escapades.
Pop-up dining
From the first of April to the 17th, the Spiegeltent will become home to a pop-up dining venue. You can see the full line-up here but we can tell you that some of the participating restaurants include Gamba, Red Onion, Arisaig and Soba.
From the 18th of April to the 24th, over 60 of Glasgow’s best restaurants will be running specially priced set menus. A full list of participating restaurants and a programme of events will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on the Glasgow Restaurant Festival site.
Dish crawls
Also likely to be popular is a series of Finnieston restaurant crawls with diners stopping off at three different restaurants for their starters, main course and dessert.
The crawls will run on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays for two weeks starting from Monday 18th April.
Groups of up to six will meet at The Finnieston at 6pm where each crawler can enjoy a Finnieston Club cocktail plus a dish from the Small Plate section of the menu.
Porter & Rye is the destination for the main courses. Guests can have a rump, onglet or bavette cut of 60 day-aged steak, a side order and a sauce plus a glass of house wine.
Desserts are at The Gannet and will be accompanied by an Old Fashioned.
The price will be £59 per person and a maximum of two places can be booked by each party. Guests will be with people they don’t know which is all part of the fun.
Places can be booked by emailing – info@glasgowrestaurantfestival.co.uk
Fun, quirky experience
The 5pm Dining blog went on a preview run of the Finnieston Dish crawl last night and it’s a fun, quirky experience.
Recommendations? We loved the oysters at The Finnieston. Especially when sprayed with a whisky mist atomiser or served with Shaoxing rice wine, ginger chilli and kaffir lime leaves.
We’ll also give a shout out to the wild Argyle mushrooms which are served with, among other ingredients, nasturtiums. The flowers give a little crunch to the soft, slipper fungi.
Porter & Rye is steak paradise. Having chosen our weapons from a selection of five different steak knives, we all tucked into beautiful chunks of beef – charred crisp on the outside but red and soft inside. Try the truffle chips.
Truffle and chips. Chips and truffles. Two of the most delicious food stuffs known to man. It’s a no-brainer.
At The Gannet, we finished with a beautiful salted caramel fondant served with Tonka bean ice cream.
Apparently, people travel considerable distances for this particular dessert. My picture doesn’t do it justice but it is gorgeous.
Add in a Rhinns Old Fashioned – Bruichladdich whisky, Sauternes, Triple Sec, simple syrup, aromatic bitters and orange bitters – and it’s a very decadent way to finish a splendid evening.