When you walk into Fratelli Sarti's Renfield Street restaurant in Glasgow, it smells so damn good, your mouth waters.

Now, Italian restaurants often have an aroma that makes you lick your lips, what with all that baking pizza, freshly ground parmesan and deep dark espresso coffee. But in Fratelli Sarti, the particular aroma that does the trick is garlic bread. It activates the olfactory system and makes you salivate, yet I'm not that gone on the stuff. It strikes me as fake; you don't get it in Italy, at least in the forms we know it. And except in early summer when garlic is a new crop, the bulbs we get here just aren't fresh enough, so it often lingers on the breath. Even worse, if that's possible, than very old garlic is that foul-smelling garlic paste in jars. It really does stink.

At Fratelli Sarti, I thought that I had said no to the garlic bread and said yes to the offer of foccacia, but up rocked what I would call a pizza bianca with a fine garlic paste baked on to it. Increasingly in Scottish Italian restaurants, the terminology of bread is inexact. True focaccia is thick and has uneven air pockets. Classically, it is topped with olive oil, rosemary and sea salt. This is what I thought I had ordered and didn't get. Disappointing really, given that among Glasgow's Italian clan, the Sarti establishments seem more willing than most to offer up authenticity, as well as the usual commercial, safe bet Britalian offering.

While everyone else around us tucked into trusty old guard offerings - pizza Margarita, lasagna et al - I trawled the menu for some less usual suspects. The first that caught my eye was zuppa di farro della Garfagnana, a soup of spelt grain that is typical of the mountainous Garfagnana region, near Lucca, in Tuscany. Spelt from this area now has geographical protected status in Europe. Sarti's rendition of its soup, made with cubes of ham, spelt, some beans and lentils, was faithfully rustic. Anointed frequently with the Sicilian Tenimenti Montoni oil that sits on the table, it was just as ideal on a raw Scottish day as it would have been up a mountain in wintry Tuscany. It wasn't cheap at £5.95 but then neither is spelt, so fair enough. However, for £7.50, I was less than chuffed with the aubergine caponata, which was crudely oily, as well as salty and vinegary, probably because those cheap briny capers had been used. The menu said that it came with Altamura bread. This is a speciality of Bari in Puglia, made typically with durum wheat flour and renowned for its prodigious keeping quality. The bread we got was light, dry and vapid, not special enough to live up to its billing.

I like that Sarti has the commitment and pluck to offer dishes like baccala alla Fiorentina, salt cod cooked with chickpeas, although the fish tasted as if it had been deep fried then plunked on top of the chickpeas, and too much chilli powder seemed to have been lobbed into the pot. Hefty tordelli Lucchesi - beef and veal filled egg ravioli with a robust meat ragu - were fine, but let down by the dry, nondescript Parmesan, which just wasn't up to scratch.

It's tempting to skip dessert: they mostly look bought-in, often frozen. The tiramisu, however, is made on the premises, but any competent home cook could whisk up a better one than we were served.

Sarti's Renfield Street premises are magnificent with all that OTT Victorian marble and wood panelling, but I do wish they would lose that pointless TV above the bar. Is it there to entertain staff during quiet times? And if so, are they lip-readers, since the volume is turned so low?

Sarti hasn't given up the ghost and dumbed down its menu. It's great to see that it does dishes, such as cotechino sausage on Umbrian lentils with Mostarda di Cremona, porchetta, and slow cooked rabbit. But it can't seem to decide if it's sticking to the old guard Britalian path, or marching purposefully along a more exciting, more genuinely Italian one. I'd urge the latter.