Rogano, the legendary Glasgow oyster bar and restaurant, has played host to everyone from Mick Jagger to Winston Churchill and Helena Christensen.

But what really goes on at table 16?

It is interesting to sit where Rod Stewart has sat, and to see what he has seen. As for eating what he’s eaten ... well, that might have to wait.

Whenever Rod is in Glasgow and feels like indulging himself in seafood, he makes his way to Rogano, the legendary city oyster bar and restaurant in Exchange Place. His favourite spot is table 16, at the head of the restaurant. Curved ­panelling means he is screened from customers in the cocktail bar behind, but he can still pause over his cod and chips and take in the waiting staff in their trim black waistcoats, weaving between the tables as fellow diners savour the lobster thermidor, the cumin-roasted monkfish and the lemon sole meuniere. Ah, table 16. What wouldn’t people give to sit here?

Once under the stewardship of Gordon Yuill and now overseen by general manager Ian Smith, Rogano – and table 16 in particular – has accommodated such illustrious people as Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, actress Helen Mirren and supermodel Helena Christensen. As befits a restaurant of Rogano’s standing – one London reviewer summed it up as “a card-­carrying Glasgow institution; a permanently moored cruise liner with an art deco interior and a killer range of cocktails. Gloriously decadent” – many other celebrities and serious diners have found themselves here, too.

Bob Dylan, no less, is said to have perused the menu; Henry Kissinger and Winston Churchill as well. New York-based, Glasgow-born photographer Harry Benson drops in from time to time for a fix of the fish soup. Lawyer Joe Beltrami is a regular, while actress Charlotte Rampling was once asked politely to put out her cigarette. Back in the dog-days of Margaret Thatcher’s administration, Michael Heseltine received a standing ovation from diners, prompted by his announcement that he would be challenging Maggie for the Tory leadership.

People like coming to Rogano. Perhaps it’s the food, the service (the waiters glide: there is no other word for it), the discreet attention to detail. Perhaps it’s the aesthetic chic that speaks so eloquently of the 1930s. In the restaurant, the noise is muted: the murmurs, the soft background music, seem to be absorbed by the carpet. Its design – black with pink swirls – came from the Queen Mary, that great Clyde-built Cunarder, and the colours are said to have counteracted the effects of seasickness.

Rogano’s longest-surviving customer – a Mr Glasgow, fittingly enough – reportedly first came here in 1935. He met his wife here, it’s said, and he entertained countless business contacts. For more than two decades, until a year ago or thereabouts, he would arrive for lunch every day: same table, same routine, bar the occasion when an old lady who sat at his table on Saturdays passed away, and Jimmy Glasgow, out of respect, sat elsewhere every Saturday thereafter. And every day he would leave a shilling tip, even when the value of a shilling had been whittled down to no more than a few pennies.

A lady customer was responsible for the strangest request Ian Smith has ever had. She didn’t like biscuits with her cheese, so please could she have some smoked salmon with it instead? “It’s a strange combination,” the manager says, “but we’re happy to oblige.”

Over the years, Rogano has gone through several owners and a fluctuation in its fortunes but, under businessman James Mortimer, who bought it for £6 million-plus three years ago, it has been revitalised. Its popularity seems intact: Saturday nights in the restaurant are booked out until at least January. The bar area is constantly busy. Next year, Rogano will have been a fixture of the Glasgow firmament for 75 years. To mark the event, a commemorative book is coming out this month, featuring an array of its classic food and cocktail recipes.

Its articles include one on Ken McCulloch, who did so much to revive Rogano back in the 1980s before he went on to establish One Devonshire Gardens, the hotel in Glasgow’s Great Western Road, with a similarly upscale restaurant. He bought Rogano in the summer of 1983 in a joint venture with the Ind Coope and Alloa ­Brewery. A brewery director at the time said: “We believe that even in times of recession the public wants quality and will pay for ­quality.” And the customers continue to come, even in today’s recession.

The article on McCulloch is the work of John Mitchell, a celebrated Rogano barman who, it is said, once took a phone call from a bartender in New York, seeking advice on the precise kind of whisky sour favoured by a Scots guy, named Gregor Fisher, in his bar. “John’s contribution is fantastic,” says Rogano’s head chef, Andy Cumming. “There’s a lot of insight into why McCulloch took the Rogano on in the first place.”

Today, Smith and Cumming are at table 16, in the hour before the first of the lunchtime customers come in out of the rain. The kitchen staff are hard at work, prepping and cutting and slicing. Soon the two men will discuss who is coming in today, and whether there are any special group dietary requirements – gluten-free, vegan, halal, kosher.

Both are in their third spell in Rogano’s employ; both returned in 2001. “Ian and I have maybe had five different owners in our time here, but the beauty of it is that no-one ever knew,” says Cumming. “The Rogano just carries on like a liner cruising through the ocean. People didn’t know who the owner was, and didn’t even care. It was Rogano. We’re of the same opinion. We work for Rogano: we’re here because we love the place.”

“It’s a place you inevitably love,” says Smith. “It has been modernised to a degree but the style has not changed, the feel has not changed when you walk in the door.”

“I remember going to college in the mid-80s, and looking in the window and looking at the menu,” says Cumming. “The art deco grabbed me even then. I’m a huge fan of art deco. There’s just something about it. If I’m not feeling particularly well, if I have a slight cold or something, I walk through these doors at 8am and something happens to me. You pass by these two seahorses engraved on the front door in the morning and all your problems disappear.”

Not that he has much time to reflect on anything but the job. The kitchens run smoothly but still need a lot of attention, with the 20-strong team of chefs turning out hundreds of meals every single day from lunchtime until last orders (10.30pm in the case of the restaurant, 11pm for Cafe Rogano and the Oyster Bar). Still, the head chef notes – not without some satisfaction – that his early-morning visits to the fish market are long behind him. “The quality of suppliers is that you can phone them in the morning and get what you need. They know our standards. We get deliveries of Scottish ­mushrooms twice a week from up north and separate specialist deliveries of seafood. There’s still a lot of excitement about these things. For me, it’s a child-on-Christmas-Day feeling, bringing deliveries in, dealing with fresh food.

“I’m here for about 15, 16 hours a day. I like to make my last train at 11.10pm; if I miss that, I’m a grumpy bunny.”

The famous old menu has been tweaked over the years but there are certain dishes which, if scrapped, would probably result in a volley of quietly pained complaints. “The fish soup is here for ever, and the lemon sole meuniere is a classic. The lobster thermidor, too,” says Cumming. Oysters will never disappear from the menu; nor will mussels and langoustines. This, after all, is a fish and seafood restaurant, with a certain reputation.

“People complain to me about the price of the lobster thermidor,” Cumming adds. “But look at the facts. Buchanan Street [just a few yards away] has the highest rates for shop units outside London. You couldn’t buy a pair of boots for less than £200, yet people object to a lobster thermidor costing £35. It’s funny.”

Rogano certainly doesn’t stint on buying fresh seafood: each year it orders, and uses, some 10,000 lobsters and 100,000 oysters. That’s a lot of money to be shelled – pun only partially intended – out to suppliers. Yet it has not gone unnoticed that several new city restaurants seem to use Rogano’s prices as a benchmark. “You can see them thinking along the lines that Rogano charges £28 for a fillet steak and £35 for a lobster,” the head chef says. “But what they don’t realise is that we sell so many of these, and everything is fresh, and lots of bits and pieces have to be taken into account. They think they can charge that, but they can’t. The level of service has to be there, and I think that’s why so many people go under.”

Arlene Taylor, who has recently returned to Rogano after a 20-year absence to head its PR and marketing operation, joins her colleagues at the table. There’s a discussion about Champagne prices (Rogano charges £9.50 for a glass at the bar, but it can get away with it, simply because it is Rogano), and about how Friday nights are Champagne nights here, with female parties unwinding at the end of a long week.

The talk turns to how the fast-changing times have compelled the restaurant to advertise (something it never used to do) and to keep its profile high so as to attract delegates who are in the city for a conference. Beneath the waves, the propellers of the 75-year-old liner cruising the sea are working overtime.

“Over the years, we haven’t really had to change anything,” says Taylor. “We just have to be a bit smarter in what we do, because I think we have all the tools. Coming back here, it hasn’t changed that much to me. This is a nostalgia thing for me. This is a passion.”

She glances at the chef and the manager. “We all worked together 25 years ago. We’ve all gone and done our own things and, with the careers we’ve had, we’ve all gone and worked our way up. We can all bring something back to Rogano. It’s not about teaching somebody how to suck eggs: it’s more about leading by example. It’s almost as if you need to stand outside and look in and say, right, what do we have here? We need to see it from the customer’s view. What more can we do?”

Taylor says her forte is in talking to people, a skill that will come in handy as she seeks to spread the Rogano word to anyone who will listen. The place is always ready to usher well-known faces to a table, but it knows that its bread and butter lies in the hands of less famous people.

“Regular customers maybe mean more to me than celebrities, as they’re not one-off ­visitors, but the celebrity value has been quite good for us,” says Cumming. “But we’re quite protective of our celebrities. I’ve left here late at night a couple of times and seen a couple of photographers. I say, ‘Who are you here for tonight?’ and when they tell me I say, ‘Sorry, they’re not here.’ Elizabeth Taylor got quite a bad time when she was here, years ago: some journalists took a table next to her and they were bothering her. But that is an exception.”

Some “pretty big” divorces have also been sealed over a meal in the restaurant – not to mention business deals. Scottish Enterprise is said to have been born at table 16. The great times 10 years ago, says Ian Smith, were Friday afternoons. (Fridays and Saturdays are the hectic ones now.) “You’d get the same faces coming in then – the cigars, the brandies, the late lunches that continued right through until last orders, when you’d have to order taxis for them. The talking was done at the table and the hand-shaking was done at the back door.

“But we are discreet. We have to be, when we have husbands and wives in here at the same time, dining with separate people. You have to be careful that you direct them to the right table.” A mild understatement.

Rogano could diversify – other restaurants, after all, have dabbled in such projects as cookery schools – but it sees no point in change for its own sake. As Cumming puts it: “It’s a big enough job here keeping 20 chefs employed and running a restaurant, plus the downstairs cafe and doing the bar food as well. But the bar food has probably been one of our biggest growth areas, especially since we introduced the seated terrace outside.”

True enough, as he speaks there are some hardier customers sitting outside, sheltered from the steady Glasgow rain by a canopy and warmed by some industrial-sized outdoor heaters (which probably don’t do too much to alleviate global warming). Even on one recent day when the heavens were being emptied, the outdoor area was fully occupied.

Twenty years ago, Smith is saying, “the bar food menu was small – there were sandwiches made at the bar …”

“That was my job at first,” says Taylor. “There was soup, sandwiches and two hot dishes.”

“But it got busier and busier,” says the manager. “Every single bit of space in the kitchen is now taken up.”

“The area outside is not only protected, it’s private as well, whereas others are just open,” says Taylor. “It’s as if we’ve taken the inside [of the restaurant] outside and made it that place all year round, no matter the weather.”

Cumming agrees. “I think it’s fair to say we’ve led the way as far as outside terraces in ­Glasgow are concerned. It has been a huge investment and it has added a wee bit to the cafe culture that Glasgow is looking for.”

This Christmas, for the second year in a row, the restaurant will open its doors on the afternoon of December 25. Champagne and canapes will be offered on arrival, and the meal will be priced at £75 per head. Bookings are already running at twice the level of last year, when the guests included, among others, Joe Beltrami and his wife.

Saturday nights, as mentioned earlier, are fully booked, but Smith is adept at squeezing in an extra couple or two. “On a Saturday night you might get visitors to the city. They’ve just walked in and they come up to the desk,” Smith says. “And you think, well, you don’t want to deny them the experience, so you squeeze them in somehow. You then get that overbooked feeling, you’ve got people waiting at the bar, you haven’t told others they have to leave by a certain time, there’s a queue – but you know what? It all works out.”

In the mean time, if you can’t get a table for love, money or a combination of both, you can console yourself by trying one of the recipes in the new Rogano book. “Some of them are very much restaurant recipes, such as the pastry recipes,” says Cumming, “but most are quite simplistic, like the smoked haddock risotto [see right]. Home cooks are becoming more adventurous. I gave some of the recipes to my wife and she knocked them off without too much coaching from myself.”

So there you have it. Rogano on a plate in your own dining room. All that’s missing are the waiting staff in their black waistcoats – and the celebrity at table 16, frowning in concentration as he sips his 2008 Sancerre Blanc Domaine Brochard and tries to make up his mind between the assiette of duck, the fillet of beef Rossini or the sesame-crusted king scallops.

Enjoy classic Rogano food and drink at home

Smoked haddock risotto and poached egg

Risotto:

75g butter

400g risotto rice

1 shallot (finely chopped)

1 litre hot fish stock

100g fresh garden peas

Smoked haddock:

4 fillets of undyed smoked haddock (diced into 1cm cubes)

1 lemon

10g chopped parsley

50g Parmesan cheese

Poached egg:

1 tsp vinegar

4 eggs

Method:

Risotto

1. Melt the butter in a pan.

2. On a high heat, sweat the rice and shallots for 3-4 minutes.

3. Add hot stock gradually until it is all used up. This should take between 12 and 15 minutes, until the rice is almost cooked to al dente.

4. Add the smoked haddock and cook for a further 3 minutes.

5. Finish by adding the lemon juice, parsley and Parmesan.

Poached egg

1. Bring a pot of water to the boil.

Add a teaspoon of vinegar.

2. On a gentle heat, swirl the water round in the pot with a wooden spoon or whisk.

3. Add an egg into the middle of the pot where the water is spinning, which will keep it together neatly.

4. Cook until set (just under 3 minutes).

5. Remove egg from pan and serve.

Mojito

Highball glass

1 fresh lime

10 fresh mint leaves

2 tsp Demerara brown sugar

50ml Mount Gay rum; soda water

Slice the lime, then muddle in the glass with whole mint leaves and sugar. Fill glass with crushed ice and add rum and then soda. Stir and serve with mint sprig garnish.

Rogano: Glasgow’s Favourite Restaurant is published by Black And White on December 14, priced £30, but copies can be purchased from the restaurant now.