Pickled Ginger

512 Saint Vincent Street, Glasgow

0141 328 8941

Lunch/Dinner: £18-22

Food rating: 5½/10

WHAT would Japanese people make of Pickled Ginger, the new Japanese restaurant in Glasgow? Since the Japanese are supremely polite and discreet, and take a positively professorial interest in anything cultural, I'm sure they would smile and seem positive. But if you visit Japan, you'll realise just how un-Japanese most "Japanese" restaurants in the UK are. Pickled Ginger is no exception.

Japanese food is not that easy to do well. Japanese chefs tend to specialise in one area of expertise, and pursue it with scrupulous etiquette. In Japan, you eat in a restaurant that does one style of dish - shabu shabu (hot pot), okonomiyaki (savoury pancakes), sashimi, kaiseki (fine dining), ramen noodles in perfect broths. At the top end, they do them to cult standard. In Kyoto, for instance, I ate a fabulously clean and delicate 16-(small) course, set tempura menu in a restaurant where the chef cooked nothing else. The generic Japanese sushi/noodle/dumpling/bento joints here are UK hybrids.

The Japanese are also respectful food connoisseurs. In Japan, it's easy to eat well at all price levels, and the Japanese train the same serious skill on non-native cuisines. A stroll through the fascinating food basements in Japanese department stores - these occupied me for hours at a time - shows just how accomplished Japanese chefs are at world cuisine, most notably in the patisserie section, where the Japanese eye for that which is aesthetic, delicate, and fine finds full expression.

The decor at Pickled Ginger is clever. The walls are sheathed in plywood, and this material is also used sideways-on to section off tables, its cross bands creating a linear design - a clever budget way to catch the mood of the legendary Japanese craftsmanship in wood. The floor, on the other hand, which rises up like a humpback whale, is more like a DIY disaster.

Pickled Ginger has an impressive selection of saki, including one that is made without any additives or added alcohol. The menu is relatively small, and takes no real risks. At Harajuku Kitchen in Edinburgh, for instance, less commonly encountered species of fish swim onto the menu. Here, the ubiquitous sea bass, salmon, and prawn are centre-stage. There's crab-stick too, for anyone naïve enough to choose a processed fish "surimi" amalgam.

Our tuna maki tasted as though they had been rolled to order: the sticky rice and nori moist and fresh. Most importantly, they were served at room temperature, allowing the perfume of the rice, and the seaweed's marine waft, to come through. Temperature is critical with sushi: so many supermarket and sandwich bar offerings are chilled to death and of questionable age. The gyoza pot sticker dumplings were a bit of all right too. Again their pork filling seemed homespun and fresh inside its pliant, crusty wrapper.

Otherwise serviceable pork katsu was marred by saccharin-sweet mayonnaise, its bento box presentation spoiled by a tedious green salad with an unpleasant-looking dressing. Squid was a very unsuccessful crossbreed of "ika-yaki" (marinated, char-grilled squid) and tempura. You would have needed a heavy knife to cut through these ungainly, rubbery cephalophods, which were too clumsily large to lift with chopsticks. Their greasy batter flopped into folds, their steamy underside settling down into a flaccid slide.

Needless to say, in Japan, you wouldn't get Korean bulgoki anywhere other than a Korean restaurant. The stale-tasting, ultra-thin beef (as though it had been put through a roller) was like a poor takeaway stir-fry; rolling it in lettuce and a dab of "Korean barbecue sauce" with its vague kimchi whiff didn't rescue it. The almost plastic crunch of the seaweed salad tested one's persistence, although it was its sugary dressing that finally forced me to give up trying.

I obviously didn't expect Pickled Ginger to hit many authentically Japanese high notes. Mind you, that's not an impossible goal. New Yorker Ivan Orkin dared to set up a handmade ramen bar in Tokyo, and he has become a star of that city's restaurant scene, despite being a "gaijin" (foreigner). Somehow, I don't think that Pickled Ginger is going to leave such a mark.