Ladle Inn

11 Hyndland Street, Glasgow

0141 334 2312

Lunch/Dinner: £15-£25

Food rating: 8½/10

SWEET and sour pork, prawn fried toast, chow mein, lemon chicken, spare ribs, Peking duck: the appeal of these old British-Chinese stalwarts never fades. The fashionable people at the table next to us at Ladle Inn are ordering along these lines, as if their modernity has stalled when it comes to what’s on their plates. This is typical of Chinese restaurant food in Scotland, a tried and tested formula with mass appeal, a culinary Groundhog Day for both diners and restaurateurs. Over the years, more adventurous occidental diners have tired of the offer, drifting off promiscuously to other Asian-branded establishments – "Japanese" restaurants (often run by enterprising Chinese), Korean, Thai, Vietnamese – in search of excitement. Chinese restaurateurs quietly open more authentic restaurants catering for the local Chinese community and Chinese visitors, such as students, leaving non-Chinese mildly intimidated by the complexity of ordering and the hardcore Chinese ingredients: jellyfish, chicken gizzards, pork intestines, preserved egg. Or they run a proper Chinese menu in Chinese script, often available by pre-order, alongside the standard Sino-Scottish deal.

Ladle Inn in Glasgow strikes me as an astute compromise between an uncompromisingly real and a predictably Westernised, Chinese restaurant. From my conversations with the staff – a charming, attentive bunch who evidently get great pleasure from your enjoyment of the food – I gather that the zone of interest here is north China, not the southern Guangzhou (Canton). So lamb features more than in typical Cantonese outfits, many dishes are spicier, and hot pots are a bit of a feature. I didn’t get to the bottom of why there’s a bit of a Malaysian thing going on too, but was grateful to our graceful manageress for recommending "pancake with Malaysian-style curry sauce", which to me was a paragon of a Malaysian roti canai. Consummately crisp, it made a lip-smacking mouthful when dipped into the emollient, fragrant, coconut milky sauce. Who needs prawn crackers when you can prime your appetite with these beauties?

To make it easier to sort the wheat from the chaff, there’s a "special" menu, which accommodatingly offers the option of dishes in smaller portions, bliss for the perennially indecisive, and another nudge to order more adventurously. Nothing too radical, we start off with the salt and chilli soft crab, which is sweetly succulent, thoroughly flattened in a bubbly batter so crisp it almost rustles when you bite into it, scattered over with freshly stir-fried red onion, pepper, chilli, and coriander. With it we’ve ordered a "small" but generous portion of "stir-fried garlic stem with dried shrimp", one of those crunchy, juicy almost asparagus-like Chinese greens; they have picked up the meaty harbour whiff of the chewy, salty prawns.

Two options appear in Chinese characters at the bottom of the special menu, which turn out to be noodles handmade, yes handmade, on the premises. If you aren’t Chinese, a bowl of noodles in broth requires some negotiation or a lot of stain remover, but at Ladle Inn, the staff are on the case, lifting the slippery, fat, wide, irregular noodles into your bowl with chopsticks then ladling on the bone broth, which contains slivers of stir-fried pork, and kale-type greens that have been cooked so soft they resemble spinach. The noodles are firm and wilfully uncontrollable, the total effect marvellously wholesome, even homely. Sambal beef has been beaten thin for tenderness. Hot, sweet, and alive with what tastes like Chinese red rice vinegar, it goes well with the glistening eau-de-nil celery in chilli oil we've selected from the "cold dishes" repertoire. It’s as if the celery has been sliced at an angle on a mandolin, blanched, then anointed to create its distinct savoury coolness.

The monkfish in the Malaysian curry sauce tastes firmly fresh, not frozen. Ample chunks float in the creamy, aromatic sauce alongside softer than soft aubergine and the odd green bean. Top notes of fennel and cinnamon waft up from its warm coconut depths.

Now that I have confidence in Ladle Inn, I’m determined to order more boldly next time: shredded cucumber with jellyfish in Chinese mature vinegar, perhaps. It would take me a while to get bored with this place.