Singl-end

265 Renfrew St, Glasgow

0141 353 1277

Breakfast/lunch: £3-£15

Food rating: 9/10

OTHER cafés contrive to create a quirky, indie vibe, but this place has it in spades. Singl-end is in what was once the Lyon print shop, so it has a luxuriously roomy space to play with. The ceiling is quite low and Singl-end hunkers low down on the street with tall, imposing tenements opposite, so there’s an instant intimacy that inclines you to linger, cradling a coffee, but the smells that curl under your nose make it extremely unlikely that you’ll leave without eating something.

The decor is essentially the same as when it was run as an Italian restaurant (it closed last autumn, a year after opening). You still have the glass top tables with vintage ephemera underneath: postcards from back in the days when we wrote with ink pens in a copperplate hand; letters from friends (remember them?) with exotic postmarks. Our table was an education. A Will’s cigarette card offered a matchstick-size digest of the battle of Agincourt. (Too bad if I sound like Ed Reardon here, but the equivalent nowadays would be “Meet a Kardashian” or some such nonsense.) Handwritten notes, illustrated with accomplished pencil line drawings, showed arched Gothic windows and early English pillar capitals. Honestly, ignoring your dining companion and keeping your head down was never more tempting than at Singl-end.

But there has been one significant improvement; the TV monitors that previously hung over tables and on the walls have gone. That was an aberration if ever there was one. So it feels as if someone has got a grip of the place and focused strategically on what to do with it. When there were Italians at the stove, the food was brilliant, but Singl-end was never going to have the footfall to make it work as an all-day restaurant. So now it is a daytime café (8am until 6pm), a much better fit for the life of the area.

It doesn’t take long to spot that there’s an Ottolenghi fan in the kitchen, which is terrifically good news on the food front. There is a counter of breads – sourdough, sweet potato and almond, hazelnut and olive, craggy scones – that you might find in the great man’s cafés. On the breakfast front, standard dishes have been creatively subverted. Eggs Benedict comes as poached egg on slices of roast sweet potato with spinach and red onion and a cashew and tarragon Hollandaise. The pork and fennel sausage that is casseroled with beans is homemade. This is obviously not a dabbling-with-fashion-while-mainly-buying-in sort of operation. You can see the cook’s own pickled lemons maturing on the shelves, next to homemade jams, apple butter, and spiced plums. Singl-end even makes its own granola and hazelnut spread. I know, you just have to visit when you hear that.

Everything we ate tasted even better than it sounded and honoured Ottolenghi’s ability to pack in layers of flavours so that nothing is dull or merely makeweight. A spicy lentil soup tasted like one you’d eat in India with the added dimension of a strong bay leaf presence. Then came my favourite Ottolenghi salad – the Puy lentil, soured cherries, Gorgonzola one – made into a lunch on good homemade toast with poached quail's eggs. A hot ham sandwich sounded borderline prosaic, but with the most succulent home-roasted ham, a vibrant homemade peach chutney, and heaps of good quality Gruyère, is most certainly wasn’t. Particularly juicy lamb koftas sat in a gloriously lemony green tahini sauce with toasted pine kernels and chopped preserved lemon. Quinoa, rice, pistachio and sour cherry salad with its orangey-sweet dressing offered up a perfect ratio of ingredients.

And the cakes! Where to start? Perhaps with the Ottolenghi-style toffee apples cake with its subtle maple syrup topping? Or there’s a glowing almond orange cake, an orange meringue pie wherein a sublime orange custard replaces the usual cloying curd, a bite-sized pecan pie sweet with dates rather than sugar, or a blood orange, hibiscus, and campari truffle from chocolatier Stacy Hannah.

This place is vegetarian and vegan-friendly without being shouty, hair-shirt and ideological, Oh, and feel free to bring your gluten-intolerance along: you’ll find lots to eat.

I do wish Singl-end was in my neighbourhood.