IT probably helps if you remember what this place was like. Maybe even having once upon a time lumbered around those scruffy blaze tennis courts over there with your kids. Huff-puff, huff-puff hoping the let’s-be-the-next-Andy-Murray phase will pass soon. Like right now.
It helps if back then you glanced over here at this old pavilion. Wire meshed, shuttered, graffitied, long forgotten. Ugly. A bit scary. Very scary in fact if you’re a kid. A grim and brooding corpse from glorious summers long, long gone when people came to public parks to do more than just walk dogs.
It helps if you’ve done that and then like today, a Sunday in December of all days, you walk down the hill in the crisp frosty morning with the dug, and the missus, and you look over at the grim old pavilion and you realise, hang on. It’s different, tidier, done up, what’s that…a cafe sign…crikey, it’s actually bloody open.
And then … and here’s the really surprising thing, you walk inside and it’s not simply been dusted down, brushed up and dragged back from the dead with the smell of damp still lingering in the corners. It’s in its prime again. Fitted out, expensively, tastefully, cleanly. Walls plastered, fresh and white, tables, chairs, there is even sets of couches, free newspapers and magazines. Heating. Yes, heating. It’s warm.
Outside, where once people in crisp linen lounged while watching the chaps playing tennis, there’s a long terrace for people to sit with their dogs. As they are doing right now. In the cold. Clapping their hands, and clapping their dogs. Drinking steaming cappuccinos. Waitresses – and you couldn’t make this bit up – bring freshly baked dog treats out to their pets. Puffs with liver, doggy bakes.
Inside right now a tray of cinnamon muffins is carried piping hot and straight from the oven to where the counter sits, to be racked alongside ginger cakes, scones, tarts and pastries and all made in here. The baking smell spreads deliciously throughout the room.
So it helps, it definitely helps, if you remember the way this place was because then you can be pleasantly astonished at the way it is. It helps also, if you like me, have long wondered why Glasgow’s parks, despite undoubtedly being beautifully planted and fabulously maintained, feel so empty and abandoned when just over the municipal border in East Renfrewshire there is a more enlightened policy to commercial development: they hustle and bustle with life.
In short, then, this place – now called the Dandelion Cafe incidentally – is on a winner before a mouthful is even eaten.
It presses every restaurant reviewer button. Freshly baked, reclaimed building, a little beacon of light in the park, tastefully refitted. It wouldn’t be right at this point, though, if I don’t confess this: moments after having surveyed and praised the whole scene I turn to Debs and say: “What the ... £7.50? For French toast? The same for a scrambled egg and bagel.”
OK, some people just don’t know when to shut up. Actually, the bagel when it arrives is almost perfect, the scrambled egg creamy and cheesy and there’s bacon, the good stuff, dry cured and completely crisp.
Only an incongruous dish of chilli jam, surely the 21st century’s most traduced condiment, puts a mild dent in the picture.
There’s thick toast, too, made with freshly-made bread and with melting butter running down its crisp face and then a cheese and leek pastry is brought out all golden and puffy and freshly baked from the oven in its own little bag of greaseproof paper.
And that still-warm cinnamon muffin.
Good? Yes. All good.
The only disappointment is that the Dandelion Cafe doesn’t open at night, it seems that’s because the park is dark. So dark it’s hard to find your way around. Something else for the council to change now they’re allowing tasteful private enterprise into these lovely spaces.
Dandelion Cafe
Newlands Park Pavilion, Lubnaig Road, Glasgow
Menu: Fresh baking, breads, cakes, muffins and soups, most of them straight from the oven. 4/5
Atmosphere: It’s an long forgotten tennis pavilion turned into a lovely cafe in what must have been an expensive refit. And it’s right in the park. 5/5
Service: Excellent. They’ll even bring little baked treats out to your pooch on the admittedly tight terrace. 5/5
Price: At first glance £7.50 seems to be a bit steep for French toast in the park, but the quality is very high and it’s worth every penny. 4/5
Food: Cheesy scrambled egg, filled bagels, baked puff pastry pies. Simple stuff but freshly made and thoughtfully delivered. 8/10
Total: 26/30
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