FOR all the times I have been in Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, I have never noticed the discreet entrance to the Western Club.
Membership used to be hard to come by. In 1924 the Glasgow Evening News opined: "It's easier to manoeuvre an OBE for yourself than to gain entry as a member of the Western Club." Times have changed. This is no Groucho, no fashionable playground for celebs and paparazzi. As many other private members' clubs in the UK have found, few of us these days will fork out for exclusivity.
So the first-floor dining room of the club is now open to the public, giving us the opportunity to spend a little time in this plush establishment, if not to access its innermost sanctums. And the atmosphere is quite special. It is painted in several tasteful shades of grey, if not the full 50. You are warmly greeted down below in the hallway from where an intriguing staircase coaxes you upstairs to a dining room fit for a grand hotel. Unlike those London clubs frequented by spies in John Le Carré novels, the decor isn't conservative retro, but contemporary in a respectful way that sucks nothing from the building's sleek proportions and fine features. At night, from our table that looked down onto the Corinthian columns of the Gallery of Modern Art, which is illuminated by a twinkling firmament of starry lights, Glasgow looked opulently gorgeous.
You wouldn't expect the restaurant here to be cheap, and it isn't; Arran cheddar soufflé with onion jam, for instance, comes in at £9.50, a generous mark-up on ingredient costs. You can go for a lunch and early evening deal at around £20, but otherwise, you're looking at £35-40 a head for food alone, and that makes me rather picky. At this price level, I think we have a right to expect better bread than we were served: pappy with a limp crust.
Two lovely fresh scallops, served on the shell and perched on a bed of fennel, could have done with a bit more oomph from the promised ginger. The Western Club has one of those menus with lots of enticing come-ons embedded in the descriptions that are not fully realised on the plate. For example, I chose the pear, Roquefort and chicory salad because it came with "spiced cashews", but any spices present in the crumbled nuts were keeping a low profile. This left me with a fairly standard threesome of ingredients, overburdened on the cheese front, with fairly vapid pear, and no obvious dressing.
Rack of lamb and loin of roe deer were impeccably cooked, blushing pink and a tender joy to eat. The former came with a spoonful of tomato fondue (an intense tomato mush), the latter with red cabbage and a spirited gravy aromatised with raspberries and heather honey. Both these main courses were let down by their respective potato elements- a soggy rosti and a stale-tasting fondant. Each came with spinach and Chantenay carrots. This template presentation, with its routine, mix-and-match built-ons, isn't thrilling.
Memo to myself: stop ordering pear. Like those in the salad, the pears in the sour cream tart were so low-key, you might miss them. The pastry on the tart was softly humid, tasting as though it had been refrigerated for some time. This was within days of the restaurant opening. Perhaps turnover is an issue until diners reach a critical mass, but this was not the day-one freshness that one might rightly expect from this price ticket. I very much liked the baked rosemary chocolate pot, but its tuile - formed, I think, from pink-coloured white chocolate - wilted into a sad, sticky pool within minutes.
Thus far, the cooking at the Western seems to belong to the staid country-house hotel school. Maybe that's the club tendency showing. But surely Glasgow could handle something a little less sedate?
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