TO Pickled Ginger, then, where we squeeze all four of us into a booth so tight and upright it feels momentarily like corrective surgery.

To where there's a cool red neon sign on the door, to where staff hippy hop about with beanies on their head and to where there's a short guide on "sushi etiquette" printed kind of helpfully on the place mats. Dip only the fish in the soy, pick it up by the rice side, take ginger in between sushi to clean the palate, since you ask.

Is it a restaurant or is it a bar? Nope, it's kind of both with people eating from bento boxes behind us and others sipping cocktails at the counter.

As atmospheres go, this joint perched right here on the very, very outer edge of Glasgow's fashionable foodie Finnieston strip - in fact, it's so close to the M8 it might not even be on the strip - has got it pretty right tonight we think.

It's a Tuesday but it's bustling, the waitress is relaxed, smiling and joking with Debs as glasses are taken away and we all pitch in to shuffle plates aside in a forlorn attempt to get all the food onto the tiny table without stacking full dishes.

The sushi comes on slate platters containing salmon, octopus and prawn nigiri, Californian rolls and a few maki. They're just-made in the kitchen through the hatch over there and it shows: the salmon plump and clean and light, the rice nicely flavoured, the prawn is served cooked - a la Marks and Sparks.

"The best thing on the menu," was how the waitress described the glistening green wakame or seaweed salad packed with sweet, sour, spicy flavours from the sesame, soy and ginger.

And she was right. A pork katsu bento box is full of good, crisply breadcrumbed and tender meat, salad with a punchy squirted dressing, a couple of nigiri, steamed rice and comes with a bowl of miso soup.

So far, so good? Or is it really so far, so-so?

There's nothing here that's not pretty commonplace nowadays. Never one to, ahem, avoid rehearsing an anecdote I am at this very moment recalling in a misty-eyed fashion that the first sushi I ever tasted was in Wolfgang Puck's in Florida 20-odd years ago - I was startled, shocked, mildly revolted then hooked. Uh-huh, at this point my kids are actually yawning. But...nowadays sushi is the mainstay of the supermarket lunch counters, annexed by large restaurant chains and completely and utterly mainstream.

Somewhere on the internet I saw a vague claim that Pickled Ginger has a trained sushi chef, but if it's not flim-flam they don't make enough of it.

Nor do they make much of Scotland's seafood larder on the standard sushi platter. To push things a bit further we order clam nigiri; horse clam in fact. These turn out to be rubbery and largely flavourless slivers of whitish meat. Are they from the Pacific? If they are they feel tired from the journey.

Anyway, good handmade minced pork potstickers dumplings are re-ordered, though, at £6 for three somebody is ignoring the handmade dumpling war currently taking place in Glasgow and these can be had for less at Chop, Chop, and Dumpling Monkey and many more.

Oh...the Ika-Yaki? Squid "lightly dusted in flour and fried" it said on the menu, though they're usually grilled in Japan. What we got? Whole baby squid dipped in a very heavy batter, served with the oil oozing from them and bursting alien-like from their tasteless cocoons.

If you are opening a new sushi joint nowadays, doesn't it need to be a bit bolder to avoid being generic?

Pickled Ginger is a kind of mash-up of Asian dishes - and we had a saucy, spicy Koreon Ttekbokki, too. While it's not, as yet anyway, doing anything new, it's still a fairly pleasant place to be.