Smile Cafe, Glasgow
DIMMI,” the waitress says as she breezes up to our table, so we do – we tell her what we want and off she goes. “Dimmi,” the waitress then says as she swoops over to the couple beside the window. And they do. They tell her what they want.
There’s a lot of Italian spoken in the Smile Cafe. They burble away warmly to each other behind the counter, they shout orders in Italian through to the man making the food in the back and they speak to the customers in Italian. And the customers respond in English. It all sort of works. Admirably. In a sort-of that’s-what-we-speak-here way.
I’d like to ask why they called it the Smile Cafe, but considering that when we ordered hot coffee with cold milk (in Italian) we got cold coffee with hot milk (in a bowl the size of a bird bath), we’re not pushing that question. Not in my Italian anyway. And the place is so small that to have a conversation with anyone here is to have a conversation with everyone.
It’s enough to say that this tiny stretch of shops on Queen Margaret Drive, along from where the BBC used to reign majestically over the west end of Glasgow, is blessed with not one but two thoroughly Italian cafes with two thoroughly non-Italian names.
The other is, of course, The North Star about two baguette lengths away from here where they too converse in smiles and Italian. They maybe don’t have fresh copies of Dylan Dog, the wacky Italian crime comic, on the shelf at The North Star. And the list of menu items isn’t so long that it’s easier to take a photo of it on the phone and go over it in sections but apart from that, they’re so similar that you couldn’t put a 2,000 lira note between them.
Sandwiches, paninis, soups; perhaps they make more main-course dishes at The North Star but we’ve already had a chickpea and rosemary soup here, a few cherry tomatoes floating in it, mounds of chickpeas in a stocky broth, only the slightest hint – because that’s all it needs – of rosemary. If you were brought up pretty much in a back shop with a pot of soup always on the go, tended to by an Italian woman, you’ll know exactly what it tastes like.
We have cakes too. Freshly fatta-in-casa, that one, made by myself, the waitress says, pointing. Pear and dark chocolate, nice.
But it’s the sandwiches that make the Smile Cafe, and in particular today the ciabatta with mozzarella, salami and wild broccoli. They say “wild broccoli” on the tightly-handwritten chalkboard menu with its taleggios and grilled aubergines, with its pancettas and pestos but they actually mean friarielli – a southern Italian vegetable like broccoli, but not broccoli. Preserved in oil and garlic and chill. Delicious, and made for sandwiches and pasta.
During my progress through a sandwich with mozzarella and salami and, of course, thin green strands of friarielli, my eye is drawn magnetically to the shelf packed full of Molisana pasta – the best – tins of Italian meat pastes, and to a medium-sized glass jar stamped “Product of Naples – the King of the Garden.” There’s friarielli for £10 a jar and they don’t even take cards in here. Every bite confirms that rich, tangy, slightly bitter, oily and garlicky hit transforming an ordinary meat and cheese sandwich into something special.
I’m actually, genuinely out of my seat and up the road to the cashline to get the money for the last jar before someone else buys it.
Does the use of friarielli make the Smile Cafe into something special itself? Unique. No, of course not. But there’s a great buzz to this place and a genuine hit to the flavours that raises it out of the ordinary even in Glasgow’s hugely overcrowded cafe market.
And they’re definitely Italian.
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