Enjoy
393-395 Great Western Road, Glasgow
0141 334 6622
Lunch £8.95-£15.95 Dinner £15.95/£18.95
Food rating 8/10
IT'S too soon to say, but Enjoy in Glasgow might end up being my best food bargain of 2015. A three-course lunch of voluminous portions, well-cooked in the main, and using sound ingredients, for just £15.95? In this day and age that represents astonishing value for money.
Now any old dive can, and many do, put on a cheap lunch, but it's rarely a great deal in the end. One trick for restaurateurs is to bump up the carb element - the potential profit margin on pizza, risotto or pasta is phenomenal - and/or pad out the plate with low-cost wadding: piles of tired rocket and lolla rossa fit the bill.
Since wages are the most significant item in any restaurant's budget, cutting down on the labour element is another obvious economy. What's easier than a slab of industrial goat's cheese melted under the grill? No cost-cutting chef butchers his own meat, or preps his own chips. It's so much easier, and cheaper, to let a purveyor of convenience foods to the catering trade do the work. It saves time and your chefs don't need any real training. Believe it or not, there are many restaurants where chefs don't even skin an onion, opting to buy them in peeled, chopped and frozen.
Another tactic is to keep the tickets on the main courses ostentatiously low (because they are the benchmark most of us use to predict the likely bill) and then jack up the price of desserts. Have you noticed how many puddings these days command £7.95, even when their main element is bought-in ice cream? As for sticky toffee pudding, the ingredients cost buttons, it requires a piffling amount of skill or time to make ... in fact, it's a chef's licence to print money.
The only let-down at Enjoy was a make-weight cream of cauliflower soup with winter truffle. I should have known better. "It'll be boring," my dining partner warned me. But mid-winter finds me in lock-down mode against grey chill and ready to be romanced by the homely appeal of comforting, warming soup. He was right. The soup was thin, the truffle had nil aroma (nothing new there), and it came with sun-dried tomato bread whose herby, sunny chorus clashed with the wintry fungi-brassica coupling. His wiser selection - emollient Aberdeen Angus corned beef, crispy ox tongue, hot battered onion rings, sitting on a mustardy mayonnaise-like dressing reminiscent of vitello tonnato, and crowned with a textbook confit egg yolk - was a different story altogether: deft, well-judged, the product of hard work.
The heft of the main courses called for the services of diners with robust appetites, but they weren't coarse. Cured mutton sausages had a firmly meaty texture lightened with barley and the developed whiff of more mature sheep. Short rib had been braised, and then finished off so that it was crusty on the surface yet sticky and moist within. Both dishes came with almost identical accompaniments that caught the spirit of the season: velvety creamed potatoes, sturdy, candy-sweet heritage carrots, their skins nut brown with butter roasting, purées of celeriac, chervil root, and parsnip, iron-rich cavalo nero, and umami-packed red wine onion jus. I ate about half of mine; as I say, Enjoy won't send you away hungry.
A scene-stealer of a dark chocolate torte was quite something to look at: a wedge with the geometric clarity and modernity of a Kandinsky. A truffle-dense ganache topped elegantly thin sponge while providing the scaffolding for a glossy Sachertorte-style enrobement. It came with a thrilling salty, dangerously dark caramel ice cream, and once again, was twice the size that most restaurants would serve.
Pistachio pancakes were a puzzler. Where were the nuts? But with its generous quenelle of dense white chocolate mousse and eight dazzling amarena cherries in syrup, it was another demonstration of the sheer generosity with ingredients that typifies this establishment. And when you bear in mind
that it is a well-kept little restaurant - warm, bright, with solicitous service - Enjoy feels like even more of a bargain.
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