Joanna Blythman reviews Beaumartin The Cottage, Bearsden

Thinking of food in seasonal terms is hard-wired into French culture. Beaumartin’s menus show that its chef looks outside the kitchen window to take account of the weather. Beaumartin is also at pains to point out that because “we use fresh organic ingredients that are available on the day, menus are subject to minor changes”. I’m happy to live with that uncertainty.

So we settle down next to the vintage Pifco teaset and a very browsable cookbook collection, and leafing through Rachel Khoo’s Little Paris Kitchen, snapping the recipe for oeufs en cocotte (more neglected old friends). Beaumartin is small, personal, a dead ringer for the genuine family bistro that you’d wish for in France, but rarely find. Complimentary ‘nibbles’ are generous: oatcakes with chicken paté and gentle chutney, filo parcels of creamy smoked fish, homemade bread with whipped sun-dried tomato butter.

Starters proper perform the Gallic trick of being much more interesting than they sound. Roasted vegetable, onion, and goat’s cheese tartlet has the most amazing millefeuille-type flaky pastry, the onions are decisively molten, a teaspoon of fruity tomato compote on top delivers a magic touch, a salad of well-dressed lamb’s lettuce, and little pools of red pepper sauce lie below. It reminds me how satisfying a well made tart can be. Then there’s the chicken terrine, somewhere between rillettes and liver parfait in consistency, two fat slices, flanked by a well-matured apricot chutney, sliced cornichons, on a bed of ruby chard tossed in a properly made vinaigrette.

Now we turn our attention to an Arbroath smokie bathed in buttery lemony juices, with it a pearl barley risotto that’s sharp with crème fraiche, the most delightful braise of petit pois, broad beans, tiny broccoli spears, and kale and new potatoes fried to a crisp. But then the roast Peelham organic pork chop – ‘all our dishes are prepared with freshly sourced organic ingredients’– is also a beauty, a lovely piece of meat immaculately treated, doused in a peppery amber sauce with crushed peppercorns and roasted red onions through it. Smooth mash potato stippled with golden mustard seed, and piquant with horseradish, perhaps, makes the perfect companion for this glorious sauce.

After a meal like this, so unstinting in its generosity, we barely crave dessert. For a second I consider passing up on pudding altogether, but when the ice creams arrive, I’m so happy that we didn’t. They’re made on the premises and both the summer berry and the strawberry with Cava sorbet exhibit astonishing purity of fruit, the alcohol present but not overbearing, the overall effect not excessively sweet. As I said, the French understand restraint. Second wind now on the toothsome front, we have one for the road in the form of ‘café gourmand with sweet treats’. Shame that the espresso is Nespresso – surely a George Clooney brokered triumph of marketing over taste? – but focus on what strikes me as a very superior banoffee pie, with a fudgy base that’s saved from sickliness by competing flavours, vanilla, I’d guess, balsamic vinegar maybe, salt, almost certainly. ‘Beaumartin’s Little Bearsden Kitchen’? There’s a volume I’d happily work my way through.