RUTHVEN Lane, like the neighbouring Ashton Lane, with which it is sometimes confused, is one of the unexpectedly exotic backwaters of Byres Road. It is also - again like Ashton Lane - one of Glasgow's long-established sources of interesting food. It was from one lane to the other that the Ubiquitous Chip once sprang. It was in one but not the other that Poachers rose and fell. And it is in the premises vacated by Poachers that the Puppet Theatre is now to be found.

The Puppet Theatre, it should be explained at once, is not a puppet theatre. But its intention, plainly, is to remind us that restaurants are a form of drama, which is why, or partly why, we are willing to pay more to eat and drink in them than we do at home. Whether we eat and drink better in them is, of course, a moot point, and to some extent beside the point. What restaurants offer, several times a day, is a performance, which may be no more than the serving of something flagrantly disgusting, but which may also, at Covent Garden prices, be the hautest of haute cuisine.

Even without puppet plays, the Puppet Theatre is theatrical. There are romantic Italianate murals, dramatic pictures, elaborate candlesticks, and small, atmospherically dark, interconnected rooms, designed perhaps for Glaswegian liaisons dangereuses. There is a tiny bar, which could be a place for tiny trysts. But if space and light are what you prefer, there is an airy, eccentric, audaciously lopsided conservatory, overlooking what was once a farmyard, in the days when Byres Road was a name that meant what it said.

This recently added extension has been described as Gaudi-esque, and indeed you could imagine coming upon something of its sort in a corner of Barcelona. The food, however, is not at all Catalonian, even though there was at one time such a restaurant nearby. Rather it could be called British, perhaps even Scottish, with some generalised Mediterranean and other overtones. It aims high. This is cuisine involving the prettification of traditional dishes which, some would say, might be better left as mother used to make them.

Yet in spite of the daintiness, and in spite of the menu's mannerisms, the Puppet Theatre is capable of providing some seriously good food. The ``home-made'' beef olives with herb mash and a rich red wine sauce may seem over lavishly hyped - why should the dish be anything other than home-made or herby, or richly vinous? - but it is easy to see why restaurants feel the need to prove that what they promise is what they actually serve.

To the starter portion of Peking duck spring rolls with a salad of ``hot things'', on the other hand, I would be less inclined to give my blessing. The spring rolls on one recent Thursday were good, indeed very good, of their kind, and notably superior to those of many of Scotland's Chinese restaurants. But the coyly named ``hot things'' were little more than the usual incongruous bed of leaves upon which the rather ungenerous quantity of spring rolls rested.

A pheasant casserole - one of four main dishes featured on the short fixed-price lunchtime menu - seemed no more than par for the course. Baked cod with mozzarella and Mediterranean vegetables or pumpkin ravioli with Parmesan and a gratin of amaretto biscuit were other options, both of them demonstrating a pleasant Italian bias. But slices of orange in caramel with apricot and vanilla sorbet were the real coup de theatre, confirming that, behind the flummery, there is talent in the kitchen. The wine list, incorporating Chile's high-profile Casablanca sauvignon at #14.25 and, from Italy, a pedigree Pinot Grigio at #13.95, is on the short side, but inspires trust.

More fundamentally Italian, and without a hint of haute cuisine, is the Pellicano, a small establishment in one of those raffish Edinburgh streets - in this case Easter Road - where good restaurants open and sometimes survive, much as they do in Glasgow. Tinelli's, which shows Milanese cooking to be more than an alternative to Edinburgh Neapolitan, is an Easter Road survivor. But Paolo Romano, who has taken over the Pellicano, promotes a quite different Italian style, that of his native Abruzzi, where the mountains stretch down to the Adriatic and lamb vies with seafood as flavour of the day.

Like Silvio Praino, proprietor of Silvio's in Leith, Paolo passed through Tinelli's before striking out on his own, first in Penicuik, now back in his old familiar strada. When the Pellicano originally opened, under different management, it served mostly brown food amid mostly brown decor. Today, brown is not excluded - it is, after all, the colour of the wild mushrooms to which Paolo is partial - but his home-made ``trittico'' ravioli, as its name implies, is tri-coloured, and rightly a specialty of the house.

In other ways, too, Paolo has brought his own personality to a menu based partly on shellfish - king prawns, oysters, scallops in season - prepared as his mother might do them at home in Pescara, and partly on his own inventions and variations, such as his sensationally full-flavoured, mushroom-dominated veal Veneziana.

Floating between kitchen and front-of-house in an ambience that is unpretentiously his own, Paolo shows what domestic Italian cooking is all about. His wine list similarly shuns the merely commercial. It's not everywhere that serves a lively Malise at a house wine price (in this case #9.90), or a brilliantly fruity Greco dei Tufo at #13.50. For the moment, Paolo's Pelican is purely an evening bird. But as an answer to the post-theatre pizzerias of Leith Street, it is worth the detour.

n The Puppet Theatre, 11 Ruthven Lane, Glasgow (Tel: 0141-339 8444). Three-course lunch for two with wine, about #40. Dinner dearer.

Il Pellicano, 110 Easter Road, Edinburgh (Tel: 0131-661 6914). Three-course dinner for two with wine, about #50.