In the past forty years Glasgow has been transformed from a location off the tourist grid into a bustling modern city open and welcoming to all with a vibrant arts and leisure life. Nowhere has this transformation been more apparent than with the city’s dining scene.
Glasgow’s restaurants and diners have gone from an overwhelming focus on fish n’ chips, chops and gammon steaks to serving a wide range of dishes that cater to all tastes. Walk down any of the city’s main streets and you will see a variety of eateries appealing to all palates.
It’s tempting to say that Glasgow in the past was a culinary desert. But that would be unfair as there were many restaurants and cafes serving good, decent food, whether they be Italian cafes, fish and chippies, Indian restaurants or Chinese takeaways.
But the key word was basic. Good solid, reliable and filling fare was the order of the day. To give an example, in our forthcoming book, Dining Tales, Domenico Crolla, a son of one of Glasgow’s most famous Italian family dining dynasties reminiscing about the menus in Italian restaurants in Glasgow in the 1970s and 80s recalls that:
‘Remarkably, there were no Italian dishes. The starters were either prawn cocktail, grapefruit, fruit juice or pate while the mains were the likes of steak Diane or peppercorn steak.’
And the same could be said of Indian and Chinese outlets in the city serving up dishes that were considered locally to be “classic” Asian and Eastern cuisine such as chicken tikka masala (invented at the Shish Mahal in Glasgow) or chop suey (first made in San Francisco in the late 19th century).
Equally, home grown ‘Scottish’ dishes revolved around a staple fare of mince and tatties, steak pies, haddock and chips and the much-loved gammon steaks which were regarded as quite exotic back in the day.
No, by and large, the Glasgow palate was for simple, plain food without the frills and its dining scene mainly reflected this.
This all changed within a few years from the late 1970s onwards. The change was heralded in the 1960s by pioneers such as the Rio Stakis and Berni Inn chains which served steaks at decent prices which had previously been outside the price range of most Glaswegians.
During the 70’s and 80s a whole range of new eateries opened, many of them fast food outlets, introducing the city to the delights of hamburgers and pizzas (which really got a big boost in Glasgow with Dino’s, that unforgettable pizzeria in Sauchiehall Street which introduced many in the city to that remarkable Neapolitan dish), products which people had only ever seen before in movies set in downtown New York or Chicago. (Strangely, hotdogs, another staple of US street food, never took off in the city to anywhere near the same extent.)
Kebabs entered the scene in a big way from the late 80s’, while Indian and Chinese takeaways proliferated across every part of the city.
The dining scene really took off from the late 80s and early 90s. Stimulated by the success of a handful of Italian restaurants in the 1970s, a whole clutch of new Italian eateries opened. Spurred on by Glaswegians coming back from holiday in the “old country” demanding the dishes they’d eaten over there; they started peppering their menus with genuine Italian offerings and lasagne and a host of pasta dishes – not least the ubiquitous spag bol – became a Glaswegian staple.
Again, beginning with a few innovators in the 1970s, new restaurants began serving more traditional Scottish produce within an upmarket setting: the beginnings of the ‘fine dining’ scene. Meanwhile, entire areas of the city, hitherto rundown or neglected such as the Merchant City or Finneston, were transformed into dining hotspots.
This brief overview can only scratch the surface and there’s much which, for reasons of space, has been left out. But the best way to grasp the revolution that has occurred in the city’s dining scene is to compare any major Glasgow Street with high footfall fifty years ago with the present. The contrast is striking. Today, almost every second or third shop will be serving food of some description, whereas back then, eateries were far and far between (the only exception today in the city centre is Buchanan Street which is still largely free of restaurants and fast-food outlets).
Our book, Dining Tales due out soon and written by me in collaboration with Marco Giannasi, proprietor of the multi award winning Battlefield Rest, will tell the story of some of the main players in Glasgow who made this dining revolution. Meanwhile in this series of blogs over the next few months we will look in more detail at Glasgow’s culinary scene and the commitment and resilience which have gone into making it a success.