Caffè Parma
30A Hyndland Rd, Glasgow
0141 334 3811
Lunch/Dinner: £8-£28
Food rating: 5½/10
A BALMY evening brings out a more carefree Scotland, and Caffè Parma in Glasgow, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and exterior decking, is perfectly designed to take advantage of it. Players stroll past on their way to the tennis courts below. People hang around outside, not in a smoky huddle, but just keeping an eye on their kids as they play outdoors, making the most of every blessed minute of evening warmth. Even in well-heeled Hyndland, handsome houses can look a little dour in grey weather, but this unusually clement weather shows off their majestic stony beauty.
I’m beginning to regret our 6.15pm booking, though. Instead of being quiet, Caffè Parma is rammed. Two long tables have a Midwich Cuckoos explosion of little blonde children around them. I love to see small kids in restaurants but even though they’re behaving nicely, there’s the delighted whoops when the ice cream arrives, the animated chatter, and the increasingly loud attempts to get attention from parents who’re having a good old chinwag, so the noise level does mount. No wonder teachers need penetrating voices. I’m quietly relieved when one table of eight leaves, and the kids from the other table defect to play Tag around the ornamental bay tree outside.
Caffè Parma serves middle-of-the-road, 20th-century Scottish-Italian food. The new wave of stripped-down, more genuinely typical, regional Italian cuisine typified by Bocca di Lupo in London, has yet to make it to Scotland. (There’s an opportunity here for anyone who cares to grasp it.) At Caffè Parma there’s one nod in that direction, a blackboard of cichetti, small snacks, referencing Venice’s traditional "bàcari" bars, but otherwise, it’s a familiar formula, veal escalope with spaghetti, mountains of pasta with Bolognese sauce, carbonara, and so on. Pizza occupies much of the menu, but I’m not tempted. Options such as “Cajun chicken calzone” aren’t selling it to me, and seeing all the uneaten pizza stacking up on the kiddiwinks’ plates isn’t either. Unless pizza is sensationally well made, it always ends up being too big, and too much.
The cichetti are cheap at £3 a shot. Our first, a meaty, fennel-spiked sausage on well-oiled bread, capped with fiery arrabiata sauce is a steal. Panzanella (bread and tomato salad) is a disaster, the bread mushy and eye-wateringly vinegary. It’s nothing like a proper panzanella. The use of balsamic rather than wine vinegar is just one of its problems. Tomatoes that aren’t good enough is another. Lolla rossa as a stand-in for basil is a third.
We are liking the cauliflower fritters or “fritelle di cavalfiore”– they sound so much more enticing in Italian – and their luxuriant blue cheese sauce. Bagna cauda (warm anchovy and garlic dip) is one of the few road-less-travelled dishes on this menu. Given another hour or so of very low cooking, it might have reached the desired molten consistency. The vegetable crudites that accompany it are crudely cut: carrots like quartered tree stumps, stringy celery, limp pepper. The broccoli is so old that someone in the kitchen has actually tried, ineptly, to scrape off its yellowing flowering head. This is a sin of commission, not omission. Does the chef really think we won’t notice that it was only fit for composting?
“Maria’s homemade tortelli” is an entirely different proposition, luscious, fresh, crimped rectangles luxuriating in ample golden butter with abundant sage, and just the right amount of Parmesan. They slip down nicely. Homemade gnocchi with crabmeat and chilli soon become unappealing: the dumplings are too firm, the crab meat fishy rather than resoundingly fresh, and swamped in a chilli-free glossy sauce that probably involves cream. Fuzzy flavours, when what I expected was a clean-cut dish of simple ingredients.
There’s too much gelatine in the panna cotta, unless you savour the consistency of mastic, and its strawberry coulis has a fruit gums taste. Strawberries come in a “rich mascarpone cream” that doesn’t taste of mascarpone.
Service stops and stutters; it’s not clear whether the problem is in the kitchen, front of house, or both. On a night like tonight, I overlook it. On a grey night, I might not.
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