McCune Smith @ Glad Cafe

1006 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow

0141 636 6119

Brunch/Lunch: £5-£15

Food rating: 8/10

IT'S a happy occasion when two good old friends hook up together, and that’s how I feel about Glasgow’s East End McCune Smith cafe teaming up with the south side’s Glad Cafe. Were any two enterprises ever more suited to one another?

Both are much more than mere cafes. The former honours the life of the eponymous Mr Smith. He was the first African American to achieve a medical degree (which he did at the University of Glasgow), an influential slave trade abolitionist, and yet another exceptional individual of colour only belatedly recognised for his achievements. I do love a cafe that makes a radical point as well as scones.

As for Glad, when I visited four years ago it was a fledgling social enterprise, a community arts centre with counter-intuitively good food. I needn’t have worried that its creative plans would work out: it won the inaugural Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Award for the Best Performing Arts Venue in Scotland. It hosts gigs, screens films, and has a community choir. The “Glad Academy” has brought a stream of thinkers through its door: Nicola Sturgeon, Liz Lochhead, Elaine C Smith and others. There’s always something interesting happening here.

And the new food liaison – McCune Smith @ the Glad Cafe – reaffirms this independent, creative spirit. It’s not just that it uses fresh, local, seasonal, ethical ingredients. Lots of places do, or at least say they do. It’s also that it has its finger on the pulse. So it presents the vegetable-centric eater with lots of possibilities without heading down a didactic vegan path, making good use of the animal-derived foods – meat, eggs, dairy – that Scotland produces so well. There’s a nod to “clean eating” and the avocado-chic zeitgeist around healthy eating, but whoever designed the menu isn’t daft enough to believe that Glaswegians will live on a diet of chia smoothies. Craft beers – Glad is licensed, so there’s a tidy selection – are more to the point.

Food here is made from scratch, even the pepper-crusted, hand-cured pastrami. Those ingredients that are bought in are top quality. McCune Smith @ Glad uses handmade Isle of Mull cheddar, for example, arguably the finest of its type in Scotland. The roll that sandwiches your dry-cured bacon is made with organic spelt flour. Yet because the whole culture at Glad is inclusive, expensive ingredients are intelligently combined with cheaper ones to keep the overall price reasonable. A filling savoury course comes in between £5 and £8.

Someone in the kitchen has a sophisticated, modern palate. I picked that up as soon as I tasted the punchy, minty, lime-like Persian pesto that anointed a thick slice of roast butter squash, but to have this capped with a rubble of fresh “dukkah”, the Middle Eastern garnish, here made with crunchy roasted citrusy coriander and pungent Nigella seed, electrified the dish. As did the tangy homemade tamarind and date relish that flanked a “roast root vegetable cake”, in essence, a pleasingly sticky, crusty sort of beetroot and carrot latke. Once again the ability to layer interest through a dish shone brightly; the vegetable cake was topped with an immaculately poached ochre-bright egg, under a blob of vegan “avocado hollandaise” that provided a corrective to any knee-jerk view that vegan lookalikes are a penance.

Unconventional sandwiches came on Glad’s own first-rate Crossmyloof Loaf, a tin-baked sourdough, a revival of a loaf that was produced at the site of the cafe in the mid-1850s. I could have done with more of the sweet potato wedges and tahini filling on one, and less raw red onion of the Scottish “Gouda” and pastrami one. A potentially plodding lentil and roast beetroot salad was once again enlivened by another extrovert dressing, this time, of thyme, ginger and orange.

The sweet selection – light “cranachan" cake streaked with vivid raspberry compote, chocolate hazelnut, lemon polenta, and more – share a made-today freshness, that for once extends to the habitually stale “Empire” biscuits. Which reminds me, given the associations of imperialistic plunder and brutal colonialism that surround that term, surely this heritage confection is ripe for a rename? Suggestions on a postcard, please.