Kelbourne Saint

182 Queen Margaret Drive, Glasgow

0141 946 9456

Lunch/Dinner: £15-£28

Food rating: 4/10

THE unique selling point of Glasgow’s newly opened Kelbourne Saint would appear to be its rotisserie spit for chicken, the sort that used to be essential kit for second-division supermarkets on drab French commercial centres. Given Kelbourne Saint’s acquisition, might they now be the kitchen equipment du jour for hip food enterprises?

I say might, because I have always had reservations about them. How long is the bird cooked? How does the chef ensure rapid turnover, if you’ll forgive the pun? Are the birds kept warm? Or reheated? Sounds to me like one big stock rotation headache. But then I have queued at rotisserie vans in European markets, captivated by the aroma of those spit-roast, herby meats. I do see the appeal.

Of course provenance and animal welfare is my first question with chicken, and Kelbourne Saint would appear to have this sorted. “Our chickens have had time to grow slowly, roaming free on Scottish farms. Paired with the natural produce they eat, this means that the meat has had time to develop the very finest texture and flavour.” All birds have been brined and basted in “our secret blend of herbs and spices”. It’s all a bit vague so I check with our server that the Sunday special whole roast chicken, served with roast potatoes, vegetables and gravy is also free-range. She tells me that it’s “free roaming, which is even better than free-range”. I don’t get the semantic distinction, but she’s saying the right sort of things, and it sounds like an incredible bargain for £20.

So we order it and turn our attention to the starters, and because we’re feeling under-vegetabled, this being the time of year when it’s all too easy to neglect salads for hearty stodge, we choose two veg-dense options: Tuscan tomato and bread soup, and smashed broad beans and peas with “chunky sourdough toast, olive oil, and lemon zest”.

It’s hard not to feel disappointed with their appearance. I had imagined the soup as a chunky pappa al pomodoro, but this is a sludge, possibly thickened with bread, blitzed in a food processor. To be fair, the tomato taste is deep, as though fresh tomatoes had been oven-dried to start with, of competent home cooking standard, no more. It comes with two slices of untoasted industrial-style brown bread that look as inviting as baked sawdust. The smashed peas and beans, dumped in a bowl without any garnish, look and taste like another (lumpier) food processor job. They have about as much “eat me” appeal as chip shop mushy peas. Their plainness is positively Spartan; the flavour needs lifting. The “sourdough” is just more of the same appetite-daunting sliced loaf, this time toasted on one side. No way does this fit the “chunky sourdough toast” billing. And what happened to the lemon zest?

The roast arrives after a wait that tests our patience: jointed bird, roasted spuds, carrots and celeriac presented in one of those tin-thin enamelled casseroles that lose their heat instantaneously. The ensemble isn’t bad, albeit the flavour profile is flatter than the Netherlands. Even a solitary blade of dry rosemary lacks fragrance. Our bird is barely warm, the blanched kale and mange touts stone cold. Our plates are a few degrees warmer than a fridge. The option of using the gravy to warm it all up fades when we realise that it tastes like liquid Caramac.

Were we foolhardy to order the whole rotisserie-cooked pineapple? Thirty minutes on we’re looking at something that a bunch of Scouts might rustle up over a campfire. Cremated green leaves; a core as chewy as deep fried phone directory; leathery yellow skin – impenetrable to knives – that’s branded with burnt black lines; dark amber salted caramel sauce that’s splitting like an overheated emulsion. This pineapple is absolutely hopeless.

Look, we’ve all had short-lived love affairs with kitchen gadgets, but if Kelbourne Saint wants to stick with its rotisserie, then its roasting technique, like the rest of its rough-and-ready, hillbilly cooking, needs a lot of polishing.