Cafézique

66 Hyndland Street, Glasgow

0141 339 7180

Dinner: £22-£28

Food rating: 9½/10

LIKE a weathervane showing which way the wind’s blowing, you can rely on Cafézique in Glasgow to be up with food trends. With many years in business under its belt it has demonstrated both its food literacy and its mature understanding of its market, the preoccupations, mutable habits, and eccentricities of its customers. Cafézique has shown itself to be an adaptable, creative concern that has become rather expert at fitting a snug shoe, intelligently crafted from cutting-edge fashion, to the requirements of the local foot.

For lunch it serves very superior versions of what you’d expect in a decent neighbourhood restaurant- things like avocado and slow-roast tomato salad with pine nuts, bacon crumbs, poached egg, and lemon dressing. With this popular daytime formula there’s always a buzz at Cafézique. All the bread, cakes, and pastries are made freshly in the bakery next door every day; that’s the clincher. Approachable prices and affable staff are a further draw. But it’s in the evening that you can really taste the breadth and depth of what Cafézique can do, and properly sample the characteristic creativity and enthusiasm that drives this enterprise.

We arrive on a balmy evening, elated and energised by sun and blue skies, to find that Cafézique has given its menu a proactive Spring clean. Its burger has disappeared, an indicator of creeping ennui with the category. Only one hearty, wintry option remains – braised ox cheek with smoked polenta, savoy cabbage, and pickled walnut dressing – otherwise this menu represents a breath of fresh vernal air. We steadfastly resist the breadbasket with dukkah and olive oil. (As I’ve learnt in the past, the bread’s so good here it takes serious restraint not to overdo it.) The small plates are keenly priced, so we order three. Squid, its extremities roasted and golden, sits on a crunchy red cabbage and mooli slaw that’s brisk with coriander and chilli, surrounded by dots of ochre, homemade mayonnaise. Orkney crabmeat, sprinkled over a bright red ceviche dressing that has the kick of a Bloody Mary, forms a pretty bracelet around a salad of red pepper (too much pepper for my taste), toasted flaked almonds, fronds of dill, and avocado. This dish is freshness personified and so drop-dead gorgeous it should be on the cover of a cookbook. Free-range chicken thigh, the meat beaten flat then fried in spiced bread crumb coating with whole cumin seeds in it, served on a salad of finely shredded, briefly blanched kale that’s spiked with tiny capers, and a hazelnut purée that’s sublime enough to dazzle in its own right, is a further revelation. Who’d have thought of teaming up this little lot, but heavens, how well it works.

I’ll lay a bet that the new slow-cooked lamb shoulder gyros becomes a permanent fixture at Cafézique. It takes its inspiration from the eponymous Greek street snack, but elevates it. Instead of pita bread, you get a lithe herb pancake; the meat isn’t sliced off a spit, but shredded; the ubiquitous fat chips are twice-fried for crispness and made from Rooster potatoes, a variety that suits this purpose. This winning combination is laced with two contrasting dressings, unctuous pine nut pesto, and yoghurt sour with ground sumac berries. Pomegranate seeds tumble over it in abundance. It tastes even better than its stunning good looks.

Thick, quayside-fresh red mullet fillets, their skin golden-crisp, are a further candidate for a magazine cover. They recline nonchalantly on a mound of juicy, al dente courgette ribbons, the plateful moistened with yoghurt blended with tahini, little blobs of smoky aubergine purée, with a splash of citrusy dressing full of toasted hazelnuts for good measure. I don’t remember eating red mullet this good anywhere.

A pedantic pastry chef might judge the chocolate fudge cake as a little dry, in need of even more of that pistachio custard that tastes like marzipan, or some further embellishment, but no sane professional could find fault with the short, buttery pastry on the lemon curd and rhubarb tart, or the sharp, refreshing cherry sorbet flavoured with Jack Daniels.

Who said that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?