Summary
Surprises, as Jane Austen once noted, are rarely pleasant and nearly always inconvenient. And you can add deadly dangerous to that when it comes to food. In a student cafeteria in Paris I was once served a plate of something I'd never come across before. "It's a surprise," smiled my new comrades. I was nervous. I knew the French delighted in eating the things no one else dared. But this was not les escargots nor the legs of the grenouille, and it didn't look like it might once have galloped down the final furlong at Longchamp. It was a bit like macaroni in tomato sauce. I took a tentative forkful: weird, kind of slithery texture, but the sauce was nice. I ate some more. "Ca vous plat?" smiled the chef. "We did not think you British would like ze entrails." It was offal. Really awful.
That was ten years ago, and I still sometimes feel a faint sense of trepidation at dinnertime. I must confess that the thought of eating at Air Organic, which opened its doors in Glasgow at the very same time as I was reaching for the Pepto-Bismol in Paris, made me slightly uneasy. Notoriously avant-garde in the beginning, to the point of dispensing with crockery (so old-fashioned; little moulded trays with separate compartments for each item was the hip way to eat dinner), even its name sounds like a fearsomely trendy pair of trainers. And trendy food is never a good idea. Seaweed. Polenta. Sun-dried tomatoes. It's such an effort to like them. And what if the chef tried to combine them all, perhaps with a balsamic and truffle-oil dressing?See the full content of this document
Extract
Breath of Fresh Air
But last week, as we sat down in the long, bay-windowed dining- room, I got the distinct impression that Air Organic had undergone some...
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