Winter warmer with a sweet tooth: Firebird, Glasgow, reviewed by Joanna Blythman

Lunch/Dinner: £10-£28

Food rating: 7.5/10

IT could just be chance, of course, but now that the weather has turned from Indian summer into decisive winter, several restaurateurs and shopkeepers have told me that business is slow. Theories abound. Is it the school holiday effect (plausible), people nestling down these dark nights to autumn TV (likely), families saving up for Christmas (please no!), stony broke frugality (nothing new there), or, and I’m putting my money on this one, is it the sobering effect of a sudden drop in temperature?

Those Spartan, minimalist restaurants kitted out from the architectural salvage yard that seemed funky and fun in summer, almost overheated by an exuberant crush of bodies, don’t seem so make-do-and-mend clever when the raw wind whips against their floor-to-ceiling windows and whistles up from the cracks between the recycled floorboards. Time to forget about painted toenails and look out your thermal socks.

Reconnoitring the eating spots on Glasgow’s Argyle Street in these climatic conditions recently was an instructive exercise. Some establishments throb with warmth and their cheery huddle of customers, while in echoing, empty others if you’re quick you’ll see the front of house manager nestling behind the bar in a parka, bedding down for the lean weeks before office Christmas parties come to the rescue.

Firebird, the well-used restaurant at the Kelvingrove Galleries end of the strip, fits snugly into the first category. Of course the name connotes flaming orange, that warming, gregarious, energising colour, even if the dominant hue here is inky black to the point where it’s hard to read the shadowy Casper The Friendly Ghost outline of chalk on the blackboard. So what? Firebird is palpably a perennial popular restaurant, which is something of an achievement when you consider how long it has been in business. And even if you sit near the door, the atmosphere is toasty.

Back in the day, I had a memorable wood-fired pizza here, but currently if I want pizza in Glasgow, I’ll be heading to Paesano, which has really upped the ante in this department. On the other hand I was a willing recipient of another Italianate dish, a pedestal of polenta topped with fresh chanterelles that had been briefly introduced to the inside of a hot skillet, an egg oozing ochre yolk from its crunchy breadcrumbed jacket, a frilly parmesan wafer, and to crown this wanton orgy, a truffle cream sauce. Maybe it’s the glutamic acid in the fungi, but this kind of food can temporarily make you feel glad it’s winter.

Still I wasn’t quite ready to wave goodbye to summer so the other starter had to be a pulpy mozzarella burrata, not in the classic Caprese presentation with tomatoes, but with marinated beetroot. Now this was a nice cheese and the combo worked, but I misinterpreted the accompanying “honeycomb” as the waxy bit of real honey, when in fact it was the Crunchie bar stuff. Even made more savoury by the inclusion of smoked almonds, I still think real honeycomb would have made a much better pairing, or even a drizzle of honey – but something this grittily sweet with burrata? Madone!

This same idiosyncratically sweet palate dogged a main course of confit duck served inexplicably on a nondescript waffle with a cloying mustard maple syrup overlay, and an overkill of protein in the form of a fried egg. The other main course of “porchetta” wasn’t true porchetta, just a thick pork steak, improved by the presence of crisped up lardo (cured pork fat) along with a generous amount of braised carrots and freshly podded peas.

Desserts proper (as opposed to random sweet notes in savouries) are a bit of alright. Counter-intuitively, given that the stone fruit season has long since gone, roasted peaches, flanked by honey and saffron sponge with pistachio crème Anglaise, worked well. Chocolate hazelnut mousse with salted caramel and toasted banana made a satisfyingly stick-to-the-ribs winter pudding.

Sugary aberrations apart, the food here is mainly fine. The staff are friendly and efficient, and around you there are people of all ages having a nice time. So you’ll probably leave Firebird thoroughly warmed, and in good humour.