Locavore

Glasgow

I COME in for a light late lunch and end up leaving with five litres of organic olive oil, two full-grown and flowering cucumber plants, garlic raised in nearby Rouken Glen and a jam jar of grind-it-yourself peanut butter.

There’s a moment with the peanut butter machine when I can’t for the life of me find the tubs to grind it into. Then the man behind the counter gently explains: Hello, stupid, you’re supposed to bring your own recyclable receptacle – before rooting about the back shop and finding one for me.

Nearby people are filling bottles and tubs with milk from a huge shinily silver machine, presumably organic, while oils, lotions and organic washing up liquids are available in the same way. So completely ordinary does all this feel that by the time I’m given a hand to carry all this stuff out to my car I experience a momentary pang of embarrassment at firstly having turned up in the degenerate heap and then having to roar off like Mr Toad. Toot, toot.

Anyway, yes, there’s a whiff of earnest planet saving going on at Locavore which I concede in the past would have been a turn-off of the highest order. Yet, as I eat outside with the afternoon sun bathing Victoria Road in the sort of golden grandeur that once made it one of Glasgow’s great streets I’m struck by how busy Locavore is. And how similar this airy, comfortable corner shop must be to the magnificent emporia that say, a 100 years ago, would have filled this area.

Young couples root about in the leafy section; families from the local immigrant community shop; people simply sit at the windowside tables having coffees and cake. It’s all very chilled.

Now, this was a pub until relatively recently and normally they’re not the easiest to covert. But with its corners filled to the brim with fruit and vegetables, its shelves stacked with self-serves of all kinds; its staffed cold counter in the middle – the whole place smartly painted out in an irrepressibly cheery yellow and green – it feels like it’s always been here.

Most folks are eating inside today but I go to one of the three outside tables. At first I’m not one hundred percent sure what I’m eating. I picked something called (rather cheesily) Locavore Fare (£8.50). Instead of house beans on toasted rye, say, or any of the open sandwiches. There’s a boiled egg anyway, slices of thick, sweet and creamy Peelhams Tamworth Ham, Carrick Cheese from an ethical dairy which tastes to me, in its smooth mildness, a bit like the Italian Caciocavallo. There’s a bowl, too, a lively, tangy dip which I’ll later discover by checking the blackboard and not the menu is chard, walnut and kale pesto.

But I’m initially struggling with these three salads. Frankly, and at the risk of stopping the piano playing and sending tumbleweed bouncing through this article – they could all do with a dash of salt. I add some. Slowly the buckwheat, peppers, courgette and taboulleh salad arches its back and yawns lazily; the basmati, courgette, and ginger wakes up while the chard and watermelon simply wakes up and lazily turns over.

There’s good, freshly baked bread, too, sourdough, of course, and I also ordered a slice of that courgette frittata that was sitting in the chill counter. The frittata, I’ve got to say, may well be made with eggs from Glaswegian chickens, and courgettes grown on an allotment very near you, but it’s a disappointingly waxy, tasteless concoction. Ho, hum, can’t have everything.

Walking round later and looking at courgettes grown by Jenny and Elise at The Croft, tomatoes from Rouken Glen, broad beans from Sahelia Community Garden it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that this bustling little place is a sourcing gold mine at just the right time. And one with the raw materials that an adventurous chef could run riot with.

But hey, maybe not everything’s about making money.

Menu: Largely locally grown and produced salads and sandwiches and baking. They are not tied to that nor is it exclusively vegan or vegetarian. 4/5

Service: There’s none of the high-five super-smiley greeting that restaurant staff are ordered to adopt these days just a quiet, helpful calmness. 4/5

Price: I paid £8.50 for the Locavore Fare platter, open sandwiches around £6. Refreshingly they’ve not used the sourcing to go mad with pricing. 4/5

Atmosphere: A bright and breezy, spacious, comfortable and interesting emporium on Glasgow’s Victoria Road. It feels good. 5/5

Food: It’s pretty simple stuff made from the best of ingredients. I think they could do more with it, and maybe a sprinkle of salt here and there. But good. 6/10

23/30

Locavore

349 Victoria Road,

Glasgow

0141 328 3303