Temaki

Glasgow

QUITE why a beef teriyaki K-Cup is priced at £6.50 on Temaki's website yet is £9, excluding delivery charge, when ordered through Just Eat is a mystery we’ll never actually get to the bottom of. This is probably because I don’t even look at the restaurant’s website until today when I’m writing up this column. And then I have to double check everything while a giant speech bubble with the word “uh” in it floats above my head.

Is it Just Eat who are taking what looks like a pretty big mark-up or is it the restaurant? Is it danger money? Is it more expensive to order out than sit-in (assuming you could) nowadays? Just who is winning financially anyway during this lockdown?

I hear that business is booming for the chain corner-shops, presumably likewise in the delivery van world, too, and take-aways must, surely, be getting a pretty good turn now McDonald's and all the other monster global chains have powered down their deep-fat fryers and withdrawn from the culinary battlefield.

The difficulty with take-away restaurants generally seems to be that it’s an endless Sargasso sea of small places all selling pretty much exactly the same thing. What happened to all those top restaurants that promised they’d be switching to delivery when the lockdown came in? Answers in an e-postcard, please.

Yawn after yawn after yawn anyway as I spool through scores of curries and kebabs, sweet and sour chickens, burgers and pizzas on the app, thinking doesn’t anyone ever want to put their own twist, stamp their restaurant’s personality, on anything any more? Or are we just a nation that likes familiarity?

This is how I end up with Temaki. Something slightly unusual. An actual restaurant. Delivering across Glasgow from their city centre base. And I do want to know what exactly a K-Cup is, given I find no clear clue on the internet.

The food then? It arrives pretty swiftly in a silver BMW, my wife says, as she returns from a socially distanced doorstop exchange with a man who smiles and waves before heading off. In her hand, she grasps a large orange paper carrier bag like something out of Monsoon, all stiff, and boomy and full of Eastern promise.

It unpacks with all the style of a You Tube unboxing channel as we stand around the kitchen table and watch. No skanky, sweaty, knotted blue plastic bag here, no identikit rectangular tubs filled unattractively to the brim, lids squashed on. We have instead neat, deep and opaque plastic bowls containing glimpses of attractive-looking, still-steamy hot food, small, soft polystyrene tubs with colourful sauces, packets of hand wipes, too, and even chopsticks. Crikey.

We’re full of expectation before we taste a thing. That K-Cup turns out to be pleasant enough slices of beef on fat-grained, properly cooked and still fine fried rice (an extra £1.50 according to the bill), onion, mushroom, vegetables and not much more than that.

There is asparagus tempura for £6, still crisp and fresh after its journey. Sweet potato tempura, too, at a fiver. We double-take the cucumber fried rice at a frankly surprising £8.80, considering it is no more than fried rice with cucumber chunks in it and fight to finish the last crispy in-all-the-right-places, wibbly-wobbly otherwise, pork gyozo. Luca has a pork gyozo ramen too (£12) with an extra container containing a lake of a spiky chilli broth that we all pour over the other rice dishes just to give them a kick-start in the flavour stakes.

Temaki doesn’t just do hot food, it does sushi too, but this, in my humble opinion, is not the time for sushi. All this food comes to £47.30 then, certainly up there with the most expensive home-delivery we’ve had and that’s not including the not-unreasonable £4.50 for delivery and a further mysterious 50p for something called a service charge.

It was certainly light, fresh and prettily presented.

Temaki

113 Hope St, Glasgow

0141 248 1869

Menu: Japanese. K-Cups, teriyaki, ramen and tempura. Slightly different in the home-delivery world.

Price: Ordered through Just Eat and expensive. To their credit, the food was fresh and the presentation was first rate right down to the chopsticks.

Food: Arrived showing no signs of the journey, pleasant asparagus and sweet potato tempura, fresh and very light K-Cup and other rice dishes.

 

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