A city of dichotomy greets me every time I set foot onto the tarmac of Glasgow International Airport. In all the times I've arrived here I've never stepped off the plane onto an extended jet bridge; instead it's always a manually-controlled set of stairways that remind me of my days of youth spent visiting the Caribbean. Except, of course, instead of welcoming sunshine there's drizzly clouds and instead of palm trees there are 300-year-old poplars.
I've yet to be disappointed by our food offerings here in this old city; a metropolis now experiencing a renaissance of sorts in both cultural and culinary upgrades. Now that we live here it was a difficult task picking which restaurant to review the gravy of first, but in the end the decision was simple - a local chippy.
In the United Kingdom, chippys' are as ubiquitous as Tim Horton's back in Canada, with the main differences being that every chippy is different in some way due to their differing methods of preparation and food sourcing. Sure, the 100 menu items are typically the same across most takeaway establishments, but the breadth and variety of those offerings are night and day depending on where you go.
Healthy? 10 out of 10 doctors say no. Vegan-friendly? Go eat some swiss chard, hippy. Authentic? In spades. And that's something this blog tries to seek out wherever its author finds himself - the authenticity of the flavour.
As you approach Glasgow from the airport, you wouldn't think that a major city awaited you after crossing over or under the Clyde River, mostly due to a surprising lack of a recognizable skyline we're all so used to. But after making your way through the fantastic architecture of the city centre into the leafy-green warmth of the west end, you end up at the very unassuming Genarro's Fish and Chips. Although it's an establishment that appears from the exterior as your average 150-item takeaway, much like the absence of any real welcoming skyline in this town, looks can often be deceiving until you get into the heart of it.
Genarro's has no less than 200 items on the menu, everything from calzones to burgers, from kebabs to pakoras to everything you could imagine in between, including fried pizzas. But I wasn't there for all that hoity-toity-west-end-Waitrose-shopping nonsense; you know I was there for dat gravy.
After a quick ordering process that involved me nodding and smiling bewilderingly to the cashiers' rapid-fire hard-to-understand thick Scottish accent, the gravy presented itself with one of the aforementioned menu items - in this case, fish and chips. You never know what you're going to get in a gravy, and that's part of the excitement.
This takeaway-gravy, one that is buried at the bottom of a 250-item menu, had a chance to be a neglected recipe forged as a last-minute addition to appease the late-night punters' request for some alcohol-soaked binge eating rampage - but no. There was (gasp) subtlety - a nuance of thyme that hinted at something greater. A healthy 70% opacity clung to the chip as if to profess its innate desire at wanting to be something more than a forget-me-not sauce at the end of a 300-item takeaway menu. I was surprised that this gravy was top class, but to be fair, at a proper restaurant it would perhaps receive lower marks, and a part of me think that the gravy knew this.
With one foot lingering in the past and the other moving forward as a result of its progressive creative culture, Glasgow often does seem a city divided at times. It's the first city I've been to in the UK that reminds me of Toronto, my home. But it's also the first city in the UK that I might possibly be able to one day consider home. Time shall tell, but I do look forward to eventually trying all 350 items at my local chippy, and perhaps finally finding that perfect gravy to call home. read more
