Sunday Herald, 20th July 2009
All shook up
Joanna Blythman

There’s a lot to like about Velvet Elvis. My favourite is the framed copy, on the door of the ladies’ room, of the Bunty comic from 1976 because I was addicted to it as a child, along with the Judy and the June And School Friend.

The menus are fun, too, printed with wonky crayon handwriting and lots of scorings out, and fitting under the sleeves of old LP records. There’s a jukebox, and if you like to cruise charity and junk shops looking for bargain vintage bits and pieces, then you’ll love the furniture, a ¬serendipitous mixture of stylishly re-deployed objets trouvés. We sat on what looked like old railway station waiting-room benches and ate at a table topped with eau-de-nil formica finished with a riveted zinc edge.

The food has much to commend it too. It offers an unpretentious, sensible and flexible menu of no-nonsense dishes at very manageable prices that make eating approachable, even when you’re feeling hard up. Don’t interpret this as a compromise on ingredient quality, though, it’s more that the choice of dishes is shrewd, making the most of raw materials that are decent and wholesome, but not hugely expensive.

Of a vast pile of plump, fleshy mussels I have only one complaint: they were so filling, they blunted my appetite for the main course. They might easily have made a meal in themselves. With a Breton twist, they had been cooked with finely sliced leek, cream and cider. Not one of those nasty ciders either, but Addlestones, the cloudy double-fermented stuff from Somerset that isn’t filtered so it still contains live yeast and natural apple residue. A proper “live” cider, it gave the mussels a welcome kick and cut the richness of the cream.

You might think a paté of sustainable smoked mackerel was right-on but dull, but this one was lemony-sharp, assertively smoky and not at all greasy. Served with rough-hewn oatcakes from the Handmade Oatcake Company in Crieff, and a little side salad of marsh samphire and sea parsley (a sort of marine lovage), it felt like a luxurious treat.

We chose our main courses badly, plumping for stewy, wintry offerings, but I couldn’t say no to the oxtail on the bone that had been braised with wine and ceps. Why don’t more chefs serve oxtail on the bone? The meat came away cleanly in melting, suitably gelatinous strands and the wild mushrooms added their characteristic pungency to its unctuous juices. This gravy was ideal for mixing into a champ – mashed potato with raw spring onion through it to freshen up the spud and add texture.

There was another interesting mash across the table, this time perked up with a liberal amount of coarse-grain Pommery mustard. It partnered a most respectable steak pie, more winey and French than the plain Scottish sort, under a crisp, amber lid of airy puff pastry and served with a generous pile of green beans – the properly thick UK summer sort, not those jet-lagged Kenyan jobs.

I think there’s work to do in the dessert department. Despite the current mode for lemon posset, I still haven’t got bored of this cheaply made yet toothsome confection, but this one was over-sweet for my taste. You need quite a quantity of exhilarating lemon to balance all that cream. I loved the sound of strawberry trifle made with poppy seed and lemon sponge, but trifle is tricky. Much rests on getting right the ratio of component parts. This one had too much sponge and custard, too few strawberries and no cream at all. Maybe someone forgot to finish it off with the latter. These slips just need tweaking, though, and maybe Velvet Elvis should hold a focus group on puddings.

Velvet Elvis is another feather in Glasgow’s eating out cap. There’s Pintxo next door, Fanny Trollopes up the road, the Left Bank … the city excels in easy-going, affordable, neighbourhood restaurants that seem to understand the principles of good food but have their feet firmly on the ground. There’s a dearth of these in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

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