The Sunday Times, June 21, 2009
Restaurant review: Allan Brown at Velvet Elvis

It will be for ever associated with an unorthodox black pudding recipe, but there's no doubting this place is a hit

No matter what happens on its plates, Velvet Elvis’s place in the food lore of its home city is assured. In a previous life the space was a butcher’s shop. But not just any old butcher’s shop. It was the butcher’s shop in which Alex Norton converted his wife’s cadaver into black pudding. I’m talking Taggart here, obviously. It rarely happens in this stretch of Partick now.

Plus, I’ve no doubt the real Alex Norton subjects his real wife to nothing more upsetting than some of his soliloquies from Scottish agitprop dramas of the early 1970s. Velvet Elvis’s proprietor, Allan Mawn — of Pintxo, the tapas place next door — plans to install a small publicity-shot shrine honouring the fact that 20-odd years ago this was the location of one of Taggart’s most celebrated cases. The shrine will probably be by the toilets, the very spot on which the oatmeal was mixed with the deceased spouse’s blood.

I know what you’re thinking: none of this will endear the place to the Michelin inspectors. They do tend to frown upon overt references to cannibalistic practice in the restaurants they evaluate, or they certainly used to. It’s a fairly moot point, though, as Velvet Elvis is scarcely the sort of place to give a pudding-encrusted wedding ring about the effete or genteel. It’s not quite Glasgow’s answer to the Hard Rock Cafe, but it’s in the same zone of Shea Stadium, serving bar and brasserie staples, though with an uncommon ardour and attention to detail.

It’s clearly the play-pen of a bloke of a certain age; it crackles and sizzles with all kinds of touches you can tell Mawn has waited years to apply. There’s a hulking 1955 jukebox — four singles for a quid — on the way to the intimate, bare-brick dining room, which is dominated by booths rescued from a Falkirk cafe opened in 1909.

The menus come slipped into the sleeves of vintage collectable albums by Leonard Cohen and the Beatles; when you remove the vinyl you find it’s charity-shop rubbish by Sydney Devine or Glen Daly, with a sticker mocking your naiveté for hoping otherwise. Part sanctuary, part rumpus room, altogether it is Mawn’s mischievous temple to his own whimsy.

None of which would count for more than a boudin noir mysteriously containing a Timex watch if Velvet Elvis’s food did not supply a steady and reliable backbeat. Taking its cue from the music, the food errs towards the American, both in bearing and portion sizes.

This is hearty, friendly food, lifted from the dreary levels it often occupies and rethought for more detailed, demanding appetites. Both starters of sardines and mussels were exemplary and sourced with discrimination; the mussels plump, plentiful and edged with bright orange, the sardines a pair of glistening aquatic mamm-oths. If you so much as looked at it, a main of oxtail and cep fell off the long, segmented bone to which it came attached.

The steak pie, meanwhile, was christened in honour of Jack House, the late Glaswegian bon viveur who lobbied for pies to be made holistically, rather than as jerry-built constructions of pre-rolled pastry and filling. Moist, rich and redolent of a vanished slow-food era, the version here must surely be precisely what House meant. It was the star of a generous, gregarious restaurant that is painstaking in its many efforts to delight.

The cheese board, incidentally, features Blue Monday, a spicy, soft veined cheese made by Alex James, the bass player from Blur — in Tain, curiously. It’s his Fromage to Caledonia. I’ve waited years to use that joke and finally Velvet Elvis has provided the pretext, thus rendering it, for this and many other reasons besides, virtually impossible not to love.

Velvet Elvis, 566 Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, 0141 334 6677, dinner for two with wine £50

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