SEVEN years ago, when I worked in Glasgow, Fratelli Sarti was a mainstay. Granted, the service at the Bath Street restaurant was never lightning-quick, but the friendliness of Glasgow's finest and the cheery blow-ins from Italy more than made up for any time lost. And the food was always interesting and well prepared. The place was, in short, a large cut above the run-of-the-mill Italian restaurant.
Not any more. After our meal there I asked my nine-year-old daughter for her verdict. She just shook her head. "Can we go somewhere else next time
, Dad?"
She had a point. What should have been a nice early-evening meal at a leisurely time when the kitchen and waiting staff weren't run off their feet turned into a marathon that lasted almost three hours. There are people who can run a marathon in less time than it took us to complete our meal. If I hadn't eventually chivvied them along, we might still be there now.
There's a note in the Sarti menu which effectively says that because you are about to get authentic Italian food that is lovingly cooked from scratch, the whole process will take time, so please be patient. Those are noble sentiments, but it took 20 minutes to get our drinks at the beginning of the meal before we'd even ordered any food, and over quarter of an hour from the time we ordered our puddings for them to arrive – and they were all cold, pre-prepared gâteaux and ice-cream.
The only thing that arrived quickly was the bill – and it was wrong. When I pointed out the error our waiter simply disappeared and it took another ten minutes and some semi-hysterical drowning-not-waving semaphore to attract another waiter's attention before I was finally allowed to pay.
Perhaps the wait wouldn't have been so painful had the food lived up to the Sarti standard of old. Sure, the place is still as appealing and atmospheric as ever, reeking of the old country. But the food – particularly the pasta – was produced with a stunning lack of care or attention to detail.
I started with the seafood antipasto – a bowl of calamari, octopus, mussels and prawns that I was assured would be cold. It was hot. That didn't really matter, but the Lilliputian size of the prawns and the fact that the mussels were overcooked certainly did. In fairness, this was a sizeable serving, and the sauce at the bottom of the bowl was well worth the wait.
Bea liked her tortellini in brodo, a clear chicken broth in which floated a dozen little flavour-packed parcels of meat-filled pasta, although she was slightly put off by the raggedy pieces of stringy chicken lurking at the bottom of the bowl.
If the starters were passable, that was more than could be said for all but one of the main courses. Thankfully, the gold medal dish was mine, a pork shank in which the moist, tender ham peeled off the bone at the slightest touch of my knife. But even that was spoilt by the accompanying 'chef's choice of vegetables', which consisted of two small sautéed potatoes and a shard of over-roasted aubergine. Chef was clearly in a bad mood.
And that was as good as it got. Bea had ordered linguine with langoustines and prawns from the specials board. She'd been told that it was the last remaining serving and was left in no doubt that the dish contained a veritable herd of langoustines. Whatever happened between the kitchen and the table, it clearly involved the removal of most of the main attraction: her plate contained just one lonely little langoustine surrounded, if that is the word, by four prawns that varied in size from small to very small. She was not impressed.
As for the kids, the spaghetti carbonara had too much cream and plasticky ham, while the spaghetti with two small meatballs was solid but unspectacular.
Pudding was much better, with both my amaretto gâteau and Bea's tiramisu turning out to be small but perfectly formed balls of creamy stodge. The kids went for the ice-cream, always the safe option in an Italian restaurant, and weren't disappointed.
And that was more than can be said for the meal as a whole. Sarti's wouldn't seem so ridiculously overpriced if it had maintained the standards that made it the default setting when it came to Italian food in Glasgow, but it is noticeably heavy on the wallet (even the cheapest bottle of wine was £16.80) given the poor service and cooking.
Fratelli Sarti has long traded on a reputation for being Glasgow's Valvona & Crolla – in other words, a venerable, dependable slice of authentic Italian cuisine in the heart of the city. Forget all that. The food here can be found in a thousand streets in a hundred Scottish towns. And not only would it be cheaper, you'd probably get it on your plate a lot quicker too.
VITAL STATISTICSFratelli Sarti121 Bath Street, Glasgow
(0141 204 0440,
www.sarti.co.uk)
Out of pocket Starters £3.90–£9.60; pizza and pasta £6–£13; main courses £8–£21; puddings £3.95–£4.75
Rating 4/10
The full article contains 885 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
