Restaurant review: Osteria Piero

WITH food this good, little slips are easy to forgive

OSTERIA PIERO

111 West Regent Street, Glasgow

(0141-248 3471)

THE Bill

Dinner for two, £44.40, excluding drinks

FRATELLI SARTI OPENED their first restaurant 20 years ago in Glasgow and pretty much set the benchmark for Italian cuisine here, importing high-quality ingredients from Italy and keeping the menu traditional and seasonal. After a management buyout there, one of the Sarti brothers has moved his business a couple of streets over from the nearest branch. Four months ago, Piero Sarti opened Osteria Piero in the premises occupied previously by Bouzy Rouge.

Stepping off the West Regent Street pavement to the restaurant's subterranean terrace means you aren't overlooked by passers-by but the city centre is fairly quiet at this end anyway. Inside, the place was lively for midweek, with two large birthday parties.

I brought along Kara, who knows Italian food, having sampled it from a young age in its indigenous state. She refuses to sit with her back to the room in any restaurant, so even though I was the one reviewing the place I had to rely on her reports of what was going on. These mainly consisted of oohs and aahs as other people's orders went past, and comments on the unfeasible size of the waiter's Gucci shoes.

We had been told the restaurant offered its food in the traditional Italian way; with courses of antipasti and then pasta before the main meat or fish course and pudding. While this is certainly an admirable way to pass the time when keeping out of the Tuscan sun for an hour or three, we were never going to manage to work our way through to the end on our own.

Here they also offer assaggini, little plates of tastings, like tapas, so we combined the two ideas and went for the main dinner menu, but worked on the one dish, two forks approach. The cuisine refines the principle of a short menu of high quality traditional Italian food but moves upmarket from Sarti's, and this was what I wanted to sample.

We started out with the zuppa di fagioli, ostriche e timo (£6.90), which isn't anything to do with large flightless birds, being borlotti bean soup with oysters and thyme – it was the hit of the night. The smooth, delicately-flavoured purée would have been mundane on its own, but it was elevated by the addition of opaque, salty oysters and a slug of really nutty olive oil. The menu makes much of the quality of all the ingredients and in simple dishes like this it really pays off.

Next up was the antipasti, or as it is called here, l'orologi, which is a choice of different meats and cheeses in platters to share. We ordered orologio salumi e formaggi (£10.90), consisting of mortadella, Parma ham, Felino salame, pecorino and 24-month old Parmesan cheese, accompanied by a glass of prosecco which cut through the delicious fustiness of the food and made for a wonderful combination. The size of this plate made me grateful I'd brought Kara, as she can always be relied upon to help a friend in need. Next we fought over the clams in the linguine alle vongole veraci in bianco (£9.50), which had a little more kick than the "touch of chilli" advised on the menu would have you expect, but was none the worse for it.

With so much meat already consumed, we decided on a fish main course, pesce san pietro in cartoccio (£12.90). The advertised fillets of John Dory were unavailable but it was substituted with sea bream which I prefer anyhow. When it came, it was a little startling; encased in a huge parcel of tin foil which I expected the waiter to expertly unwrap using a spoon and fork with a flourish, but he didn't. It sat in front of me for some time before I realised he wasn't coming back, so I took the job on myself. Predictably, the fish collapsed at my inexpert attempts to take it out of the foil. One could get depressed at having to wrestle with your main course but when the fantastically sweet and garlicky aroma of capers, cherry tomatoes, fish and olives finally hit me and I tasted their concentrated flavours, I forgave the waiter and his big shoes.

The foil fiasco was one little thing, but there were other rough-around-the-edges mistakes which should have been ironed out in a restaurant opened months, rather than weeks, ago. A pre-dinner gin and tonic came without ice. The bread to accompany the soup and the antipasti meat was not great. And the roseval potatoes which went with the fish just didn't appear, with no explanation as to where they had gone.

Perhaps the waiters had seen the pair of us and decided we could do without.

What we couldn't do without was tiramisu (£4.20), again, one portion, two spoons. It is a cliché in an Italian restaurant, but this example's light creamy booziness raised itself out of the ordinary.

My phrasebook says that "an 'osteria', meaning inn or tavern, is the Italian version of a French bistro, where locals can go to eat good, hearty food and not pay the equivalent of three months' mortgage". If so, this is quite an expensive version on the theme, but the quality is worth every penny. The service is good, the waiters friendly and I loved that they called me "lady" in their fantastic accents. It needs to shape up on a few bits and pieces, but these are mere details.

In its quality of ingredients, the menu and its cooking, the attentive and very Italian service and even the little outside idyll for after-dinner smokers, Osteria Piero is a very welcome addition to dining in the city.