I first visited Glasgow over a decade ago, twice in quick succession, and came away thinking that it was absolutely one of my favourite cities I had ever been to. I loved the grand scale of its streets, the friendliness of its residents, its grit, its culture and its vitality. I’d been to Edinburgh several times before that and, truth be told, I thought Glasgow showed it up as a little pristine and joyless, chocolate-boxy and prissy.

On those two visits, I tried a bit of everything. I wandered round the People’s Palace, where the first exhibit I saw when I came up the stairs was a TV showing Rab C Nesbitt. I wandered up to the Necropolis and saw the beautiful vista of the city below.

My friend Nicola took me to the Barras Market, unlike any market I’d ever visited, trestle tables groaning with goods of debatable provenance. Inside, I reached a stall which could only be described as an Aladdin’s cave of pornography: every medium, every genre, almost a museum in its own right by the year 2014. I explored Merchant City and the West End too, all these very different parts of a captivating whole.

I went to see A Play, A Pie and A Pint in Oran Mor, the beautiful and iconic arts venue: back then it set you back a mere tenner to eat, drink and be culturally stimulated. I sat in the Three Judges at one end of the Byres Road on a Sunday afternoon and drank pints of stout while enjoying the delights of live jazz played by a bunch of septuagenarians with more get up and go and joie de vivre than I managed when I was half their age.

In the interval, one of the jazzmen told my friend Nicola and me how he’d gone on tour with Paolo Nutini, which had provided a nice little nest egg. We bought him a pint. Another gent wandered in off the street and tried to sell us supermarket meat from a carrier bag, still in its packaging, provenance again unknown. Truly all human life was there in Glasgow. I could live here, I remember thinking: the city, not the pub, although in truth probably both.

I drank cocktails in Chinaskis, and fancier cocktails on Blythswood Square – I was a cocktail drinker back then, far more than I am now – and every kind of booze in Nice N Sleazy on Sauchiehall Street, which Nicola told me absolutely had to be done if you were visiting Glasgow. It was like the Purple Turtle only brasher, and like everything else about the city I loved it.

And I ate, my goodness I ate. I ate in some magnificent restaurants which, to my pleasure and surprise, are still going strong today, institutions like Stravaigin, Number 16 and the Finnieston, along with some which to my equal sadness have closed, like Hanoi Bike Shop in the West End and Merchant City’s Guy’s. I came back from both visits saying that Glasgow was one of the best food cities I had ever been to. I swore to return and finally this month, over twelve years later, I did.

I was delighted to find that the city had lost none of its charms. It is still a marvellous, vibrant place with an awful lot to see and to do and, of course, brilliant places to eat and drink. It doesn’t, by and large, trouble the Michelin guide the way Edinburgh does, but its priorities feel different. It’s packed with great restaurants with beautiful dining rooms doing all manner of fascinating food and not so fussed about guide-chasing accolades.

It has old, ornate, gorgeous pubs – some of which are especially a joy for whisky lovers – and a coffee scene as good as anywhere’s. It has brilliant independent retail, particularly slightly out of the centre. And it has a perfectly circular metro system, the Subway, where your fares are capped at £3.40 for a day. It’s a pleasure to use.

Yet I came away from my four day visit frustrated that I had only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg: my list of restaurants to visit next time was infinitely bigger than the list of the ones I managed to check off. I never made it to the Southside, which means I didn’t get to buy coffee and fragrance at Godshot, eat at Big Counter, knock back wine at Made Of Grapes or sample Errol’s Hot Pizza.

I also didn’t get to try the craft beer at Drygate or sample some of Glasgow’s most iconic boozers: places like the Pot Still, The Lismore, Scotia Bar, the Horseshoe. When I put it like that my FOMO kicks in and for a moment, despite having a lovely time, I feel like I barely went anywhere at all. I should have been up and about earlier, cramming in brunch, checking out the street art, spending the afternoon in a museum rather than having a delightful hotel siesta.

But that all would have required me to be a different, better person than the one I actually am (it would also have required me to not wake up hungover on any of my mornings, which was never realistically going to happen). And yet when I put pictures from my travels on Threads I got the most lovely comments from Glaswegians which fell into two categories, either Yes, isn’t Glasgow amazing? or When you put it like that Glasgow is actually amazing. I could identify with them: living in Reading makes you good at rooting for the underdog, if nothing else.

“I’m biased, obviously, but it’s the best” said one person. “Glasgow’s food is truly incredible!” added another. “You’ve chosen some excellent places” said a third, which was a huge compliment to my extensive research, as was “can confirm you went to the best spots”. Perhaps my favourite comment was “Never seen Glasgow in this way”: sometimes it’s lovely to have that experience, to have an outsider swoop in and highlight that your city is rather marvellous. But then I sense that Glasgow is a proud place, but not a boastful one.

So, all that road less travelled hogwash aside, let’s focus on the places in which I was lucky enough to eat, drink and shop. This city guide comes with the same caveat as my guides to Paris and Lisbon: I’m not pretending for a minute that this list is exhaustive, and even the multiple future visits I am planning could never make it so. It’s just a selection of restaurants, cafes and pubs that I loved on my recent trip, as kindly validated by some very agreeable people on Threads, and I hope it gives you some idea of where to start if you make your own journey to Glasgow, or makes you consider it as a candidate for your next city break.

I guarantee that if you do go, I’ll be deeply envious.

1. Brett

I did want to treat myself for at least one of my meals in Glasgow because, technically, the trip was partly to celebrate my wedding anniversary. Initially I considered Cail Bruich, the West End institution which is now Michelin starred, but eventually I decided instead to visit its less formal sibling Brett. It’s also on the Great Western Road, a great thoroughfare that reminded me of Bristol’s Whiteladies Road, but closer to the centre: let’s just say you know you’re in a fancy part of town when you alight from the metro and are almost immediately faced with a Farrow & Ball showroom.

Anyway Brett was a superb choice on every level, a classic example of a great neighbourhood restaurant whose only crime was not being in your neighbourhood. We had a wonderful table in the window with a great view of passers-by on one side and customers sitting up at the bar watching the open kitchen on the other (it also has a mezzanine, but I think the ground floor is the place to be).

Unlike some of the places on this list which are very much ‘order small plates to share and they’ll come in whatever order we decide’ – which you may or may not care for – Brett is very much a starters, mains and desserts kind of place, with an optional course which I very much recommend ordering. But really, everything was magnificent. I started with an outrageously good snack, a giant chicken wing boned and stuffed with haggis, sort of like a sausage roll if it was (a) amazing and (b) had the pastry swapped out for chicken.

It set the tone for a parade of stone cold brilliant dishes. Aged raw beef was like a tartare made with cecina, the whole thing punctuated with sweet, almost sharp apple and covered in shavings of ethical foie gras. That optional course I mentioned, which I think has been on the menu for ages, is linguini with a rich and salty mushroom XO sauce, topped with a single anchovy and a sheaf of crispy leeks, a foam of aged Parmesan on the side: not the easiest thing to eat, but quite the easiest thing to order.

The high standard continued for the rest of the meal. I liked my saddle of lamb with crispy lamb breast, cavolo nero and a bright green tomato salsa, but Zoë won the battle of the mains with an extraordinarily good dish of monkfish tail in brown butter, festooned with crispy Jerusalem artichoke, the sauce dotted with trout roe.

And then a dessert with a supplement, one you need to preorder: an absolutely faultless tarte tatin with vanilla ice cream and a sticky caramel sauce. I’ve seen other reviews say it’s a must-have but I don’t know: looking back at the menu I can’t help but wonder what the burnt honey and cardamom ice cream would have been like, and how it went with caviar.

But no matter, because Brett was just a wonderful meal from start to finish. The staff were bright, happy, authentic and brilliant at what they do, the room was wonderful – as we will see from the first four places on this list, Glasgow seems to specialise in stunning dining rooms – and the people watching was fantastic. I even enjoyed the willy-waving of the lone diner at the bar, trying to namedrop all the Michelin starred restaurants he’d been to in his conversation with the chef opposite him. There’s always one.

Brett’s à la carte is £59 for three courses, although if you’re anything like me and you have the snacks, the extra course, the supplementary dessert, welcome cocktails, a corking bottle of white and some really superb rosé dessert wine the damage will creep far higher into three figures, as it did for us. But it was worth every penny. Next time I go to Glasgow I might book Cail Bruich. But it’s hard to imagine I’ll enjoy it more than I did Brett.

Brett
321 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G4 9HR
https://www.brettrestaurant.co.uk

2. Corner Shop

Corner Shop is in Yorkhill, a bit of Glasgow I’d never previously visited, west of the more famous Finnieston and south of Kelvingrove, with its stunning art gallery, museum and park. It’s been open for a year but with its gorgeous, bright, almost midcentury dining room, its considered design and its thoughtful menu it has the air of a place that has been there far longer. It was, however, the source of one of my biggest disappointments of the trip.

The thing is, I had been admiring it and its well-curated social media, its gorgeous-looking menu, from afar for weeks in the run-up to my visit. And then we got there on a sunny Tuesday to find that they had just introduced a lunchtime menu del dia, £20 for two courses with only two choices of starter and main. Having eyed up their huge albondiga on a skewer, their squid pil pil, I was gutted.

But that shows what I know because that menu is both phenomenal and an outrageous steal, and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as bargains like, say, Quality Chop House‘s lunchtime offer. Plus, it’s only two courses if you decide it has to be. Once you’ve snaffled a pair of exemplary jamon croquetas with an apéritif and added on a puffy-crusted flatbread slathered with braised leeks and buried under an avalanche of cheese you really don’t feel like anything is missing.

That’s before we get on to the main attractions, a starter and main as delicious as they were plentiful and both superb value. The tenderest squid cut into ribbons came on stewed sweet onions, finessed with a textbook salsa verde and a bright lemon vinaigrette, and I could have eaten it all the live long day. Zoë’s in season asparagus looked gorgeous too, but there was no way I could forego the squid.

We both picked a standout main, though, an immensely generous pork chop sitting on a layer of spinach, the whole thing resting on a caramelised cauliflower purée that simply had no right being so savoury. I asked the restaurant on Instagram later what magic they had worked on it, wondering if something like miso had found its way in there, only to be told that the secret ingredient was what the secret ingredient always is: more butter than you could possibly imagine.

All that and a wine list full of treats by the glass in – I’ll be saying this a lot – one of the nicest dining rooms I’ve eaten in for a very long time. When I go back to Glasgow I will make sure I snag an evening booking at Corner Shop, but I hope their lunch menu has the success it deserves: by the end of my meal I was aggrieved on their behalf that they weren’t turning people away.

Corner Shop
45 Old Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, G3 8RF
https://www.cornershopglasgow.co.uk

3. Eleven Fifty Five

When I visited Finnieston back in 2014 that area was at the vanguard of Glasgow’s gastronomic advances. It’s still home to the Finnieston and Crabshakk, widely heralded as some of the best places in the city to enjoy fish and seafood. But I never made it to high end small plates restaurant The Gannet, on the same stretch, which closed last December after a brilliant 12 year run which included plaudits in the Guardian.

What that means is that I approached Eleven Fifty Five, its reincarnation in the same site with the same team, without any preconceptions or sadness about what had gone before. It had been open less than 3 months when I dined there on a Tuesday night, and if you’d told me it had been open for 12 months I would absolutely have believed you.

Apparently the intent was to change the venue from a fine dining restaurant to a neighbourhood bistro, which I can completely understand: I sense that Glasgow is a city that will wrap its arms round a neighbourhood bistro but might not feel quite so strongly about a plating with tweezers establishment. And whatever it was before, what Eleven Fifty Five is now is a beautiful, very accomplished restaurant. It’s almost like the people running it have been doing this for ages.

It’s another standout space – as I keep saying, it seems, about everywhere. Another grown up, sophisticated dining room, impeccably furnished and beautifully lit, with tasteful comfortable furniture, attractive banquettes and booths, bare floors, wood panelling, exposed brick and blood-red walls. In that sense, I don’t remember many neighbourhood bistros looking half this fetching.

But the menu is where you know you’re not in fine dining territory: you are instead in fine pricing territory. A couple of magnificent pig’s head croquettes, magnanimously portioned things, for £7 to go with your negroni? Why not. A pile of deboned, smoked chicken wings striped with tarragon and topped with crispy shallots? That will set you back less than £15, as will a beautiful puck of white pudding topped with a quail’s egg, perched on mushrooms and draped with lardo, the distillation of an all day breakfast into an all smiles starter.

Mains are equally good value: Zoë had the best of it with a Himalayan salt aged ribeye with sauce Bordelaise, but I couldn’t complain about my lamb shoulder, braised to soft surrender, served with poached vegetables and crispy sweetbreads. There weren’t enough of the crispy sweetbreads – but there never are, and at £22 it was still very hard to quibble anything about that dish.

Cheeses, from Glasgow’s preeminent cheesemonger George Mewes, were unimpeachable, and the “chocolate bar” – praline, caramel, dark chocolate and a really terrific Guinness ice cream – is pretty much my idea of the perfect dessert. We pushed the boat out with a bottle of dessert wine into the bargain, and had a long and happy time trying, and failing, to be the last table to leave.

We had Kevin Dow looking after us – he has been running front of house for first The Gannet and now Eleven Fifty Five for over a decade – and to say service was silky-smooth would be an understatement. I absolutely adored my meal at Eleven Fifty Five, a class act that felt to me like an institution in the making. It makes you think, that Corner Shop is barely a year old and Eleven Fifty Five is only three months into this incarnation. That says to me that although Glasgow is already great, its best days may well still lie ahead.

Eleven Fifty Five
1155 Argyle Street, Glasgow, G3 8TB
https://www.bistroelevenfiftyfive.com

4. Margo

Here’s an illustration of the illusion of choice, Glasgow-style: there are four restaurants in Glasgow that all have a Michelin Bib Gourmand: Ox and Finch; Ka Pao; Margo; and Sebb’s. For all their differences – Ka Pao serves South-East Asian food, for instance, and Ox and Finch is more contemporary European – they are all small plates restaurants and they’re all owned by the same people. That isn’t of itself a bad thing, but it probably gives you a decent idea of what’s in vogue in Glasgow right now.

We ate at Margo on the first night, which was the place I most liked the look of on paper. And although I liked it, I liked it less than I expected to.

That’s not the room’s fault. I’ve said this already in this guide and I’ll say it again before we’re done but my goodness, the interior is beautiful. It’s dark and conspiratorial, simultaneously cosy and spacious, all gorgeous tables and even more luxe booths, and as sophisticated a dining room as I could recall – a position it held until the following night, I seem to remember.

It wasn’t the food either, because it was gorgeous stuff. Coppa came thick but expertly sliced, smoky and just waiting to be crinkled up and popped in your mouth. Really exceptional sticky merguez were topped with charred peppers and toasted seeds, curls of squid were served with thick slices of morteau sausage on a bed of Puy lentils.

The pricier plates had an awful lot to like about them too, whether it was a round of confit lamb shoulder with salsa verde or pork belly with crispy skin, morcilla and black garlic ketchup. Skate wing with kumquat was an intriguing combination of flavours I had never imagined, let alone eaten, and the single best thing we had was barbecued hispi cabbage. I know everybody sneers at hispi cabbage but this, charred and served with castelfranco and caesar dressing, was one of the nicest things I ate all week.

So what was the problem? I suppose it was that Margo, for all its talents, epitomised everything that irks me about small plates culture. Most of the plates, really, either weren’t big enough to share or didn’t lend themselves to being shared: when you’re dividing a single piece of morcilla in half something has gone wrong. Service was polite and friendly but maybe a tad cool, and asking to order in waves – my usual way of trying to apply structure to this kind of menu – was brushed off straight away as not an option.

That meant you were constantly loading half of a not very sharable dish onto a plate which was never changed, accumulating all the residue of dish after dish, sauce after sauce. And “they’ll come out when they’re ready” meant, it turns out, “they’ll all come out in the space of five minutes”: that old chestnut again. So although I liked Margo, and its food definitely deserves a mention here, it’s the one place in this guide where I would say: go if that’s your kind of thing, but consider the alternatives first.

Margo
68 Miller Street, Glasgow, G1 1DT
https://margo.restaurant

5. Sebb’s

Sebb’s is a basement bar and restaurant right next to Margo and, as we’ve established, owned by the same people. I didn’t really want to go to two places in the same empire but Zoë insisted because she thought there was something special about Sebb’s from her look at the menu.

Annoyingly, she was right.

Somehow everything Margo got wrong, Sebb’s got right. It’s instructive to think about why. First of all, the dishes were actually better suited to sharing and secondly, the service – which was warm and likeable and couldn’t do enough for you – was more than happy for us to order in bits and bobs as we went. The dishes are, on the whole, a little cheaper than Margo’s but with no discernible difference in quality. Sebb’s is more of a speakeasy, they have their own superb IPA on draft which is brewed for them by Pilot and it is, in short, an awful lot of fun.

All the dishes were cracking, too. Sebb’s shtick is cooking things over fire, and I loved practically everything I ate, from spongy lamb meatballs with a proper whack of heat to a fluffy flatbread covered in feta and sobrasada. My absolute favourite thing was Sebb’s pakora, served with a little piccalilli and a snowdrift of Spenwood, one of Reading’s finest cheeses.

But we also found space to have one of Sebb’s signature dishes, a gigantic and not-remotely-phallic Texan hotlink, coarse and moreish, with gold sauce, a Caroline barbecue sauce with more than a hint of mustard, and some life-affirming pickles.

At the end we chatted to our server, who was delightful from start to finish, and he explained that the menu had only just changed with some dishes, like their lahmacun, coming off for the first time. I got the impression they were braced for a backlash from regulars, but all I saw was stuff to love: he did say, though, that the pakora and the hotlink had been there from the start and probably always would be.

Anyway, I think they have nothing to worry about. Sebb’s only picked up its Bib Gourmand this year, and on this evidence it just needs to carry on doing what it’s doing. I would love to have dinner there next time, and to emerge from its depths at night rather than blinking into the daylight: while you’re down there time does rather lose all meaning. Interestingly, when I posted pictures of my travels on Threads, prior to writing this guide, the one place that got the biggest, warmest, most immediate response was Sebb’s. I can 100% see why.

Sebb’s
68b Miller Street, Glasgow, G1 1DT
https://sebbs.com

6. Shilling Brewing Company

A happy set of circumstances led us to Shilling Brewing Company. The bus from the airport into the city stops a stone’s throw away and, as luck would have it, we stepped down from it just in time for lunch. And it had been recommended by friends who’d visited Glasgow not long before, so what were we to do?

It’s a really gorgeous, high-ceilinged space that once, before being defiled as a horror-themed pub called Frankenstein (just imagine) used to be a bank. And for ten years or so now it’s been Glasgow’s first central brewpub, offering four Shilling beers along with over twenty-five others from breweries across the U.K.

Whoever is picking their line-up has seriously good taste. Across two visits I enjoyed sours from Dundee’s Holy Goat and Somerset’s Yonder, a great pale by New Bristol Brewery, very far from home, and another by Weekend Project that I’d previously enjoyed at the Castle Tap, of all places, last summer.

That would be enough to earn a recommendation, but Shilling Brewing also has a kitchen knocking out pizzas and they are very, very good. In truth mine, with haggis and Irn Bru chilli jam, didn’t manage to transcend being a gimmick. But Zoë’s, honking with ‘nduja and blue cheese, was the real deal. I didn’t get to try Paesano, one of the contenders for the city’s best pizza, but I didn’t feel short changed.

Shilling set rather an unrealistic standard, in terms of beer, for the rest of the trip. It’s not a huge craft beer city – and the other craft pub, The Raven, was closed for refurbishment during my visit – but rather a city full of gorgeous pubs that prefer cask to keg. In that sense it reminded me a little of Belfast, although Belfast’s craft scene felt more developed. But, as we will see next, if the pub is good enough the beer can feel decidedly secondary.

Shilling Brewing Company
92 W George Street, Glasgow, G2 1PJ
https://shillingbrewingcompany.co.uk

7. The Laurieston

The only time I crossed the Clyde was on my first night to go to the Laurieston, a pub Zoë and I had read much about and were keen to visit. It’s a flat roof pub next to a railway bridge, its name spelled out in a retro typeface on the front, and nothing about its exterior gives you much of a clue about just how special it is. As we approached it we saw a sign on the front, saying CASH ONLY and cursed, but a friendly chap sitting out front told us that there was a SPAR just up the road with an ATM at the back.

I had my card with me, and I took out some notes there, cursing under my breath the £1.75 charge for doing so. Who uses cash any more, or ATMs? On any other evening neither of us would have had our wallet, and I would have been writing about a different pub here. But fortunately, I’d brought my wallet and so I got to drink in one of the most incredible pubs I’ve ever visited.

The inside is quite amazing. Both rooms are, actually. The lounge bar, all red banquettes and plush chairs, wood panelling and tartan carpet, looks like a Martin Parr photograph brought to life. But it’s not a time capsule, as the array of art on the walls, some created and donated by patrons, shows. And that contrast is the Laurieston writ large, it looks in some ways like it probably always did but is a living, breathing thing, a pub that is bigger than every person that has ever drunk there and all their accumulated stories, but is also the encapsulation of them.

I liked the public bar even more, with its horseshoe bar and little formica tables, walls groaning with art and photos. The Laurieston isn’t a craft beer place – it is completely separate from such concepts – but it does offer a fair few beers by Fyne Ales including their totemic Jarl on cask. They also have Guinness on tap, at three different temperatures. The regular and extra cold are par for the course but the mythical middle tap is the one, serving the black stuff at cellar temperature, smoother than any nitro could ever be and a hundred times more enjoyable.

I only know about the middle tap because we sat up at the bar and got chatting to Michael next to us, an ex-military physiotherapist who lives in the Gorbals and drinks at the Laurieston fairly often. The absolute picture of welcome and charm, he bought Zoë and I our second drink in the pub and an hour later we were chatting away about all sorts, sharing jokes, talking beer, talking about Glasgow and how magical the Laurieston is.

Meanwhile a couple of emo twentysomethings came in, took the stools next to us and we all started talking about the gig they were off to. The old boy a few stools along from Michael joined in, and the next thing I knew the bar staff were telling Zoë and I where else to eat and drink in the city. A pub called The Griffin was mentioned, and an Eritrean restaurant on the Byres Road called Massawa, and Michael said there is a Lebanese restaurant called Damasqino on Saltmarket which is incredible.

By the time we wandered off, two hours later and three pints to the good, I had no idea why anybody would think Glasgow isn’t a friendly city, because I’ve rarely walked into any pubs I can think of and felt so welcome and included. And there was nothing special about me or Zoë – not in this way, anyway – this is just what the Laurieston is, and what it does. I liked it very much, although I’ll leave pontificating about what makes it so amazing to the likes of Pellicle. I just know that I wouldn’t go to an ATM for almost anything else.

Michael summed it up best without meaning to as we were about to leave, pointing to a sign on the wall saying IT’S JUST A PUB. That’s it in a nutshell, he said. But the twinkle in his eye told me he didn’t entirely believe it, and for what it’s worth neither do I.

The Laurieston
58 Bridge Street, Glasgow, G5 9HU
https://www.instagram.com/thelauriestonbar

8. Outlier

Outlier was on the edge of Merchant City, and we went there for coffee on our first morning in the city. It’s impossibly cool – I’m going to be saying that a lot, which exposes how uncool I am – all exposed brick, bare wood floors and tiled walls which have a touch of vintage Portmeirion pottery about them.

Add in floor to ceiling windows, heaps of natural light and a steady procession of the young and beautiful coming in for coffee and baked goods and you have another of those places that makes you understand why people go on bakery pilgrimages these days.

The coffee was excellent, Zoë’s cheese twist with chilli and hot honey even better. And I had a sausage roll full of dense, sage-infused pork that set me up nicely for the short wait until lunchtime (don’t judge, I was on holiday). But the more we looked at Outlier’s brunch menu the more it rankled with me that all our lunches and dinners were already booked up in the city. And then we looked at our flight time home, and the checkout time at our hotel and thought… breakfast on the last day?

So we did, and it was a capital idea. Zoë had a ham and cheese croissant – their pain au chocolat are epic too, by the way – but I really went for it with their conventional breakfast. A huge slice of toasted sourdough, crust surprisingly unlike cardboard, was topped with soft scrambled egg enhanced with caramelised onion, like a sort of reimagining of a tortilla. The bacon was smoked and streaky, as it always should be if you ask me, brushed with honey and grilled and the oyster mushrooms I’d asked for as a side were dry, meaty and remarkable.

But that’s not all: Outlier’s hash browns, a snip at a fiver, were sort of halfway between hash browns and Quality Chop House’s confit potatoes, salty golden bricks of shredded potato that defied both description and resistance. All that and a home-made brown sauce which was rich, fruity and many miles from the Houses Of Parliament. I don’t think I’ve ever had a breakfast with so many things going on, or so many imaginative things at that. It was almost – and I never say this – too much.

Next time I’m having the leek rice with Arbroath smokies, clearly their take on a kedgeree, and one of those cheese twists. And another pain au chocolat. And, and, and… I’m going to have to visit more than once again, aren’t I?

Outlier
38 London Road, Glasgow, G1 5NB
https://www.instagram.com/outlier.gla

9. Spitfire Espresso

I first encountered Spitfire after my first coffee at Outlier: their roastery is on Osborne Street, which curves away from Saltmarket and ends up at Bare Bones (at the end of this list). We stopped by, bought some beans for home – they’re great, by the way – and I nabbed a takeaway latte which I loved. But we also discovered they had a bigger premises, an actual cafe, in Merchant City, so we resolved to go there the following morning.

I’m really glad we did: it’s another really handsome space – those Glaswegian buildings are big-boned, and they’re good bones at that – with a striking red white and blue colour scheme which carries through the whole space beautifully. Their coffee, as I already knew, is extremely good but I was also struck by the chance to tick off another item on the gastronomic checklist, a morning roll.

It was a corker: a floury bap crammed with soft black pudding, crispy back bacon and brown sauce, and it set me back just over a fiver (Zoë, a black pudding skeptic, said the Lorne sausage was equally fine). I really wanted to try a morning roll on this trip: I hear the dead fancy ones are to be had at Cottonrake Bakery, out on the Great Western Road, but Spitfire’s rendition made me very happy indeed.

Spitfire Espresso
55 High Street, Glasgow, G1 1LX
https://spitfireespresso.com/pages/locations

10. Amulet

Amulet, cyan-fronted and too cool for school, is out in Partick, just west of the Byres Road, and I actually visited it after Nowita, a couple of places down this list, which makes it slightly arse about face. Sorry about that.

It is in an area rich with cafés: just across the street you have Kaf, who some say are Glasgow’s best bakery, and Revival, who do coffee and vinyl, that classic hipster one-two. Further up you have Hyndland, an area which sports a branch of 1841, which some people think serves Glasgow’s best coffee. And the other side of the Byres Road you have Hinba, which also has its champions.

So competition is fierce, and within a 15 minute walk you have more top-notch coffee than you can find in the whole of Reading. That rather puts it all in perspective.

I didn’t go to those other places, so I can’t rank Amulet against them, but I did like it very much. It’s an attractive space – how many times have I said that now? – with exposed brick painted white and a big central island with stools, a few more in the window and a handful of low tables along one side. The welcome was friendly and the music was excellent, although I Shazamed one track to find it was by a band described as simultaneously post hardcore, punk and emo, which I took to mean that I was far too antediluvian to add it to my library.

On my visit there was no “handbrew” – I had to look it up, it means pourover and the like – because one of the team was at the London Coffee Festival, so I had to settle for a latte. It was up there with the other excellent coffee I had on this visit, without a shadow of a doubt.

The whole thing did make me roll my eyes a little, though, which just goes to show that as a fiftysomething scruffy grump I am not the kind of customer Amulet is that bothered about attracting. The hours painted on the front say 8-4 maybe in a way I found needlessly wacky, and lettering underneath said amulet is not a cafe.

‘Well, what the hell is it then?’ I wanted to ask someone, although I thought better of it because it was the definiition of a me problem. But I maintain that if it looks like a café, it sells you coffee for money like a café, it gives you somewhere to sit while you drink it like a café and plays you music like a café, in my book it’s a fucking café. For whatever my two pence is worth, I reckon Amulet is a very good one.

Amulet
38 Mansfield Street, Glasgow, G11 5QW
https://www.instagram.com/amuletamuletamuletamuletamulet

11. Laboratorio Espresso

Laboratorio is just round the corner from Shilling Brewing Company, which means that they served my first latte of the holiday. It’s been open for nearly 13 years and is an excellent spot, although that didn’t surprise me because they get their hands on some seriously good beans: I recognised superb Barcelona roaster Nomad from my travels, and we made sure to pick some up to take home with us.

It’s an arresting if minimalist space inside, with a handful of tables and high stools up at the full length windows looking out on the world, and I can imagine it would be excellent for people watching on a good day or sheltering on a bad one. On this visit to Glasgow we got more bad weather than good, but a latte like Laboratorio’s would make that, and life in general, infinitely more bearable.

Laboratorio Espresso
93 W Nile Street, Glasgow, G1 2SH
https://laboratorioespresso.com/index.html

12. Nowita Ice Cream

The reason I was in Partick wasn’t to grab coffee and listen to post-hardcore music at Amulet. It was because I’d heard good things about Nowita, an ice cream place opposite. I always aim to include one ice cream spot in my city guides, come hell or high water, and I didn’t want to let anybody down on this visit to Glasgow. Nowita is the creation of married couple Jill and Jamie Inkster, and it celebrates its fourth birthday this summer.

It’s bloody good, let me get that out of the way now. But Nowita makes you work for it. Its opening hours are slightly erratic: they weren’t open on Monday or Tuesday and on Wednesday, the day I dropped by, they didn’t start trading until 3pm. There’s no seating inside, just a solitary bench outside. And the day I visited, arriving 10 minutes after it opened, the rain had been constant, the clouds mutinous. It didn’t bode well for my Nowita experience at all.

There were ten flavours, all handmade by Jamie every week, and they were a fascinating mix of the staples – raspberry sorbet, vegan dark chocolate, strawberry ripple – and more leftfield options: cardamom and white chocolate or pineapple upside-down cake, anybody? But I kept it simple, placed my order and then something magical happened. The sun came out, the rain held off, the bench outside was vacant and welcoming. It was, I decided, a sign.

I tried one classic and one curveball, and both were exquisite. I liked Nowita’s salted caramel a great deal, getting the balance bang on with a very pleasing stripe of caramel, almost elastic, running through it. But the real eye opener for me was Nowita’s dark chocolate with chilli peanuts, deep and rich but with bite and spike coming through, both in terms of texture and temperature.

It made me wish I had been more experimental and tried some of the more left of centre flavours on offer. It made me wish I’d gone for three scoops instead of two. It made me wish they’d been open on Tuesday, too, but you can’t win them all.

Nowita Ice Cream
51 Hyndland Street, Glasgow, G11 5QF
https://www.nowita.co.uk

13. Tantrum Doughnuts

When I went to Corner Shop I would quite have liked to try their dessert selection. But I think that option is best explored at dinner time, because I’m not sure how much dessert they’ll realistically shift at lunchtimes. The reason for that, a few doors down, is Tantrum Doughnuts.

Tantrum is one of the more famous places in this guide, because it appeared on Somebody Feel Phil, which means it doesn’t really need exposure from anyone. It’s been going for over 10 years, having started out at food markets, and although it now has a branch in the centre and on the Southside the one in Yorkhill is the original and the one I wanted to visit.

These are proper doughnuts, not the Krispy Kreme variants that still seem to be so popular in the U.K., and to have them in they’ll set you back between £2 and £5 depending on whether you’re going for a more spartan glazed ring or the full monty filled and topped with all manner of decadence. I had managed to save room after lunch for the ‘Chocolate Millionaire crémeux”, filled with chocolate and caramel, topped with more chocolate and finished with shortbread crumbs and chocolate pearls.

It was everything I hoped it would be, and then some: it reminded me of Pipp & Co doughnuts, back when they used to be better, only better even than that. I have no idea where the name comes from, unless it involves someone turning up to find that they’ve run out.

Tantrum Doughnuts
27 Old Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, G3 8RD
https://tantrumdoughnuts.com

14. Bare Bones Chocolate

Bare Bones Chocolate is a bean to bar chocolatier – try saying that sentence a few times in a row after you’ve had a few – at the end of Osborne Street, just down from the Spitfire Espresso roastery. It sells an array of its tasteful, beautifully packaged, utterly delicious chocolate and – perhaps just as importantly – invites you to try before you buy from the thoughtfully arranged wooden bowls, using the tongs provided.

I’d like to say I bought so much chocolate because I felt guilty about wielding those tongs with abandon. But really, it’s because Bare Bones know what they are doing and their chocolate is almost improbably good. The milk chocolate, the reference bar, is exceptional. But the dark chocolate – not too dark, mind – with a hint of sea salt is one of the best bars I’ve ever sampled. Not too much sea salt, mind: do you see where this is going? Bare Bones, like I said, know exactly what they’re doing.

There’s a little table outside and they serve hot chocolate, which I’ll absolutely try next time. But more widely, Bare Bones realise that a shop just selling their six different chocolate bars would be a bit of a one note retail experience, so they have curated a selection of other lovely things – drinking chocolate, olive oil, blankets, greeting cards and so on – making it a genuinely idyllic place to wander and browse, pausing only to check another chocolate bar, just in case it needs to be added to your shopping bag.

The other thing worth saying about Bare Bones, which is a tribute to how good they are and how good some of the other places in this guide are, is that their chocolate is used across the city. If you order the chocolate nemesis at Margo? That’s made with their chocolate. If you have a mocha at Outlier – which, by the way, you absolutely should if you ask me – that is made with their chocolate too. That cross-pollination, that culinary scene where everything is supportive and interconnected, is as good a closing image of Glasgow as a food city as any I can think of.

Bare Bones Chocolate
111 King Street, Glasgow, G1 5RB
https://bareboneschocolate.co.uk/

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