20-28 Renfield Lane, Glasgow 0141 222 2254
Style: Chilled-out urban minimalism
Food: Adventurous vegan - nothing twee here
Price: £9 for two courses
Wheelchair access: Yes
You might have lived in Glasgow all your life and never walked down Renfield Lane. It's an unlikely looking back alley near Central Station with nothing in it but the rear ends of shops. You can more easily imagine Starsky and Hutch cutting down it in their Ford Gran Torino, than you can finding a spacious vegan restaurant in such a location.
But then Glasgow has always had an idiosyncratic approach to meat-free food. In Edinburgh, vegetarian favourites such as Bann's, Black Bo's and the Kalpna compete on an equal footing with any other restaurant. In Glasgow, there are no classy veggie places, but several with a very oddball charm.
That's the case with Stereo, which has moved to the town centre from Kelvinhaugh Street. Like Mono in King's Court, it upturns all your expectations of what a vegan restaurant should be like. You think you're going to get waiters in tie-dyed cheesecloth and leaflets about holistic medicine. In fact, you get a hip, indie-rock hang-out in a post-industrial setting. If the serious young men at the next table aren't in a band, they're definitely making a fanzine.
I'm there with Archie, aged 10, who comments that it doesn't look finished yet. That's the point, I tell him, as we look at the crack cutting across the bare concrete floor. Apart from the circuit-board wall design and the lime green supporting columns, there is nothing to camouflage the building's utilitarian history. The big windows fill up the loading bays, pipes are exposed and the tables have a functional simplicity. If you think there's something twee about vegans, you haven't been to Stereo.
The same is true if you think there's something dull about vegan food. The enterprising menu, which is available until around 8pm when efforts concentrate on the bar, is animal-free without looking like it's had to make compromises. There are a handful of all-day breakfast options, several salads and main courses, plus soup of the day and snacks, and sandwiches made with organic bread baked on site. Plenty, in other words, to fill you up, even though there are no puddings.
Archie likes the sound of the breakfast burrito (£3.95) and is surprised to find not only refried beans inside the flour tortilla wrap, but also the hash browns. Not usually the most adventurous eater, he gives it a fair go, but the beans are on the dry side and he'd have preferred the hash browns on their own.
He likes the tortilla itself, however, and helps himself - with good reason - to the delicious homemade flatbread and perfectly cooked couscous that comes with my Moroccan tagine. This is a spicy bowl of butternut squash, chickpeas and carrots in a warming harissa sauce and lots of coriander. It's a tasty, fortifying dish for a cold winter's night confirming the menu is as much a discovery as the venue.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article