Catch
186 Fenwick Road, Glasgow
0141 638 9169
Lunch/Dinner: £6.75-32
Food rating: 8/10
GIFFNOCK is one of Glasgow’s des res neighbourhoods, what with its handsome housing stock, tree-lined streets, and Scotland’s one and only Wholefoods emporium. And now that its not so humble chippie, Catch, is listed in the 2016 Michelin guide, it surely boosts its credentials as one of the country’s poshest postcodes.
Continuing the long, rich tradition of Italian families bringing their accomplishment with “friggitorie di qualità” (fried fish shops) to Scotland, Catch’s founder, Giancarlo Celino, “wanted to create a casual but stylish cafe where diners could enjoy exceptional, fresh seafood dishes without the stuffiness and the price tag” and give people “a quality take-out experience”. Amen to that, because I’m wary of chip shop meals. Many a fish supper is better in anticipation than in retrospect. Not so at Catch.
What does a Michelin-approved chippie look like? In Catch’s case it means smart and modern: art gallery grey softened by Moorish-style tiles and warming exposed brick. And it has a less tangible quality that is very telling: it barely smells and the mild aroma it does have is cleanly appetising. So many chips shops (and fast food shops) are surrounded by a miasma of oxidised fat and polymers from the over-used oil in the deep fat fryer. You smell them before you see them.
Visually the stand-out difference at Catch is that the wet fish and shellfish – all the faves (haddock, cod) plus lobster, sole, scallops and more – are on display over ice, rather than barely visible and slathered in tubs of batter behind the counter. And Catch’s selection is infinitely more ambitious than your standard chip shop. How abused is the description “gourmet scampi”? Too often products bearing this descriptor are nothing more than a mulch of marketing fibs bonded with additives and miscellaneous crustacean body parts. I’d trust Ondine in Edinburgh to honour the description, but few other restaurants. At Catch though you get whole juicy langoustine tails in clean-tasting batter. We’re not talking tempura-type crispness here, rather an outer crunch encasing inner gooey softness that’s more typical of the Italo-Scottish style.
So with fresh seafood and sound batter, we’re off to a promising start. Twice-cooked chips are fried in rapeseed oil – give me beef dripping any day. But notwithstanding my anti-rapeseed oil prejudice, I did manage to eat quite of few of them. Facts are facts. Catch makes its own fishcakes, which I didn’t enjoy. Maybe the addition of oily salmon explains their sour metallic taste, and their casing, although it wasn’t the dread orange Ruskoline, was too solid for my taste, a bit old-school really. Fork-tender squid with a much lighter coating of salty batter thoroughly doused in properly piquant fried red chilli and mercilessly fried spring onions, on the other hand, came from a more spirited Chinese tradition. A stunner of a dish and great value: £6.25 for a portion that would feed two as a starter.
My whole lemon sole grilled on the bone was fresh enough, nicely cooked, but too plain for my palate. I was itching to add brown butter, capers, flat parsley, even salt and pepper. It needed something to pep it up and Catch seemed to have got landed with a batch of those juice-challenged lemons. Seriously, duff lemons, along with stale garlic, are the two most disappointing fresh produce categories in these isles.
And the sauce and condiment category at Catch is weak: mayo too sweet, tartare sauce that’s light on the interesting capers and pickles, average salad dressing. Fish and chips this good deserve better mushy peas, and a slaw that’s fit for more than a works canteen sandwich. If these accoutrements benefited from some of the energy that’s clearly lavished on desserts, then we’d be talking, for they’re fresh and lovingly homemade. We wolfed down a lavish wedge of “bloody berry cheesecake”. Vivid with fresh brambles and red berries, its voluptuous cream-cheesy folds owed nothing to gelatine; they needed no help at all. Sticky toffee pudding, light and airy, could weaken my resolve to avoid very sweet desserts.
Catch do weekend specials. I’m gutted that I missed the “deep-fried oysters with spinach and crispy leeks” last month. Still, there’s always another time.
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