WHO has time for lunch these days, I mutter as I park the car and walk into Oaka Supercity, noting light woods, big spaces, many strange things on shelves and, hang on, dim sum bamboo stacks with steam coming from them.
“I’ve ordered loads,” Leo had said in his text and there he is standing with plastic cartons beside a … is it a box? A pillar? With sauce bottles stacked on top, neat little clumps of wooden chopsticks to the side, white paper napkins piled high. We eat here, he says, pointing at our box – the only standing and eating box in the whole place – while introducing his pal Patrick, who’s from Luss, as we prise lids off hot little containers of curry fish balls, ramen noodles, miso soups.
Lumps are torn off char sui and kai bao, those deathly white sticky buns, stuffed with hot meats and various other things, that have a weirdly intense sweetness that tricks your brain into thinking it’s having dessert, not pork.
Within minutes the place has filled with students and lecturers, the Strathclyde University being above us. In fact many a student overdraft was launched from this building back in the day when banking was a byword for decency and – you’ll laugh at this – probity.
I will say this: eating at the eating box that contains all the condiments and cutlery for the whole place, in a shiny, spacious Asian supermarket, is a new experience. People keep darting in to grab plastic spoons and chopsticks or to dollop dollops of that Extra Hot Chilli Sambal Extra Pedas sauce – which is very good – on their noodles. The only other place to eat in here seems to be those single seats facing out of a window where once sat a cash machine that I regularly used to wander down to from Tom’s Bar on a late-night Herald news shift back in the day, The Herald having been roughly where that block of new flats over there is now.
At the other end of this little row was Jamieson’s newsagents. It achieved one of its many footnotes in newspaper history when rather than phone in with the bad news that he couldn’t make his shift because he had a cold, top reporter Scoop Vincent left a message there for the Evening Times news editor to pick up with his morning rolls. That didn’t end well.
Enough nostalgia. We’ve already eaten everything we ordered in about 10 pleasant minutes. Who has time for lunch? Lunch needs to be longer than this, I realise as I head over to the little hot food counter. It’s very stylish in here with its light wood beams, strange, fence-like structures and the amount of space available. It’s like no Asian grocers I’ve ever been in before anyway.
Now. I’ve got to say something about the prices. A container of those good, hot curry fish balls costs £1.80. Seriously. That’s how much they cost. I just queued momentarily at one of the tills before paying for them and goggling at the receipt. Want ramen noodles with that, sir? That will be 80p. The fried fish balls are £1.80 too. Those containers of pork dim sum I’ve just picked up for us to snack on while we continue the conversation about Singaporean food? Again, £1.80 for four. Incidentally, the food in Singapore isn’t as good as you would think, Patrick is telling us as we finish off our plastic cups of ginger tea.
I like this place. It’s simple, fast and very, very cheap. There’s something like an Ikea meatballs vibe going on with food, but it’s much more stylish than that. Yeah, the food itself isn’t anything earth-shatteringly new or exciting, but it’s full of flavour and it’s hot. If this takes off it could easily wrestle the fast lunch crown away from the now pricey-looking sandwich market. That can’t be bad.
Oaka Supercity
130 George Street, Glasgow (oakasupercity.com, 0141 353 2338)
Menu: Ramen, dim sum, curry fish balls, miso soup: simple, straightforward and steamed at the counter. 3/5
Atmosphere: Very stylish Asian grocery store with an almost Nordic feel that’s pleasant enough to stand and eat in. 5/5
Service: You order and pay, and the friendly staff smile and bring over your order. Quite good fun. 5/5
Price: Buttons, or thereabouts. Curry fish balls with noodles can be had for £2.60, dim sum for less than two quid. Super cheap. 5/5
Food: The food itself is not game changing, but how it’s served and where it is eaten might be. It still tastes good too. 6/10
Total: 24/30
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