The Sunday Times (Scotland) October 09, 2005
The Meal: Allan Brown: Rest and recreation on a plate
Lunch in an Italian is all about a set meal, a little business talk and lots of relaxation, and Trattoria Trevi does it in style
Is there any pleasure in life quite like the Italian restaurant set lunch? Not the food, necessarily, but the excursion it represents away from the cares of the day. The Mediterranean set lunch equals an hour and a half in a culinary flotation tank, a zone of peaceful and pleasurable skiving where the only real worry is the terrifying size of the waiter’s pepper grinder.
Every Italian restaurant at lunch is a place without space and time, a comforting haven of unruffled continuity. There is always a mocked-up terracotta tile awning above the bar, as though it were some shebeen on a Florence backstreet. There is always pâté and toast to start. There is always lasagne to follow, and tiramisu. Two courses are always £7.95. It is thus and has been ever since the first Italian waiter crawled from the primordial ooze to ask:
“Some grated parmesan with that, sir?” And only the two-course option is ever chosen; at lunch, the à la carte menu sits cobwebbed and neglected, wondering fretfully whether it insulted somebody’s mother.
Italian restaurants at lunchtime are always dark and covert, a bit like lap-dancing bars, but with bread sticks. The wine is always cheap and tastes like it was trod by the proprietor’s mother before she visited the chiropodist. But the really amusing thing about Italian restaurant set lunches is that they’re the natural habitat of pushy businessmen.
Between 12pm and 2pm they gravitate unconsciously towards places all over the land named the Adriatic or La Taverna as though compelled by some supernatural force. They’re like pilgrims praying to Mecca, but in praise of minestrone soup. You can listen in on their conversations and hear them quizzing each other over how the antipasto performs or whether the pizza competes well in the marketplace. And they always ask for a Vat receipt. I doubt if you or I quite know what a Vat receipt actually is, but these guys do. To them it’s the fourth course: starter, main, coffee and request for a Vat receipt.
So generic an experience, in fact, is the Italian restaurant set lunch that you barely feel you’re visiting a restaurant at all. To my mind it’s the male equivalent of going to the hairdresser or manicurist, a small away day from normality, a sorbet in the middle of the week, a place where everybody is Lord Lucan for a spell. Certainly you don’t go for the food, most of which is prepared to 1950s canteen standards, still bearing the nimbus of fridge and deep-fat fryer. You go for the same reason that people take the train when they could fly or switch off their phones to stare out the window for an hour. You go to put yourself in brackets for a while, to vanish and regroup.
You go for some peace and quiet, to be frank. There should be racks of seed catalogues and Railway Modeller back issues by the door.
Trattoria Trevi is a classic, museum-quality example of the species, a fixture on Great Western Road since Pavarotti’s voice dropped. So dedicated is it to the cause of lunchtime idling that it probably disappears on the stroke of 2.30pm, like Brigadoon or Shangri-La. The National Trust should put a plaque up outside, with two crossed bread sticks over an inlay of cold meats. It’s just around the corner from BBC Scotland and has appeared as Stunt Italian Restaurant in a number of shows. I’ve long coveted the Dougie Henshall table at which the actor sat in Down Among the Big Boys, but understandably it’s always taken.
You don’t really review the food in places like this, you review the ambience and the fidelity to the classic, untrammelled Italian set-lunch template, fronts on which Trattoria Trevi performs with exemplary, knuckle-biting brio. Terracotta tile awning? Check. Walls filled with framed Inter football strips probably won at a Round Table auction? Check. As for the food, the chicken liver pâté is decently smooth and non-artificial and manipulated into a beguiling fan pattern indicative of a chef who arrived at work slightly earlier than required. The lasagne is the typical rectangular boulder of hot, angry cheese and bolognese, never, as is the fashion, quite enough. The various salads are crispy and thriving. I also ordered from the à la carte menu, and once the chefs recovered from the shock they knocked up a strident steak piazzola, its boldly flavoured sauce of onions and anchovies smothering a steak not in its first bloom of tenderness but of a size that would see most of us through several lunches.
As noted before, not so much a meal, then, as a ritual, a ceremony of recreation in which food is only tangentially involved. As temples of skiving go, though, they don’t come much better than Trattoria Trevi. Disappear into it, or somewhere like it, as soon as you can manage. And don’t forget to get a Vat receipt.
Rating: Trattoria Trevi
Food: Three stars
Atmosphere: Four stars
Service: Four stars
Value: Four stars
Overall: Four stars
Trattoria Trevi, 526 Great Western Road, Glasgow, 0141 334 3262. Lunch for two with wine £40