AA Gill’s Table Talk

This was a big one, and mah friend Dougray Scott has been a lifelong Hibs fan, and, at a push, if I’d stayed in Edinburgh and if I liked football, I’d probably have been a Hearts fan. It was enough.

We went up with Dougray’s missus, Claire, and his lad, Gabriel, for what they were calling the salt’n’sauce final. On the west coast, they eat their fish and chips with salt and vinegar. On the east coast, the condiments of choice are salt’n’sauce. That is, broon sauce, epicureanly cut with vinegar and a little water to get the ­consistency right. And it’s just as tongue-scouringly, moreishly vile as it sounds.

The march of the two east coast armies through the lowering Glasgow day was cacophonous. Glasgow always feels like a bungalow. The sky hangs so low. The lads shouted with a guttural, furry-tongued fury. Swaggering loons, naked to the waist, with painted faces, gaped their black-toothed, plosive roars. Mostly they walked with hunched shoulders, bent heads, the stance of men habituated to rain and blows.

There is something movingly pessimistic about large groups of Scotsmen. You just know this is all going to end badly. It has always ended badly. The great Cale­donian strength is humour and resolve, spat in the stony face of repeated defeat. “It’s very real, isn’t it?” said Claire, with a tremulous whisper. Life does seem more real here. There is no stylish cushion, no prophylactic of irony, no soft and sweet words. The reality is granite and cold.

The game was like a kids’ after-school kickabout, 22 mottled-thighed lads running after the ball in a shin-hacking, scowling huddle, taking swipes at each other and falling over. It was the characteristic rout. The Hibees were put to the stud not prettily but relentlessly. The army of fans, like so many Scottish armies ­before them, melted away.

By the time the fifth goal had gone across the line, half the stadium was ­empty. Just blowing programmes, and a handful of die-hard teuchters, keening for a tearful vengeance. Dougray took it hard, nursing his head, but I told him it was just another historic defeat to be filed away in the great lexicon of Scottish shortcomings and disappointment.

The high point for me was the half-time pie in the press room. One in three ­Scottish football fans eats a pie at a match. Pies are far more the national dish than haggis. They’re made with mutton and heavily spiced with pepper and onion, ­encased in a hot-water pastry crust with a lid that sits half an inch below the side, brilliantly making a small plate to add your mash, beans or gravy. Scottish pies are like Hinduism. You can’t convert. You have to be born to them. I offered a bite of mine to Claire. She made a face like someone whose dog has inadvertently dug up a mass grave.

The best pies are full of steaming, dark, unctuous, silky, pungent meat, but you never get the best pies. What you get is a pie that has a layer of slag at the bottom, a sticky puddle of textureless effluvia, and a space between this meat and the pastry roof. It’s in this space that the ­flavour seems to live as a miasma of something that might have been. The waft of dreams. The soul of a pie that never was. The hole in the hope and the emptiness in the heart.

There is something very football and very Scots about pies, and I love them, ­despite myself. I love their gawky, pale, ­unkempt look, their mottled edges, their goitred bellies, and their lifelong ability to be simultaneously welcoming and ­dis­appointing. The Scotch Pie Club’s ­motto is “Say aye tae a pie”. Which I think would make a bonny tattoo. A man travelling from Chelsea to Glasgow reduces his life expectancy by 14 years. Drop that in batter and fry it.

Before the match, we had an early lunch at the Butchershop Bar & Grill on Sauchiehall Street. I haven’t eaten in the city for a couple of years and this was recommended. It could have been anywhere in the world. There isn’t a city of more than 1m people that doesn’t have at least one vaguely American steakhouse like this — only the view from the window told you it wasn’t Cincinnati or Cape Town.

(Wattie Cheung)

There was stripped brick and potted plants, leather booths and piped jazz. They call it “Manhattan-styled”. Actually, it’s more Manchester-styled. Still, that’s part of the Glasgow gastronomic cringe. Everything has to pretend to be from somewhere else. The most authentic thing was an American waiter who played up to his accent, like those chilly Bengalis who used to be forced to stand outside Indian restaurants in turbans.

The menu promises lots, or, rather, a ­little, but in lots of ways. There’s a lunch menu and a dinner menu, menus for brunch and pre-theatre, and there are bar bites and all sorts. Essentially, this is steak and burgers. Little bits of Glasgow do sprout through.

Gabriel had a full Scottish breakfast that came with Stornoway black pudding and tattie scones, both of which were what you dream of if you’re born within sight or smell of the Clyde. Dougray had a very good burger, replete with all the burgerish additions that turn mince on toast into the mash-up that popular culture ­demands. I had a côte de boeuf — what they call their “house signature cut”. I always thought Glasgow’s signature cut was on the corner of the mouth up towards the ear.

I was shown the meat on a wooden board. Not, I suspect, the exact piece, but another meat they hadn’t prepared earlier. It was pale pink, and coyly exhibited, with ­dappled marbling. It came medium rare, with a good flavour, and the characteristic resilience of grass-fed northern cattle. If I had an epicurean nit to pick, it would be that it was a little underhung.

A much bigger pick was all the other stuff, the paraphernalia that comes with steak and burgers. The chips, both thick and thin, were barely better than Maccy D’s, and the French mustard was a brown, vinegary slop that couldn’t have found ­Dijon with a satnav. The béarnaise was bottled, and slippery, and tasted like the mayonnaise, which was pale and ­com­mercial. And all these things should have been carefully found or home-made. But all too often a steak restaurant’s kitchen’s attention is focused on tits and arse, and they let the little stuff go by on the nod.

It’s a shame, because the Butchershop has plainly got a constituency here. It filled up with a clientele that was rather smarter than you might expect to find in a similar place in Manchester, or Munich, or Melbourne. Glasgow has never really managed to take its food terribly seriously. It loves to eat, but there’s still a sense that the best stuff is consumed standing up, or at least leaning against something.

At the bottom of the menu, there was a note: “Please make your server aware if you have any dietary requirements.” I ­almost said, I’d like to live to 75, pal.