This is what gourmet night means to chefs. To customers, though, the evening generally means one thing: Basil Fawlty plunging his hands into the trifle in search of an errant duck, the high point of his hastily assembled “duck or nothing” gourmet menu.
How superbly this scene punctured the raised-pinkie self-regard of the gourmet night. “What if you don’t like duck?” asks one of Fawlty’s diners, unaware that the chef’s titanic drunkenness has reduced the menu to one dish. “Ah, if you don’t like duck,” counters Fawlty lamely, “then I’m afraid you’re rather stuck.”
Connoisseurship must be distrusted on principle, for it contains within it many unpleasant assumptions, principally concerning the smashing cleverness of the person doing the connoisseuring. Epicures and aesthetes are almost always men and all are dedicated to the belief that anything tastes better if you’ve studied an instruction manual beforehand, as though a civil engineering project rather than dinner was being undertaken.
It’s essentially a form of superstition, this conviction that arcane rites and rituals must be observed in order that an experience be appreciated properly. It’s the freemasonry of food, a wilfully complicated Sealed Knot ballet of side plates, fish forks and devices to remove antennae from langoustine. How quickly the right-thinking person comes to long for some hard-core trifle desecration.
They have a gourmet night once a month at the Beardmore hotel in fragrant Clydebank. The hotel occupies what was once a wing of the ill-fated HCI private hospital (hip replacement for oil sheikhs a speciality). As though Clydebank weren’t an unlikely enough location for a gourmet night, there’s the added possibility that the steak knives will be scalpels. It’s the weirdest night in town but, thanks to the chef John McMahon, also one of the most edifying.
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The hotel has since been tricked out with the accepted bric-a-brac of international hospitality — huge tasteless paintings, overstuffed suede sofas — but there’s no disguising that hospital architecture: the endless corridors, those spacious acceptance areas built for extra-wide gurneys. If Damien Hirst had opened the place as a wry Britart commentary on the sterility of modern culture we’d find the Beardmore most amusing but as it is, it’s just . . . weird.
The restaurant, Citrus, is in a circular room, pleasantly moderne now. The theme of this month’s gourmet night is Alsace and our fellow diners are the full chin-stroking complement of self- improving midlifers, punctuating their days of Louis de Bernières novels and golf club functions with a spot of culinary swotting.
In this they are aided by a chap from Oddbins who gives small lectures on wine between courses. Why he bothered I’m not sure, given that everything you need to know about wine is contained in the sentence: “If it costs more than £10 it’s probably nice enough”.
McMahon’s cooking turned out to be superlative: detailed, lavish and highly imaginative, with real passions for moreish indulgence and busy, generous plates. The five courses began with confit scallops and roasted langoustine, with a lobster mousse and roe cream spooned into the empty langoustine skulls. This was followed by foie gras coated in breadcrumbs in a sultana and raisin jus, then pheasant cooked in riesling, with tiny Munster cheese and a plum tart to follow, each course accompanied by the “appropriate” Alsace wine, including an exquisite Billecart-Salmon Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru champagne that was worth the price of admission alone.
Citrus is open most evenings and is worth the trip solely to encounter a chef of such flair, vision and technical excellence, with the added advantage of superb medical facilities close by if you choke on a fish bone. Gourmet nights, one supposes, are for those of adventurous disposition. Citrus and its monthly gourmet night deep in the wilds of Clydebank are several types of adventure rolled into one.
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Citrus, the Beardmore hotel, Beardmore Street, Clydebank, 0141 951 6000. Gourmet night dinner £50 per person