The pub had been there, give or take, since 1797 and looked as though the cleaner had last visited in 1798. It had an ancient horseshoe bar, drinks promotions and a scary clientele squeezing the beer mats in search of a nightcap. It had local colour, and that colour was a bronchial off-yellow.
Situated in the warren of dark lanes around the former courts established by the city’s tobacco lords and bolted onto an arcade filled with jewellers, Sloan’s was an unlikely candidate for gentrification. It always gave the impression that each new day would be its last. For years I expected to walk past and find the site occupied by a branch of Sainsbury’s Local that had spontaneously sprung up overnight.
A few months back, though, I walked in and had to walk straight out again to check I was where I thought I was. Previously it had seemed as though the Sloan’s staff ate, bathed in and moisturised with potatoes. Now they were young, svelte and attractive. The name of the establishment had changed to the Bastille Taverne. There were heavy purple drapes everywhere and candles in bottles. The speakers relayed that type of music in which the vocalist is always taking it higher and feeling so good, yeah. There was the busy, purposeful air of prosperous indulgence. The entire eye-rubbing oddity of the experience rather resembled, I thought, an episode of Doctor Who directed by Sir Terence Conran.
I’ve been back to the Bastille Taverne many times since — you can’t keep me away from the place — but I never go there without sensing the ghostly presence of the former habitués, the dentured drunks and carpet-rolling brawlers of yore. I imagine them prowling spectrally from table to table, knocking cutlery to the floor, inspecting bottles of balsamic vinegar with sad confusion and discussing how nobody charged £1.95 for a bowl of chips in their day.
Ah, from gnarly, wipe-your-feet- on-the-way-out boozer to chichi bistro in the blink of an eye — the place is a Dickensian parable on the theme of How Things Change.
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It’s all the doing of Colin Barr, the former nightclub king who now maintains a small portfolio of niche, speciality bar/restaurants, which includes Salty Dog (crustaceans for people who work in advertising), Republic Bier Halle (giant sausages for people who fancy invading Poland) and Bier Stube, which just sounds scary, frankly.
Unsurprisingly, the theme in the Bastille Taverne is metro-French, mixed up with retro-British. It’s on-the-go food for discerning city-centre shoppers. The horseshoe bar is at the front, with a separate dining room to the rear that’s claimed, with a modicum of challenge, to be the oldest restaurant in Glasgow. Although it’s been tarted up considerably since its Sloan’s days, the place still has the patina of age, an elaborately constructed authenticity.
It does sandwiches and burgers, and croque monsieurs and madames, the latter being a croque monsieur with a fried egg on top. The half-pint of prawns with garlic and lemon mayo came with the roe still attached, which attested to their freshness and the respectability of their provenance. The onion soup gratinée was thick, sweet and every bit equal to the version I’d paid double for in London’s Quaglino’s.
The chilled oysters were plump and ruddy. An 8oz sirloin with maître d’butter was moist and fully flavoured. The fish and chips with mushy peas was battered sensitively, crisply cooked and remained convincing to the last scrap.
The Bastille Taverne is a concoction, of course, a reproduction Chippendale of a restaurant. The staff, the kitchen and the sensibility are as properly French as Jamie Oliver’s gran. The sincerity, though, is in the sourcing, the discrimination, the attention to detail and in the determination to operate at one notch above the price-equivalent competition. These are aims that the Bastille Taverne achieves with élan, joie de vivre, je ne sais quoi and another Gallic term for thoroughly smashing.
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Trio: Bastille Taverne
Food 4/5
Atmosphere 4/5
Service 3/5
Value 4/5
Overall 4/5
The Bastille Taverne, 62 Argyll Arcade, Glasgow, 0141 221 8917. Dinner for two with wine £50