The Observer
Guest critic Chitra Ramaswamy wondered whether this “achingly cool Italian-inspired” restaurant from Anna and Dean Parker had survived its transfer from Glasgow’s most haunted hotel, the baronial Cathedral House, to the art deco Arthouse in the city centre. “It’s all gone a bit posh,” she judged – but a “fabulous” Sunday lunch confirmed that all was well.
“Many preoccupations of Dean, the head chef, are here: ferments, smoking, preservation, a zero-waste ethos and a love of fried stuff,” Chitra reported. His cooking is “idiosyncratic and sophisticated”, but with “an Italian reverence for simplicity”, and his house-made pasta is “God-tier-good”.
A dish of linguine pushes the “inspired” in Italian-inspired to the limit, with meaty cod cheeks flavoured with a berber chilli blend and what tastes like preserved lemon: “a pasta with one foot in the boot of Italy and the other striding out across the Med to Africa and the Levant”. A main of monkfish comes with Celentano’s “iconic strati: gold ingots, thinly stacked in striated layers, and licked with beef fat and as naughty as a Glasgow potato gets.”
Chitra Ramaswamy - 2026-09-01The Times
Jay Rayner was both amused and well fed at a restaurant that has recently moved into new city centre premises, from a couple – chef Dean Parker and his wife and business partner Anna – who were serenaded on their honeymoon in Italy by the ballads of veteran singer Adriano Celentano.
The food comes “at a jaunty angle”, and manages the “rare balancing act of being knowingly eccentric but not annoyingly so”. It’s Italian-inspired but with a very Glaswegian love of the deep fryer, so the meal opens with a ‘lasagne fritte’ – deep-fried breaded squares of lasangna whose shell cracks to release a soft ooze of béchamel flavoured with porcini and Cora Linn cheese from Lanarkshire. “It’s a god-tier snack. A show-stopper, before the show has really begun…. Smart, funny and most of all delicious.”
This is followed by a savoury donut filled with creamy cod’s roe and topped with kimchi that’s “about as Italian as the boys from BTS”, while the chicken liver mousse is “really quite French”. Pasta is both very Tuscan (pappardelle with slow-cooked beef ragu) and Chinese-influenced (linguine with a crab and nduja ‘XO’ sauce).
Jay Rayner - 2026-09-06
Drinks
Extras
