With the winter weather set to stick around for the foreseeable future, most people are still looking for places to warm up on cold, dark nights with great food and drink. With this thought in our minds, a friend and I headed along to one of the South Side’s most recent additions, Jayz Bar and Restaurant on Kilmarnock Road, in search of comfort food and warming service.
Jayz has managed to achieve a friendly, local-bar-feeling, at the same time as providing hungry customers with much more than standard pub grub. The menu, which features additions and twists on classic dishes from chef Chris – who ran his own restaurant in Japan for 15 years before coming back to Glasgow, is surprisingly varied for a non-city centre bar.
With lots of unusual menu options to choose from, we asked for recommendations from owner Gary, and started with Classic Garlic Prawns (£4.25) and a starter portion of Jayz special Skewers (£3.40 for a meat and veggie mix). The prawns, which come with chucky bread and lashings of sauce, were perfectly cooked and delicious, but the must-try from the starter options has to be the Skewers. Covered in crispy breadcrumbs, they included Black Pudding (we fought over who would get this one, be warned!), Pork and Chicken.
We decided to try one of Chris’s Rib Eye Steaks (£13.95) and the Scottish Salmon with Crispy Poached Egg, (£8.95). The steak, which I had medium rare, was perfect – served with chunky chips and creamy peppercorn sauce. The Salmon was also delicious, and the Crispy Poached Egg (my first time trying this) was a huge hit, despite being told that these are notoriously difficult to cook just right. It was finished with salad and a prawn toast crouton, and looked more like a dish you’d find in one of the centre’s top restaurants rather than a South Side bar.
There was a bit of debate about what to choose for dessert – with both classic options and more adventurous choices. In the end, we decided to share and chose the Baked Lemon Cheesecake (£4.05), served with a truly amazing ginger cream and brandy snap, and the Chocolate Fondant (£4.05), presented beautifully with raspberry sauce and toffee glaze. We savoured our desserts with a Cappuccino and as we left, realised we had managed to completely forget the cold, rainy weather outside… which is just what we were hoping to do.
You can follow Fiona, the author of this article, on Twitter at @fionafreelance.
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