Get FREE email communications from Fodor's Travel, covering must-see travel destinations, expert trip planning advice, and travel inspiration to fuel your passion.
Sorry! We don't have any recommendations for Glasgow right now.
Glasgow’s vibrant restaurant culture is constantly renewing itself. Some of Britain’s best-known chefs have opened kitchens here, including Jamie Oliver and Yotam Ottolenghi. More recently, the city has responded enthusiastically to the small-plate and sharing-platter trends, but there are still plenty of fine-dining options on the one hand, and steak houses and burger places on the other. The city continues to present the best that Scotland has to offer: grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, wild seafood, venison, duck, and goose, not to mention superb fruits and vegetables. The growing emphasis on organic food is reflected on menus that increasingly provide detailed information about the source of their ingredients. Around the city, an explosion of coffee shops offer artisanal macchiatos and mochas.
You can eat your way around the world in Glasgow. A new generation of Italian restaurants serves updated versions of classic Italian dishes. Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani foods, longtime favorites, are now more varied and sophisticated, and Thai and Japanese restaurants have become popular. Spanish-style tapas are now quite common, and the small-plate trend has extended to every kind of restaurant. Seafood restaurants have moved well beyond the fish-and-chips wrapped in newspaper that were always a Glasgow staple, as langoustines, scallops, and monkfish appear on menus with ever more unusual accompaniments. And Glasgow has an especially good reputation for its vegan and vegetarian restaurants.
Smoking isn't allowed in any enclosed space in Scotland, but more restaurants have placed tables outside under awnings during the warmer summer months, some of which permit smoking.
Miss Cranston's Willow Tea Rooms were the ultimate place to be seen in Glasgow in 1903, not only for the tasty tea but for the beautiful art nouveau decor and furniture designed by a young architect by the name of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The original tearooms have now been fully restored here, and you can lunch on traditional Scottish cuisine or take an elegant high tea in the exquisite surroundings of the Salon de Luxe.
A 19th-century inn turned into an elegant restaurant, the Finnieston retains the dark wood and narrow cubicles of earlier times, but today it is one of the new high-quality seafood restaurants that have transformed the faded Finnieston area into a fashionable district. The menu allows you to choose the fish and how it is prepared, the sauce, and salad or vegetable sides. You can also eat in the bar, but wherever you sit, choose from the enormous menu of fine cocktails including 15 variants on gin and tonic. Lobster Tuesday offers half a lobster and a glass of champagne at a good price. Booking ahead is highly recommended.
Close to Glasgow University, this popular bar and restaurant attracts a more mature student crowd. It's an airy spot with high ceilings, leather sofas, and wood floors, and the specialty is good, eclectic international food at reasonable prices. It covers the spectrum: breakfast, brunch, small plates, lunch, and dinner. The extensive menu is impressively varied, including Goan chicken curry, Vietnamese soup, harissa halloumi, and even fish-and-chips. This is a relaxed, unhurried place, whose casual air belies its excellent cooking.
Occupying a converted stable behind the Hillhead subway station on busy Ashton Lane, this restaurant is a Glasgow institution, with an untarnished reputation for creative Scottish cooking. Its street-level restaurant is a beautiful courtyard protected by a glass roof, and the more informal brasserie upstairs also serves less expensive dishes like haggis with neeps and tatties or a plate of mussels. The upstairs bar is invariably full and noisy with conversation. The creative menu might includes cod with hazelnuts and truffles, or Galloway roe deer, and there is an excellent lunch and pretheater menu for two or three courses.
This microbrewery serves beer brewed "according to German purity laws of 1516"—in other words, no additives to muddy the flavor. The German theme is continued with the slightly cavernous dining space dotted with large wooden tables, and the food, which includes wursts, Wiener schnitzel, and goulash. A more limited bar menu is served in the very popular beer garden. West is in the famous Templeton Carpet Factory on Glasgow Green, built to resemble the Doge's Palace in Venice. You can tour the brewery Friday through Sunday with four tasters as part of the price.
Sign up for Travel Tips & News
Thank you for your interest!
