Saturday 17 May 2008

Louis' Grill

Louis' Grill is located two doors down from Stravaigin on Gibson St, which if you ask me is making life hard for themselves. As you know, in my eyes not many places can compete with Stravaigin for atmosphere, margaritas or most importantly food. Louis' has a good pedigree though. Its owners own No 16. on Byres road.

No 16. is a place that serves very good food but is let down by it's appalling service. I have eaten there 3 times, each spread out over the course of three years and each time, there was an inordinate amount of time spent waiting to order drinks, order food, for the starters to arrive and then the mains. So much so that we almost left once before the food arrived. It's a shame as the food served at No 16 is particularly good, but not that good that I would wait an hour between starter and main. I have not been for about a year so maybe things have improved in that time..

Anyway, back to Louis. It serves salads and burgers and some other things that don't even pique my interest so I can't tell you what they are. We ended up going here last Sunday for a quick bite to eat and as I had already been to Stravaigin that weekend, it was out.

It would seem a similar fate occurs in Louis' in that we were sat wondering where our food was 5Min's before it arrived. To be fair though once it arrived it was good enough and they did come and ask if it was ok.





HI had a burger 'black and blue', not a reference to the rarity of the meat but to the inclusion of blackened Cajun spices and blue cheese which he declared to be good, below Chinaski's burger and maybe even as good as Stravaigin's (what sacrilege, as you know we differ on this subject HI seems pretty easy to please where burgers are concerned, in my opinion).



I was not that hungry so had a small Caesar salad with chicken. They either grilled the chicken from raw or heated it up in the microwave as it was warm, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, I choose to believe the former option. They also used good quality silver anchovies and tasty garlicky croutons, so all in all a reasonable effort.
However, there is something lacking in the atmosphere and apart from satisfying Hi's requirement for Ostrich burgers I can't see why I would come back.

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