Corner Shop, Glasgow

Opening the box on a new pair of shoes, peeling back that weird plastic film from your mobile phone, confidently slapping your hand against a piece of freshly-finished wooden furniture; there’s something very satisfying about the brand new. As we step into Corner Shop, a new wine bar/restaurant on Old Dumbarton Road, that feeling is there in spades. It’s a very shiny space, between the large (and impeccably polished) mirrors, slatted blinds and pendant lights, with an aesthetic we’ll describe as ‘crisp’. We’re talking the big hitters: nice geometric shapes, a few pops of colour – in this case a very tasteful red and green pairing – and plenty of pale wood and white tile.

We’re pairing the room with an equally crisp glass of Cava (£7) because Corner Shop positions itself as a Basque and Catalan-inspired spot. The menu is a mix of spicy, smoky treats that pair well with a glass of fizz – first out, an extremely chunky meatball or albongida (£6). The ball in question is a cylindrical unit with a fair bit of heft to it, slathered in a tomato and chilli sauce and topped with aioli. It’s charred on the edges, it’s fatty and unctuous in the middle, it’s salty and fiery, and while six quid for one (1) spheroid of meat on a stick does give a bit of sticker shock, we’ll say it’s worth it. It is delicious and, to be fair, so large it needs two sticks to hold it in place.

A plate of grilled leeks with romesco (£10) is tasty, with a nice sweetness to the sauce and some incredible crunch from the nuts, but maybe needs a touch more char to really help them fall apart on the fork. The croquetas de jamon (£8) are your classic ooey gooey croquettes with an excellent crust, but they do fall harder into the ‘expensive’ column than the one big meatball from the previous paragraph.

The standout dish is the monkfish (£12) – it’s a combo of tail and cheek, with one served as a perfectly cooked fillet and the other chopped and mixed with herbs and chilli and placed on top. It’s an excellent bit of two-way cooking, it’s a bright, brilliant orangey-red so it looks amazing with all this glass and gold around it, and it’s surprisingly easy to share. Top marks, compliments to the chef, and so on and so forth.

But with the brand new comes teething problems, which this time manifest themselves in a very particular and odd way. We mostly write these reviews chronologically – what’s a better structure for an article than linear time itself? – so we got all the dishes above in the order we described. Then came the house salad (£6), an absolutely enormous pile of dressed lettuce with a snowstorm of cheese on top. It’s nice, don’t get us wrong, but the thing about the tapas-esque nature of those dishes up top is they arrive, they’re a few bites, and then they’re gone. If only there were a salad… on the side? After the salad, it's the ratte potatoes with aioli (£6) – they’re crunchy and craggly, they’re garlicky and buttery, and they are piled almost comically high. Again, they’re tasty, who doesn’t love a potato, yum yum yum, but if there’s one piece of unsolicited advice for us to pass on, it’s this: please bring all of these dishes, but in the opposite order.

But these are comparatively small issues to overcome, and when the light’s streaming in on a Sunday afternoon and we’re eating some raspberry sorbet (£7) topped with cava like an extremely fruity affogato, we can forgive those early wobbles. When you pull your new shoes out of the box and pop them on, they often take a bit of wearing-in – once Corner Shop gets a few miles under its belt, we’re sure it’ll build on its strong start.

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45 Old Dumbarton Rd, Glasgow, G3 8RF; Wed-Sun, noon-10pm
cornershopglasgow.co.uk