Outlier, Glasgow G1: ‘This kind of carefully orchestrated can’t-be-arsedness is really quite magical’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

You cannot fake fabulous by simply buying in cool crockery and a freezer full of someone else’s pastry In my misspent youth, I’d head to Glasgow to watch the likes of Fields of the Nephilim and Hawkwind at the Barrowland Ballroom , drink snakebite and buy posters from the touts on Gallowgate to Blu-Tack to my bedroom wall and tear holes in my mother’s woodchip wallpaper. Today, however, I’m here to visit Outlier , a bakery/restaurant/art space that serves warm bread, sticky treats and porchetta with beetroot and plum caponata. It’s on London Road just minutes from the Barrowland, and I’ve wound up here thanks only to a complete stranger on Buchanan Street who wrote down its name on the back of an old receipt and pressed it into my hand.

She implored me to try the green jasmine rice pudding, the fresh sourdough and the chocolate and hazelnut babka. We used to do this type of inter-human face-to-face contact thing a lot back in the 1980s, before the internet ruined life. Outlier originally opened back in 2022, after Steven Turner, who had previously run various arts venues, applied to turn the building into a space for artists with a kitchen attached. What we have now is a fairly sparse but charming space, tiled a bit like an old swimming baths in places, in mustards and dark, glossy browns. There are pale, unvarnished wooden tables, speckled stoneware plates, green, pressed-glass tumblers and prices handwritten on scraps of coloured card. When it all comes together, this kind of carefully orchestrated can’t-be-arsedness is really quite magical, and from the outset I found Outlier intensely likable. We perch in a window seat, perusing an actively dreamy brunch menu: blood peach…