The Green Room

This review appears in the The List's Eating & Drinking Guide 2008 – in the shops now or buy online.

The Green Room is a bit like a rare exotic bird: dazzling and memorably beautiful when it appears, but blink and you miss it. This is because the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall's fine dining restaurant is only open before evening shows and matinées. Fortunately, the staff are sharp, well-trained and have impeccable timing, so service is conducted with astonishing efficiency. Excellent ingredients are in evidence throughout, so if the starter portions are slightly meagre, the flavours – in a marinated sea bass with couscous, for example – are concentrated and intense. Main courses include a succulently pan-fried guinea fowl with morsels of morcilla, the aromatic Spanish black pudding. Desserts are outstanding: the apple and blackberry crumble, for instance, is a tiny turret of tenderly steamed, spiced fruit. The Green Room's high ceilings are designed give a sense of grandeur, though ultimately the bland décor, with a few dings and dents to the fixtures and furnishings gathered over the years, is more doh-ray-me than ooh-la-la. But if you're lucky enough to get one of the enormous tables at the window for a royal view of Glasgow at twilight, the views down Buchanan Street are as entertaining as they are stunning.

• High point: Balanced and informed wine list
• Low point: Limited opening times