BB FANS

Federico Martone may have added flavour to Big Brother, but his restaurant is tasteless enough to be in Room 101
The Big Brother phenomenon is something that has to be explained to me very slowly, much as the Rolling Stones and free love were explained to High Court judges during the 1960s.

As far as I’m able to gather, 15 or so failed DJs with faces full of ironmongery and first-stage Tourette’s are corralled together for a month and instructed to scream “You’re really, like, doing my head in!” at one another. One by one these creatures are eliminated until the least hateful of them is declared the winner, whereupon they go off to appear in pantomime in Ipswich until they experience the merciful embrace of the grave.

Why this all happens I am singularly unqualified to say. You’ll understand, then, how calmly I took the news that Federico Martone, a former Big Brother housemate, had opened a new Italian restaurant in Glasgow city centre. If I remember correctly, my first reaction was an intrigued “Really?”, followed quickly by “Remind me, who’s Federico Martone?” Was he the one who told the manicurist from Dagenham that she was “like, really, really fit”? Might he have been the housemate who secreted fireworks in the chicken coop? Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. I was staring at a freshly painted wall throughout the brief span of Martone’s televisual fame.

But I take on trust that he was one of the show’s more likeable contestants and ran the cheery Orcadian Cameron Stout a close second in 2003. Keen to body-swerve the ignominious afterlife of most Big Brother housemates, Martone has branched into the catering line, emboldened no doubt by his father, Rocco, a restaurateur in the city.

Qua has taken over what was Oko, the sushi place on the northern hem of the Merchant City. There isn’t a terracotta awning or a mural of old Napoli in sight at Qua. It has the low-lit, laid-back feel of a lounge in a fashionable bar, so crepuscular in fact that I had to line up a rank of tea candles to illuminate the menu.

The room is studded with large grey rocks on wooden stands. These represented the first reason to worry. Unless they functioned like the rocks British intelligence installed in Moscow to spy on the Russians and were carrying through the Big Brother theme of surveillance, they were a pointless nonsense indicative of a restaurant hoping to distract with fripperies.

The menu, meanwhile, was enormous, never a good sign, incorporating every variation of pizza, pasta, carne and pesce the continental mind has ever devised. The waitress admitted she could neither pronounce nor remember a sizeable percentage of the Italian dishes and was ribbed for this frequently by the chefs (a good idea for a reality show there?), so we had to point out the names to her as though we were in a restaurant in some obscure province of Szechuan China.

The food, largely, was terrible; lovelessly assembled, by-the-numbers stuff for people whose appetites dominate their taste. A starter of prawns in lemon and garlic butter at least avoided those chewy pink commas that come in giant bags from Iceland, but these prawns weren’t a noticeable improvement; an antipasti of cold meats was dressed in the dullest, most grudging manner possible. A main of tagliatelle with prawns, tomatoes and basil was wan and flavourless.

Filetto Qui Quo Qua involved a decent enough lump of fillet steak, but in a dark brown sauce that tasted a little like Bisto and quickly became quite unpleasant, accompanied by a forlorn dish of mealy potatoes and blanched broccoli.

A dessert of apple strudel didn’t taste home-made, the house wine mugged the drinker’s tongue and two chefs stood smoking at a side door. Altogether, Qua provides a profoundly unimpressive and cursory acquaintance with production-line dining at its most mediocre. It was the weakest link. Or was that a different programme?

Rating: Qua
Food 3/5
Atmosphere 3/5
Service 4/5
Value 2/5
Overall 3/5

Qua, 68 Ingram Street, Glasgow, 0141 552 6233, dinner for two with wine £60