Stephen McGinty: Chemistry is no match for elegance

THE distance between Glasgow's Rogano and the world's finest restaurant is approximately 1051 miles and three Michelin stars. El Bulli in Cala Montjoi on Spain's Costa Brava is open for six months each year, June through to December, and seats 50 each evening or 8,000 diners per season for a 38 course meal, at 250 euros per head. Only on a single day, at the end of each season, can bookings be made for the following year.

Two million salivating gourmands try each year and fail. The phone line and email inbox may melt on December 21 when reservations are open for 2011, El Bulli's final season before closing the doors forever. Ferran Adria, the former naval recruit, who has been behind the kitchen door since 1982, is ascending to an entirely different plane of culinary existence, The restaurant will be replaced by a "think tank". As he explained: "We'll have 25 people here, chefs, journalists, tech people. At the end of each day our work will be posted on the Internet."

As a pioneer of molecular gastronomy, Adria believes it's just a matter of time before cooking will be a serious course at Harvard. In fact, he's teaching one there this autumn entitled: 'Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter."

Adria is never happier than breaking a dish or drink down to its constituent parts and then stitching them together again, like Doctor Frankenstein with his beloved monster.

So a Martini becomes a glistening, olive-coloured sphere that arrives wobbling on a spoon, to be washed down by three sprays of a gin-and-vermouth mixture from a silver atomizer. Then there is his "chicken curry", which consists of chicken sauce over curry ice cream.

I genuinely believe Adria sees himself as a true pioneer at the cutting edge of culinary research, which he is, but I'm sure he also imagines the day when he earns a Nobel Prize for revolutionising duck a l'orange using just a pig and a kumquat. Personally, I think he's sailed off the edge in his own sauceboat. But then again, what do I know? I once wrote a hymn to the hamburger. Well, I know what I like and I like Rogano, which this month celebrates its 75th birthday.

So, just as Adria can deconstruct white beans and sea urchins to a frothy foam, how do you deconstruct a great restaurant? What are its constituent parts?

For a start there is the location of Rogano, sandwiched between Glasgow's Buchanan Street and Queen Street in Royal Exchange Square. If its not at the heart of the city, it's beside the left ventricle. Then there is the brash exterior, a yellow wash, the letters in green Vitrolite and the giant orange lobster beckoning you in with a wave of its pincers.

Once through the black and chrome doors, dutifully held open by a waiter in white shirt, black tie and waistcoat, a crisply starched apron tied around his waist, the restaurant offers its art deco elegance. The air is filled with the ghosts of customers past. Nat King Cole, who wrote "Your food is wonderful" in the guest book, Frank Sinatra and those other crooners who performed at the city's Alhambra or The Empire, stayed at the Central Hotel and dined at Rogano, which hosted 11 am lunches for those stars performing two shows a day.

Sitting in a booth on Thursday evening, I pondered the restaurant's rich history, which began with the Bodega Spanish wine cellar, which sold wines, whisky and sherries straight from the wood, and opened at in 1874.

Five years later James Henry Roger took over as manager and when the Bodega company sold up, purchased the property in silent partnership with a Mr Anderson.

A new name was required so the pair combined the first three letters of "ROGer" with "ANOther" to create "ROGANO". If James Henry Roger created the name, it was Don Grant who created the restaurant. An engineer who switched trades to hospitality, he bought the site in 1935 and switched it from a men's drinking establishment to a bar and restaurant of distinction. His vision was a restaurant fitted out in the art deco style of the Queen Mary, then being built at John Brown & Co in Clydebank, and, according to restaurant lore the foreman of the shipyard paid his not inconsiderable bar bill with burr walnut and bird's eye maple wood pannelling. While the architect was John Thomson, the visionary behind the interior was Charles Cameron Baillie, who designed the stained glass features for the famous liner.

Grant toiled hard to ensure the restaurant's success. If customers were waiting in a queue outside while members of his family were dining inside, he would ask them to leave and make room for his customers. During the Second World War the Swiss manager, who feared his neutrality might not be respected by a German bomb and so locked up at the first wail of an air raid siren, was swiftly replaced by a hardier veteran of the Savoy and the London Blitz.

During rationing each meal cost five shillings, and the bar was popular with officers on leave, with those intent on heading for the distant shores of drunkenness fitted by the bar staff with a fish box label through their lapels on which was written their name and hotel.

Evelyn Waugh, who was based at Maryhill Barracks, was among those officers and later set a scene in his Sword Of Honour trilogy, when Guy Crouchbank has a meeting, in Rogano.

Perhaps its the atmosphere, so potent it could be bottled, that has attracted literary types. Then again, perhaps its just the bar.

W.H. Auden, who taught at a boys prep school in Helensburgh, wrote a poem about Rogano called ‘The Mermaids of the Oyster Bar'. William Boyd, who fell in love with the place while a student at Glasgow University, makes a pilgrimage each time he's in town, while John Byrne, on 19 May, 1973, to be precise, illustrated the guest book with a picture of himself as a vulture or perhaps its an ostritch, I can't quite work out which, and attached the following poem:

The fish is divine,

Likewise yir wine

The ‘cheeses' is grand

Likewise the band

Fur ‘melon galce'

Or even banano

It's hard tae beat

Yir auld Rogano.

Foodies may favour other establishments, but over all, for atmosphere, service and cuisine, Rogano is an institution to which I would happily be committed. For 75 years it has done something simple incredibly well: catered to its customers for three generations. So while El Bulli rises so high that it evaporates like steam, Rogano will keep its feet on the ground. A comment written by one customer, Rhona Woodcock, is as pertinent as any mission statement: "May your belly never be stuck to your back with hunger and may you never die of the thirst!"

The regular at Rogano shall suffer neither.