Chef Ilan Hall takes Gorbals cuisine 5,000 miles to downtown Los Angeles

• Natan Zion at The Gorbals in downtown Los Angeles. The restaurant aims to reflect Scottish cuisine with a twist, serving haggis, whisky and cocktails

made with Irn-Bru, alongside Scotch eggs. Picture: Ellen Freyer

LOS ANGELES: The Gorbals is ready for its close-up. No, Hollywood hasn't decided to make a movie about Glasgow's once-notorious slum district; nor does The Gorbals figure in a new Billy Connolly comedy routine.

The Gorbals is simply the name of a new restaurant, which opened recently in downtown Los Angeles. It is the creation of 27-year-old Ilan Hall, who in 2007 took first prize on Top Chef 2, American TV's highest-rated cooking show. Hall was born to an Israeli mother and a Scottish father who grew up in the Gorbals, part of a German-Jewish family that had fled Hitler in 1938.

Hall's childhood was spent in Great Neck, Long Island, where his parents had emigrated after meeting at a bar mitzvah in Glasgow. Great Neck, an upper-middle-class enclave about an hour east of New York City, had an excellent high school, but Ilan chose to attend a small "progressive" school which catered to non-conformist, disaffected kids like himself.

"I've always had a hard time with authority and rigidity," he says. "I could never have functioned in a normal school with tight-ass teachers and administrators."

"He was always in trouble," recalls his boyhood friend, Nathan Zion (now his partner at The Gorbals). "He was heavily into punk rock. He wore punk clothes, dyed his hair different wild colours every week and kept pushing the envelope every chance he could."

Hall is still pushing the envelope. "Most people in the restaurant business think I'm crazy to have opened a new place with the economy in the dumps. They point to the fact that the number of people visiting restaurants in LA has plunged for four consecutive quarters, and that many well known places have shut their doors for good."

On top of that, the downtown area he settled on has had a checkered history. Once, Spring Street was known as the Wall Street of the West. The Pacific Stock Exchange building stood here, surrounded by dozens of beaux-arts banks that were funding LA's first major building boom.

The boom's prize attraction was the Alexandria Hotel, which opened its doors in 1906, and for the next two decades was the swankiest, most prestigious hotel in Los Angeles. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill slept here, as did such showbiz luminaries as Rudolph Valentino, Enrico Caruso, Sara Bernhardt and Charlie Chaplin.

In 1919, Chaplin rented the Alexandria's luxurious ballroom to announce the formation (with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) of United Artists.

By 1930, though, the Alexandria was eclipsed by the newly opened Biltmore Hotel and it began a slow, sad descent into seediness. By the 1970s, the hotel, along with most of the neighbourhood, had become neglected and dilapidated.

Today, the neighbourhood is finally making a recovery. In the past ten years, it has been the focal point of a city-led urban renewal programme. New owners took over the Alexandria and renovated its 500 rooms, turning them into flats. The area around the hotel has been gentrified as well, with new cafs, galleries and boutiques slowly pushing out the liquor stores, cheque-cashing shops and Mexican food marts. Still, there is an underlying grittiness to Fifth and Spring. Drunks and druggies stagger around in the streets, and just a few blocks away hundreds of homeless hunker down at night in cardboard boxes.

"I'm well aware of these things," Hall says. "I know I'm taking a chance. But I've lived in this area for the past two years and I know from experience that it's a happening place, a place with real character and spirit."

Hall, who is tall, slim and handsome, has another reason to feel optimistic: he is quite famous because of Top Chef 2.

A recent table of young Asian-American women dining in the restaurant were all fans of his from watching the programme.

"He was by far the most likeable contestant," one of the girls said. "He was ambitious and driven, but not obnoxious and selfish like his main competition, a French guy named Marcel Vigneron who was a real asshole who wouldn't even share his burners with anyone else."

"What does the name of the restaurant mean to you?" I asked.

"I think it's a place in Scotland," was one answer.

"Don't be silly. A gorbals is a mouse with long hind legs and a tail!" insisted another diner.

The cooking urge manifested itself early in Hall's life. His father did most of the cooking at home and was a strong influence.

"Dad was an open-minded chef," Ilan says. "He mostly cooked the Scottish/Jewish dishes he had grown up with in the Gorbals, but he also experimented with Mediterranean and Asian cuisines."

Hall was also influenced by a favourite cousin who worked as a chef in restaurants around the world. "It was a nomadic but romantic life," Hall recalls. "Hanging out in the south of France, cooking at a Terence Conran place in London. And every time I'd see him, he'd have a better-looking girlfriend."

At 17, Hall signed up for a summer course at a small cooking school in Florence. "It was a great experience. I really grew up there. I learned Italian, took classes not just in food but wine; there I was, at 17, sampling wines from all over the region! I learned the Tuscan way of doing things in the kitchen: keep it simple, but do it the right way, the time-honoured way."

Back in the US, Hall enrolled in a two-year course at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), in upstate New York. As part of his studies, he was assigned to work at an elegant Manhattan restaurant called Aureole.

"It was a reality check. I had to work like a dog, 16 hours a day, six days a week. It was like boot camp: the chefs screamed at you, made you do all kinds of dirty work.

"They also played tricks on you, sent you running to a shop six blocks away for 'a can of steam'. It was the French method of training a chef, of toughening you up, of testing your passion and resolve."

Hall lost 16lb (about 7kg) the first month, suffered from burnt hands and a punctured ego, but he stuck it out at the Aureole and managed to get a diploma from the CIA.

He began his professional career at Craft, a Manhattan bistro run by one of Top Chef's judges, Tom Coliccho. Before long, he began clashing with the chef de cuisine, Damon Wise, and got fired. "I'm good friends with him now," Hall says. "He's apologised and so have I. I was young and obnoxious."

When he won the Top Chef crown, Hall decided to take a break from cooking. He travelled through Europe and Asia, travelling on his stomach. His favourite place to eat?

"It was a mom-and-pop restaurant on Spain's Costa Brava. The husband was a fisherman; the wife cooked up whatever he caught that day. It was simple and perfect."

One of his stops was Scotland, a country he first visited when he was 15. "My father took me to the Gorbals and showed me where he had grown up. It had changed of course, but his stories still resonated with me. I got a real feeling for the place and its history and inhabitants."

During that last Glasgow visit, Hall did most of his eating in pubs. "I love the meat pies they serve there and the great beers. My favourite place to eat in Glasgow, though, was Sloans, which I believe is the city's oldest restaurant."

It was while driving cross-country with his girlfriend that he came up with the idea of opening a restaurant called The Gorbals. "The name just popped into mind," he says. " I called my father and he of course loved the idea, was even touched by it."

Hall says he wanted to have a small restaurant with a focused menu and a casual, communal atmosphere that would appeal to young people.

Although he loves Catalan-style food, he decided against limiting himself to a strictly Spanish menu "I wanted to have complete freedom as a chef."

The Gorbals occupies a space in the Alexandria that was once a diner. Hall kept the diner's stone floor, but tore out everything else. With its open kitchen, small bar and bare white walls, The Gorbals is not just casual but barren. The long wooden table that occupies centre-stage and the smaller tables and chairs surrounding it were all built by Hall and Zion.

"We had to save money by doing a lot of the work ourselves," Hall says. "Our budget took some big hits from certain of the city's bureaucrats."

The Gorbals opened in August, 2009 and immediately attracted the food critic of the LA Times, who described the restaurant as "the oddball creation of Ilan Hall, season 2's winner of Top Chef. A wee Scottish, a wee Jewish, his downtown eatery reflects his own ethnic makeup with a creative twist". Just as quickly, the fire department showed up and decided that The Gorbals' new boilers were a hazard and had to be replaced. Next came a building inspector who insisted that its plumbing system wasn't up to code either.

"It was all a lot of crap," Hall complains bitterly, "but we were obliged to shut down and start ripping up floors and pipes."

When they reopened in November, the menu featured such fare as bacon-wrapped matzo balls, shepherd's pie and haggis burgers. The house drink is whisky – including Highland Park, Lagavulin and Talisker. "We've also imported Irn-Bru in cans; it makes a splendid mixer for rum and tequila cocktails," says Hall.

He says his goal is to create a restaurant with soul. "It's something intangible and hard to achieve, I know. So many expensive restaurants try for perfection. The seasoning can be right, the preparations fine, but a robot could have made the food. They lose the humanity, the 'dirt' that goes into good cooking."

If he has a mantra, he says, it's "Make the food too delicious for them to send you home."