ANYONE WHO lives outside London, currently the world playground for corporate fat cats, Russian oligarchs and other miscellaneous crooks and spooks,hastotaketheMarie-Antoinettishfadforplatinum-platedfood publicity stunts with a large pinch of salt. Gordon Ramsay's Mayfair restaurant, Maze, serves a £100 pizza, the main distinction of which is that it is wood-firedandtoppedwithshavingsof Umbrian white truffle. Selfridges was reported - I'm not sure I believe this - to be doing a brisk trade with its £85 sarnie with Kobe beef and foie gras.

But £23 for soup?And in Glasgow? That's what you pay for the seafood broth at the new Gandolfi Fish. Admittedly, it is the single most expensive item on an otherwise reasonably priced menu. Furthermore, it counts as a main course. But a price tag like that demonstrates either an extreme level of ambition or self-delusion, depending on how you choose to look at it. I mean, just what, exactly, can justify it?

Dipping into the aforementioned broth, the answer to this conundrum was clear. The broth was spilling over with prime Scottish seafood: three scallops, two humungous langoustines, hearty chunks of lobster, copious quantities of organic salmon, mackerel and a fistful of clams. In that sense the cost was justified. Purchase the same piscine collection in your fishmonger and you would expect a steep bill.

What was missing, however, was organoleptic evidence of the consummate skill needed to create a broth with a flavour that matched the aspiration of its price-tag. What we had was a rather dilute, underpowered fish and saffron consommée - crying out to be reduced, intensified or in some way cranked up to a higher level - served lukewarm and so destined to cool rapidly while we battled with the crustaceans. It was, we concluded, a dish where we were, in effect, paying for excessive, appetite-daunting amounts of marine protein, not for a liquid essence of all things divinely fishy.

There must be some weird, inverse economic principle in operation at Gandolfi Fish, because our cheapest dishes were far and away the best. Inverawe smoked cod roe, pleasantly sticky in texture, its fish oil and smoke elements well-balanced, was a star act, thoughtfully supported by an emollient aioli made with sweet, fresh garlic, and a simple lamb's lettuce salad. The arid baguette slices supporting it, though, were shown up unfavourably by the restaurant's own likeable home-baked rolls. Humble mackerel, a wonderful fish when truly fresh, which this was, became a really special dish with crisp-skinned fillets atop puy lentils on an unusual sauce, fragrant with ground coriander and tart with lemon. Still reasonable, if a tad pricier, red mullet fillets on mildly curried couscous studded with apricots, topped with a slate-grey olive tapenade, made another highly capable dish, although the couscous element was duller than the rest and inevitably overshadowed by the forcefulness of the tapenade.

These oilier fish dishes worked well teamed up with a commendably homespun salad of skin-on potatoes, capers and mild red onions, one of the imaginative side dishes that can be ordered. At Gandolfi Fish, the accompaniments and appetisers - such as devilled whitebait or cockles and toasted oatmeal - are intriguing. Likewise, some intelligent thought has gone into the wine list, which is long, diverse and offers an unusually good selection of worthwhile wines by the glass at prices that are far from grasping.

By the way, the place itself is smart, comfortable, but not at all uptight. A great place to be: particularly if it can sort out its extractor problems. We left smelling a bit like fried sardines.

The restaurant's flair grinds to a halt with its desserts, which are heavy and unimaginative and not at all what we wanted to eat after quality protein such as fish. My raspberry-capped steamed sponge with custard, minus the berries, was a excessively sweet/stodgy school dinner job. A chocolate tart with an insufficiently baked pastry base was also unrelentingly rich. The kitchen needs to lighten up. Peach melba, fromage blanc sorbet, zabaglione, fruit jellies, poached fruits, wobbly milk puddings ... some lateral thinking could put this right.

Gandolfi Fish, 84-86 Albion Street, Glasgow, 0141 552 9475. Food rating 8/10