Michelin-starred chef Michel Roux Jr. has opened his latest restaurant, this time in the Crossbasket Castle, a five-star hotel and spa, just outside Glasgow in East Kilbride.
The new venture comes off the back of Roux’s closure of London’s iconic Le Gavroche in January 2024, and is part of the hotel’s broader £15 million expansion. Instead of ‘just’ being a fine dining institution, Trocadero’s provides live music and entertainment every night of the week, and the name derives from a renowned 1950s dance hall in South Lanarkshire.
In this vein, owners Steve and Alison Timoney aim to create a similar vision of nostalgic, bygone glamour. The restaurant has two main spaces - the Baillie Room channels a kind of Scottish Versailles, complete with gold leaf, antique paintings and furnishings, and lavish chandeliers, which perfectly encapsulates the Timoneys’ vision. For a more lowkey yet still glamorous experience, there’s also the option of the lounge, a small yet opulent room with plush sofas and a monumental fireplace.
Within this all-singing, all-dancing atmosphere, it might be easy for the team to forget about the food. Not so, given that Michel Roux Jr is at the helm. The menu is packed with the kind of inventive British and Modern European cuisine customers might expect from a luxurious gastropub, combined with Roux’s classical French culinary sensibilities.
The best items on the menu manage to sound (and actually are) both warming and sophisticated - think Scottish cured smoked salmon with buckwheat blini to start, followed by venison loin with beetroot and Madeira sauce, or potato and herb dumplings with beech mushrooms, butternut squash, garlic ketchup and sage beignets. Poignantly, much of this is in tribute to Michel Roux Jr’s late father Albert Roux, who once ran a restaurant called Chez Roux at this same hotel, and who passed away in 2021.