After a maze of starts and stops, threats and promises, we finally have a clue of what we might be eating at Top Chef season two winner Ilan Hall’s restaurant The Gorbals, coming soon to downtown. While no official opening has been announced, The Gorbals’s website is up and running — according to the site, The Gorbals will live in downtown’s Alexandria Hotel (which is now the site of, ahem, lofts). View image
While the site fails to provide a menu of the cuisine Hall not-so-appetizingly promised would be “Old Jewish food date-raped by bacon,” we do get a teaser of tastes to come. According to The Gorbals inspiration page the cuisine will be “Scottish, Jewish, Spanish, American; it is haggis burgers, paella, chicken skin sandwiches, gefilte fish ‘n chips, and bacon-wrapped matzoh balls.” This is, of course, what you get when a chef’s parents are Scottish and Israeli.
At any rate, we’re just relieved to hear something concrete from the guy, whose plans have bounced around like a needle on the Richter scale. According to The Gorbals’s extremely nascent Twitter feed, the restaurant (which, for you trivia buffs, is named for the hard-scrabble Scotland ‘hood from which his father hails) should be opening in August. Still, we’ll save our Glasgow smiles for the day Hall cuts ribbon.
