The finest meal I ever had in Britain cost me £11 (€12.50). I thought wistfully of it at the weekend when news emerged of the huge fire that tore through a fine old Victorian block in Glasgow beside the city’s central railway station. The blaze torched my favourite chip shop.
It was late one night in February 2024 when my train from London pulled into Glasgow Central. I had a flight booked early the following morning to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. There were just two things left to do that night: eat and sleep.
Glasgow was cold and I was tired. I weighed my options: I could beat the streets in search of a nutritious meal or I could just hit the neon-lit Blue Lagoon chip shop outside the station entrance. I chose the latter and had a near-religious experience.
I ordered the very Scottish-sounding “fish tea” of cod, chips and buttered bread. Maybe it was my fatigue-driven delirium, but I had never tasted anything as good or wholesome. The surfeit of deep-fried carbohydrates replenished my soul in a way that virtuous greenery never could.
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I wolfed it down right there outside the station, grinning as if I’d had a lobotomy. I wouldn’t have swapped that fish tea for a tasting menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had stumbled into an icon of Glasgow’s culinary scene. Newspaper style guides discourage journalists from calling ordinary, banal things “iconic”. I don’t care. Blue Lagoon is truly iconic or, at least, it was before it burned down.
It isn’t loved in Glasgow for its quality, per se. More for how it is meshed into the city’s gritty cultural fabric. Blue Lagoon is to Glasgow’s culinary scene what Copper Face Jacks is to Dublin nightlife: it opens late and hits the spot for drinkers. It isn’t meant to wow you with sophistication. But it won’t let you down if you seek its warm embrace.
Blue Lagoon is actually a local chain of chip shops. It was started just over 50 years ago on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street by Italian immigrant Ersilio Varese. The business is now managed by the third generation of the Varese family.
When they celebrated the business’s 50th anniversary last summer with 1975 prices – £2 for a fish supper – Glaswegians queued around the block
There are now eight Blue Lagoons dotted around Glasgow, although the recently destroyed Gordon Street branch at Central Station is the most famous. Wayward warbler Justin Bieber walked in one night in 2016 to sample the deep-fried haggis and a can of Irn Bru. Seemingly, he baulked at the deep fried Mars bars.
There are eight more Blue Lagoon outlets elsewhere in Scotland. The business is planning its entry into the English market with a new outlet due to open soon in Newcastle. It’ll be like the Jacobite invasion, but with battered sausages.
This is the third time in recent years that the Blue Lagoon beside Glasgow Central railway station has been destroyed by fire. It was gutted in 2012, but, remarkably, the Varese family managed to get it back open within five weeks. It burnt down again in 2016.
Last weekend’s terrible blaze started around the corner on Union Street in a vape shop on Sunday afternoon. By that evening, it had crept up the block, affecting up to 30 businesses. At one stage overnight, it looked as if the fire might engulf Central Station. The station was still closed at the time of writing.
As well as Blue Lagoon, the Varese family also lost their Sexy Coffee cafe next door, as well as the company’s head office on the floors above.
“It’s a disaster,” Alessandro Varese told the Scotsman newspaper.
The centre of Glasgow is now scarred by the ruins of yet another fire. Sauchiehall Street, for example, has been blighted for years by various charred building. It contributes to Glaswegians’ sense of angst over the perceived aesthetic decline of their beloved city centre.
Thankfully, nobody was hurt in last weekend’s fire on Union Street, but the apocalyptic scenes of the enormous blaze have devastated many locals.
Blue Lagoon was only one of several Glasgow businesses to go up in flames in the Union Street blaze, ruining many livelihoods. The owners of Tangible hair salon captured the mood with a post on Instagram: “We stood on the street and held each other as we cried and watched everything that we’d built get destroyed.”
Meanwhile, many Glaswegian have spent the days since the fire arguing passionately on social media over whether Blue Lagoon was, indeed, really the best chippy in the city or if it was just an over-rated, well-located tucker trap for drunks and tourists.
I know which camp I’m in.
