Added on Thursday 22 Mar 2012

Six o'clock on Saturday and the staff at the West End's latest Indian restaurant are already working flat out, as seemingly endless hordes of customers pour through the glass-surround vestibule and into the sparklingly-swish interior.

Fair enough, it's the weekend - but in too many decades of sampling Asian restaurants around Glasgow I've never seen anything like this. Everyone and their auntie appears determined to eat at Akbar's on this one specific night.

Further enquiry discloses that at Akbar's founding venture in Bradford people will cheerfully wait up to two hours for a table on the busiest nights.

I can remember people queuing to get into Indian restaurants in Glasgow in the late 70's, but those days have well and truly gone.

Shabir Hussain

Working particularly hard on this particular evening is the restaurant's larger than life owner and founder, Shabir Hussain, pictured, who has arrived from his headquarters in Bradford, England, to show the Glaswegians what real Asian food is all about.

He doesn't put it quite like that - and insists he has immense respect for Glasgow operators such as Balbir Singh Somal and Monir Mohammed - but it's equally clear he aims to do for Glasgow what he's already done for cities including Bradford, Manchester and Newcastle.

With a chain of ten restaurants and 537 staff, he's surely the biggest Asian restaurant operator in Britain, possibly eclipsing even Glasgow's mighty Harlequin empire in scale.

His vision can only be described as Napoleonic.

"I open restaurants in cities according to the volume of enquiries I get from people," he says, "and for months we were getting a steady stream of e-mails from Glasgow saying 'why don't you open an Akbar's here?"

So he has. It's on the site of what had been Balbir's Tiffin Rooms (which never worked very well, despite the legendary Balbir's quality) on west side Sauchiehall Street close to Charing Cross, and - after a fairly lavish refurbishment - it has around 200 covers.

That makes it a big restaurant by Glasgow standards, but it's only the seventh largest in the chain. Judging from random comments made by arriving customers who know the brand, Akbar's is little short of legendary on its home turf ... and might just become a major Glasgow fixture too.

Shabir oversees the opening of new outlets personally, and seems almost to revel in the high pressure role of front of house man - sorting out a table that's still waiting for someone to arrive; and (this is just before Mother's Day), telling his staff in no uncertain terms that there will be no booking - "first come, first serve basis" he says emphatically.

He began his career as a waiter in an Indian restaurant which served drunken louts until 4am, with regular fights thrown in as an unofficial cabaret.

Undeterred, he gained a transfer to a less volatile establishment, soon proved himself to be top waiter, and at that point decided he was going to carve his own career in Asian diners.

Now aged just 42, and with a large and successful chain at his command, he gives the impression of someone who hasn't even started to tap the depth of his potential.

Where's next after Glasgow? "Edinburgh!" he beams. "I like all my sites to be in high profile locations, so getting just the right one in Edinburgh may be difficult - but I'll find it. I'd like to be in a stretch like George Street which is right in the heart of things and able to appeal to local people and visitors."

If Akbar's is already causing a stir in Glasgow, it will rattle the rafters in Edinburgh.

The capital has a handful of excellent Indian restaurants, but nothing which compares to the "circuit" you find in the West End - in fact Edinburgh has tended to be better supplied with Chinese restaurants until now.

The "good" places tend to be pricey and a little ostentatious - replete with kitschy Raj imagery - with the major exception of Mother India (last year judged the best in the city), a spin-off of the Glasgow original, which is every bit as impressive as its sister venues.

But I can't think of a single Edinburgh Indian restaurant which is operating to the same scale of endeavour as Akbar's, let alone one which is so obviously popular with large numbers of Asian diners.

Why, though, is Shabir so confident that he can arrive more or less unannounced in completely strange - Scottish - cities, and pull off a success?

"It's our food, " he says with a winning smile, adding: "They're all my recipes - everything we serve has been created essentially by me, and it's really a sort of 'rustic' approach to dishes which is more like the food Asian people eat at home."

He adds: "A lot of chefs try to be clever with spices, but don't realise that the real secret of producing the perfect dish is getting the configuration of just two of the spices exactly right - in the right quantity and at the right stage of the cooking process.

"We've got our secrets, and they are well-guarded because they really do make the difference."

And that is why, he notes, so many of his customers are Asian - which, now he comes to mention it, is a relatively unusual sight in a Glasgow Indian restaurant.

Groups of young women having a girls' night out, groups of guys, middle-aged groups of ladies or married couples, families with kids - every second party arriving, most pre-booked, appears to be Asian and frequently rather glamorous with it.

What you don't find in Akbar's is "the pub crowd", because the restaurant stops serving at 11pm, sharp, and "everyone's ready to go home by 12."

It's just yards from the maelstrom of city-side Sauchiehall Street, but Akbar's just isn't interested in accommodating the famous "weekend revellers".

The customers are overwhelmingly family-orientated, and are there for what they consider excellent food and smart service.

It's bedlam, of course, but of the well-organised kind. By 6.30pm the restaurant is two thirds full, and is clearly going to be operating at capacity within the hour.

Don't turn up late for a booking because you just lose the table: it's obvious there are many willing takers for every vacant slot, and Akbar's - making all of its money in one seven-hour shift - can't countenance costly delays.

What's the food like?

In a rather odd advertisement in a little-read Glasgow freesheet there was some mention of "South Indian" dishes but, no, the exotic fare of the sub-continent doesn't get a look in (with one or two rogue exceptions, as in the legendary vindaloo) and so Banana Leaf's unique selling point is safe.

In fact one of the most surprising things about Akbar's is that it isn't actually bringing anything stunningly "new" to Glasgow at all, because the bill of fare is firmly rooted in the time-honoured attractions of the Punjab - anyone who visits Glasgow Indian restaurants will be completely at home with the mainstays of the menu.

The prices are average, or perhaps just a squeeze higher in some cases - the basic entree is about a tenner, less 5p or so - but it's certainly not expensive by any standard.

Shabir didn't have time to sit down for a chat (let alone a chaat) during our whirlwind interview, and it was a moot point whether he could have spared a table for half an hour anyway, so the dining experience will have to wait for another day ... possibly a wet Monday when things may be just a tad quieter.

But even before trying any of the food it's fair to say something truly remarkable has arrived on the West End dining scene.

Akbar's doesn't open at lunchtime, doesn't open late, isn't begging people to turn up to dine (no chance of any crass 'eat all you can' offers here), and - days after opening - appears to have possibly hundreds of committed regular diners to its credit.

Set that against a West End scene which has its well-attested local successes, but plenty of average-performing outlets and some that are downright poor.

One highly experienced Glasgow curry expert and writer tells me he doesn't usually review chain restaurants - but I suspect he may be tempted to give this one a go, as it's clearly very different from the industry standard, and may conceivably be extremely good indeed.

But it's maybe fair to say, too, that Akbar's is offering a particular sort of vibe that will suit particular occasions.

The music on the sound machine is a Persic rhapsody that sounds like it may be from the magnificent "Alexander" opus by Vangelis - insistent, haunting, pulsating, but not raucous - while immaculate waiters glide efficiently in well-ordered swarms, like some perfectly synchronised machine.

There's no chef going bananas, Ramsay-style, in the kitchen - we know this because you can actually peer right into the open kitchen to see what everyone is doing - and, self-evidently, there's nobody at table 43 wondering whatever happened to their starters.

As a catering proposition it is deeply impressive, but of a style likely to appeal to customers seeking a lively night out with a couple hundred other people.

The secluded table for two, with flickering candlelight ... forget it. This is big and bold dining for a big, mainstream city audience, albeit in smart surroundings and with service that may soar above the merely efficient to reach the dizzy heights of "pzazz".

If some of the main dishes look familiar, there are many more starter options than you generally find in an Asian restaurant, and also a particularly wide choice of vegetarian main dishes.

Balti dishes are massively popular in and around Bradford, where many of the Asian population typically dine in very basic canteen-style restaurants offering no frills but authentic cuisine - it is a very well-established dining culture - so it's no surprise to find they're also a speciality offering at Akbar's.

There are the "old school favourites" too, recalling the basic curries of yesteryear - eg Madras ("cooked with chillies for a taste to be remembered") and "Dupiaza" (charming how the spelling varies from city to city).

But - and here the established Glasgow Indian restaurants, or some of them, have a small crumb of comfort - there's no haggis pakora. Yet.

What Akbar's does have, however, is a range of dishes which appear designed to make the most of our passionate obsession with Italian cuisine - which are basically Italian classics with "a hint of chilli". Weird? I wouldn't be in a hurry to try them, but apparently they've been wildly popular in Bradford.

And as "the best Indian restaurant in the North of England" - according to regular reviews and ecstatic blog comments galore - anything that appears on the menu has to be taken seriously.

For a first time Glasgow visit, though, where would you start? Vegetarians have no problem deciding, of course, but for an across-the-board diner a good place would probably be those Balti dishes, which may offer the biggest single point of difference to the typical Glasgow Indian restaurant offer.

We've already got Balti dishes on our city menus, of course, not least at the magisterial Mr India's Balti and Dosa House in Hyndland Street - which has nothing to fear from the colossus newly installed up the road - but as a culinary style they're obviously hugely important in the North of England, and at Akbar's are probably the signature cuisine.

Meanwhile Shabir reveals that he doesn't "go Indian" when dining out himself. Even if it's a good place, he explains, he won't be able to stop himself comparing notes with his own offer and turning the experience into a reconnaissance mission.

So in the brief time he's been able to spend in Glasgow he's been enjoying the city's Italian restaurants, and is also clearly fascinated by Chinese cuisine.

Now presumably returned to headquarters - he runs everything from the original Bradford restaurant - Shabir must have mentally ticked Operation Glasgow as the latest in an ever-lengthening line of successes.

He reveals he aims to have around 20 restaurants across Britain before deciding enough is enough, and then - probably when he turns 50 - he aims to "retire".

But there's nothing retiring about Shabir Hussain, extraordinary chef and front of house man par excellence; ruler of a mighty Indian restaurant empire whose final limits have yet to be set. It's impossible to imagine him some day taking it easy.

We'll have much more on Akbar's, inevitably, in our regular coverage of West End Indian restaurants over coming months.