Rickshaw & Co.

Rickshaw & Co

The best dish anyone has recorded eating here is not a curry: Rosalind Erskine, the Scotsman's food editor, named the £4.50 bhel puri the standout of her visit and said she had never come across it before.

Why go

Tushar Ahmed and Gulshan Soni opened Rickshaw & Co in 2022 in the former Hyde cocktail bar on Partick Bridge Street, building the menu out of their childhood and their travels across the street markets of India and Bangladesh (The Scotsman). The room runs over two floors with a rickshaw parked in reception, a square bar in the middle, bicycle wheels rigged as pendant lights, and a mezzanine terrace. Bangladeshi street food alongside the Indian side is the real point of difference in a city with this many curry houses, and it shows up in the chaat and the tiffin boxes rather than in the masalas. The kitchen passed its last inspection in May 2024.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the bhel puri or jhal muri, a delight of textures and complementary flavours, zingy hits of heat, sweetness from the tamarind and crunch from the puffed rice1; the Bengali king prawn curry, where the prawns came out correctly cooked; the Goan fish curry, which earns its place because the salmon is chargrilled first and brings smoke to a mild sauce; and the coconut rice, cut with mustard seeds. At lunch, the tiffin boxes are the format.
• Avoid: the grilled bhutta, which arrived as two small corn cobs with the chilli, butter and lime barely registering. Skip the roghani naan unless you want cherries and sultanas in your bread. And do not order the plain curries hoping for depth, because that is exactly where both reviewers found the kitchen short.

What locals & experts say

• The Scotsman (Rosalind Erskine, October 2023), Ambience 7/10, Food 6/10: Rickshaw and Co. is undoubtedly a fun and funky restaurant but some of the dishes don't live up to standard and the service was a bit slow, despite it being a quiet night. But the best dishes were not the usual classics.1
• Curry-Heute (Hector, November 2023), the harshest verdict on record: I found it hard to believe that what was served today was from a Glasgow Curry House. He filed the visit under Euro-Curry, meaning Curry as in what Chefs think people like, and reported the lack of seasoning to the waitress, who apologized.2
• The corroboration that matters: Erskine found the fish pakora "a bit bland due to underseasoning" and Hector found the same fault in a lamb handi and a Bombay aloo three weeks later. Two critics, two visits, one complaint.
• Award claim, unpinned: the venue's own site calls itself award-winning without naming the award, and no approved report could be found tying it to a specific body, category and year. Nothing is claimed here.

Good to know

• Getting there: Kelvin Hall subway or Partick station, behind the Three Judges, minutes from Kelvingrove Art Gallery.
• Booking: book at weekends. The room is big but it fills.
• Price: chaat around £4, curries around £9, tiffin boxes £11.50 vegetarian and £13.50 not. One full solo dinner in 2023 came to £17.80.
• Timing: lunch specials are worth the daytime visit. No source publishes reliable hours, so check Maps.
• Drinks: a full cocktail list, which Erskine found bright, modern and heavy on sugar.
• Currency of this entry: every qualitative line here comes from autumn 2023. Treat the criticism as dated and worth re-testing.

Verdict

could-visit — Go for the street food, not the curry. The best thing anyone has written about this kitchen is Rosalind Erskine on the bhel puri, a puffed-rice chaat she had never come across and called the standout of her meal, and the Goan fish curry works because the salmon is chargrilled before it hits the sauce. The problem is consistent and independently confirmed: two critics three weeks apart found the seasoning underpowered, and Hector, who has reviewed over a thousand Glasgow curries, would not accept it as Glasgow curry-house cooking at all. That is not a kitchen to plan a night around, but a fun two-floor room by Kelvin Hall subway with GBP 4 chaat and a terrace is a fair casual stop. Order the snacks, the seafood and a tiffin box, and go to Mother India for the curry.