Heading west, Alison Craig finds the style tribes going nuclear over

Address: 41 Byres Road Glasgow Telephone: 0141-339 3666 Opening Times: Shut all day Monday. Tuesday - Sunday 12 - 1.45pm. 6pm - 9.30pm (last orders) Lunch for two including two glasses of wine #29.50 Smoke after 2pm and 10pm evening sitting.

All Credit Cards. No disabled toilet.

EVERYONE has a friend for scheming and planning how to get rich quick. Dynamite is mine. Together we've tried and failed numerous ideas: children's entertainers, a Santa's Grotto photographic studio, dog-walking and others too worrying to mention. Our most ridiculous and expensive scheme was deciding to become sandwich magnates after talking to a friend for about three minutes who reckoned it could be highly lucrative. When people asked for a chicken cacciatore roll with hummous or sword fish-a-la-Greque we would look genuinely crestfallen and say: "We just sold the last one. How about tuna?" After eight hours of gruelling flogging we sold the grand total of seven sandwiches, the remaining 193 were duly squashed into our communal fridge. Ever the entrepreneurs, we charged our flatmates 25p a roll and existed on nothing but tuna sandwiches for a week. Since then, and for obvious reasons, Dynamite has steered clear of all types of fish. So it was very brave of her to accompany me to Fusion, a new Japanese restaurant already renowned for its unavoidably fishy speciality, sushi. It is quite small, bijou and already busy by 12.30 pm on a Thursday lunch time. On the ground level you can watch the chef and his unfeasibly sharp knives at work. We were seated upstairs. They probably realised that me, Dynamite and sharp knives in the same room is never a good idea. Our waitress explained by choosing set one, two, or three we would receive a variety of different sushi. Set one consisted of two cucumber, two salmon, a huge prawn and a chunky salmon sushi, and two inside-outs (with the rice on the outside), which came with a blob of green stuff and pink stuff. It was presented spectacularly. The waitress, realising she was dealing with the kind of half-wits who can't sell a tuna sandwich, warned us that the green stuff was wasabi, a Japanese horseradish, and very hot. She added that the shell-pink pickled ginger, folded in the centre, was to cleanse the palate between tastes. Then she reiterated "watch the wasabi. It is hot." Of course Dynamite scoops half of it up with a cool roll of cucumber sushi and almost brings the whole meal to an abrupt end as the food reappears through various parts of her face, most predominantly her nose. After gulping down a glass of mineral water and pretending nothing had happened we continued, smirking. There are no plates or traditional cutlery here, just chopsticks and a small bowl for soy sauce. The theory is to pluck sushi, dip it in sauce and eat. It is a technique that needs practice. Technique withstanding, as the rest of our order arrived, we decided we liked sushi. Two marinated chicken skewers were delicious, as was the prawn and vegetable tempura: large slices of red and green pepper with two huge creatures from the sea, fried in light batter. Dumplings, which were like mini Forfar bridies, tasted great. The noodle bowl presented a new problem. How do you eat a huge bowl of clear soup full of vegetables and long wobbly noodles with chopsticks? As the noodles slapped off the side of our faces we decided to pour the soup into a smaller bowl and drink from that but had to give up as the table was now awash with soup, soy sauce and rice. Comparing other diners - cool, style-warrior types - with our table and clothes, which looked like the aftermath of a particularly vigorous food fight, we requested the bill. The terminology and coolness might have escaped us but the phone number did not. It is in my book.

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