In the school photo of the world’s great food cultures, Belgium tends to be the one hidden at the back with its eyes crossed and its tie askew. It’s classed as a cuisine of gourmands rather than gourmets, which means that it specialises in quantity rather than quality. It provides a foster home for all the ingredients that couldn’t find a bunk bed elsewhere: radishes, eels, endives. It’s something of a culinary whelp, Belgium, always having its lunch money stolen by France or Spain.

The nation’s a little like Ursula Andress, in a way. Just as nobody can name a single movie in which Andress starred beyond Dr No, nobody can cite a single Belgian dish that isn’t chips with mayonnaise, which isn’t really a dish at all, more a sort of desperate coupling in an otherwise empty larder. Oh, and waffles, they’re Belgian apparently, though we British chose to make them with potatoes to render them palatable to anyone who isn’t having their fifth birthday party.

Serge is sort of a Belgian restaurant. This is a little like opening a sort of Arbroath restaurant: once you’ve put smoked haddock on the menu you start scratching your head, wondering what else might qualify for inclusion.

The path through this that Serge has found is to go broadly mittel-European, just as The Wolseley in London’s Piccadilly has done to such clamorous acclaim. There’s a hint of the Teutonic here, cross-pollinated with the heavy, fruity tang of the Alsace. There’s lemon in the mustard and lots of walnuts and uncommon herbs such as chervil.

It’s named Serge after Gainsbourg presumably, the lecherous old Gaul of Je t’aime renown. The bar downstairs is titled Brel, after Jacques, the gloomy Belgian balladeer of the slippery slope. There is every possibility, you can’t help feeling, that the staff might enlist you for the Resistance while warbling a chorus of Lili Marlene. Certainly on the night we visited the clientele had a touch of the Isherwood to them, being almost exclusively mutually fond young female couples.

The setting has an appropriately clandestine, conspiratorial feel. It’s upstairs in a converted Victorian mews, on the gentrified pleasure strip of Ashton Lane. It really is very dark inside and the soundtrack is exclusively jazz of the striped-jersey-and-beret variety. The place has the feel of a secret, exclusive club; much as like being Belgian.

As for the food, it’s refreshingly novel and off-piste, even if the execution is occasionally conditioned by a kitchen that has above-a-pub parameters. Mussels are another Belgian thing; well, they’re everyone’s really but the Belgians seem to have annexed them. So you’re never short of a bivalve at Serge; they come in pots, with almond and Pernod, or on platters on which they’re open-faced and grilled. The starter size is capacious, slathered in a fiery crimson chilli butter. The latter could have been fresher, it had the tang of the jar to it.

Another starter of paprika calamari, done in the onion ring style, may have been pre-prepared. There was also a mixed seafood broth that had something of a street-food punch to it, pleasantly oily and able to stand on its own once the decent helpings of prawn, mussels and the market fish of the day had run out. The quality of the seafood was acceptable; it wasn’t the pure quill but it had some self-respect within the limits of Serge’s pricing, an average £5 for starters and £10 for mains.

For mains there were a roast chicken breast on blood sausage in chervil sauce, more seafood stews and a schnitzel Holstein, breaded veal with fried egg and anchovies. The latter was very satisfactory. The waffles (potato-free, of course) seemed home-made and came with toffee sauce and ice cream; there was a superb fruit terrine with lemon sorbet.

At Serge, then, the food is hearty, substantial, pleasingly uncommon and there’s clearly a discriminating intelligence in the kitchen, though there’s also the occasional hint of feet being found; what mussels in Thai red curry are doing on such a sober menu I’ve really no idea. But, otherwise, its a bracing and intriguing experience. The moon’s a Walloon.

Serge, Ashton Lane, Glasgow, 0141 342 4966, dinner for two with wine £65

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