You might remember that several years back there was a mini-craze, certainly throughout Glasgow, for price wars in the provision of pub grub. These weren’t necessarily nice pubs, they were the dubious kind in which strangers collapse next to you and mutter incomprehensible remarks concerning the competence of the government. They were wipe-your-feet-on-the-way-out pubs; saloons obliged to deploy livestock as air-fresheners.

Nonetheless, they were forever undercutting one another in the supply of three-course luncheons. It was like the economy of Zimbabwe in reverse. From the dizzying decadence of lunches that sometimes cost as much as £3.20, licensees slugged at one another until the going rate had been whittled down to £2.50. One pub I recall even got its three-course lunch down to two quid.

God knows what you got for your money; I could never find the bravery to investigate. Jelly always seemed to figure largely, I heard; as a dessert presumably, though at those prices it was difficult to dispel visions of diners taking their knives and forks to plates of blackcurrant Rowntrees.

The craze turned out, in its sozzled way, to be rather prescient. Weirdly, as food costs more and more in the shops, it costs less and less in restaurants. Lunchtime and pre-theatre tariffs are infiltrating the evening hours. We noted the other week the £6 lunch at Chez Pierre in Stockbridge. One fast-food chain now offers a volume of food for £10 that would see a family of four through to the spring. I’ve heard several restaurateurs fulminate about the Marks & Spencer deal that provides a three-course meal for two plus wine for £10. It isn’t just a competition-decimating economy of scale, this is a Marks & Spencer competition-decimating economy of scale.

The fine-dining places are cutting their cloth, too. The high-profile chef and restaurateur Michael Caines launched his first Scottish venture several years back in what used to be the Art House hotel. One rather got the impression that Caines expected to become a grande fromage in Glasgow, much as he’d done already in Devon and Kent.

It hasn’t quite happened like that, though. Glaswegians seem to prefer their chef-patrons to remain on the premises.

Nor does it help that Caines exists at the centre of something that seems a borderline personality cult.

The Caines Correspondent brochure available at his establishments is a kind of culinary Pravda, full of glowing reports concerning Comrade Caines’s latest achievement and his five-year plans. The most recent edition features his picture no fewer than 11 times. Order a cappuccino in one of Caines’s places and they engrave his initials in the foam. It’s all rather baffling; I mean, I haven’t seen him on Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook once.

Bar MC is his informal brasserie concept, set sub-pavement beneath the proper restaurant above. Over the years I’ve been visiting this room through an endless series of identities. This time it has been reincarnated as a spare, minimalist BoConcept brochure type of place, all geometric booths and black-painted pillars. On the austerity theme, meanwhile, there’s an express two-course lunch at £7.95 and a dinner at £9.95, the latter particularly placing the limbo bar at a level even a pizza place would struggle to lower.

In terms of the menu, it’s the upper-end usual suspects: risottos, steaks, sharing platters and seafood/carbohydrate combos, often with a few Asian elements such as tempura, pak choi or chilli and ginger thrown in to indicate thought. It’s about as safe and inclusive as you could find.

Standards-wise it’s unthrilling but perfectly satisfactory: the chilli and ginger crab cakes were the typical over-hot floury boules, short on conspicuous seafood but tarted up decently by an astringent lemon butter sauce; the creamed garlic funghi with oregano on grilled ciabatta and parmesan was essentially mushrooms on toast that had passed its eleven-plus. For mains, there was a mixed grill of dinky chunks of lamb, steak, sausage, bacon and black pudding. Again, little to complain about, but little to be transported by. It was all very efficient and respectable, and at the price very good value. As an experience, though, it was on bit of a tight budget.

Bar MC at Abode, 129 Bath Street, Glasgow, 0141 572 6002, dinner for two with wine £75

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