It’s all change at casinos these days. Since the Gambling Act of 2005 you neither need to be a member to play in one, nor even to set foot upon the premises. In my day there was a 24-hour lag before a membership was valid. This was to prevent ruinous impulsiveness, though in my experience it merely deferred it by a day.

Casinos still retained an aura of proscription. They were louche and slightly sub rosa, though in a very gimcrack British way. Glamorous young women paraded around with trays of stale, curling meat paste sandwiches, designed to banish hunger and keep players at tables. The alcohol was subsidised by the house, as in a student union. Every pore and cell in the croupiers’ bodies seemed to plead for early death.

All this has been supplanted, to judge by the Alea Casino on Glasgow’s riverfront, by the faint, insistent throb of intercontinental kid-on. In Alea you scarcely know you’re in a casino at all. It’s a bit like a shopping mall decorated by Satanists, all black walls punctuated with slashes of deep dark red. It lies over several floors: the escalators go up only; you have to take the stairs down if you want to leave and the management doesn’t encourage leaving. No clocks, obviously, and there isn’t a gaming floor as such. The blackjack tables and roulette wheels are dotted around the premises seemingly at random, as though they were afterthoughts. It all feels a little like a vertical airport waiting lounge, with the designer bars, snack-shacks and restaurant as the real point of the place. The croupiers, though, still look like they’d welcome the fatal sting of the scorpion.

Casino restaurants were always noxious in the old days. Only idiots gamble, so the catering reflected the disproportionately high number of mouth-breathers among the clientele — it was basically burger-van food with cutlery, I recall. The threat of violence lurked ceaselessly. The diners had usually partaken liberally of the free booze at the tables and frittered away not inconsiderable portions of their grandkids’ college fund. So the atmosphere in these restaurants was volatile in a way you experience rarely in Skibo Castle, say. It was par for the course to watch desperate wives lay restraining hands on their husbands while begging them: “Leave it, George!”

Alea, meanwhile, has Red Leaf, a restaurant which is striving to be of stand-alone class. I say striving, but anything this corporate will always be subject to the margin ministrations of the back-office bean-counters. For example, the butter dish that came with the rolls had a lumpy, turbulent look that suggested it’d been refilled with other diners’ discarded butter. Hardly encouraging. That said, few places in the city can better Red Leaf’s vantage, a pigeon’s-eye spot overlooking the river. Look at it long enough, as I did, and you develop an intense yearning to watch an episode of Taggart as soon as you get home.

The eating happens in a square, well-spaced room at the end of a darkened tunnel of bar and private dining area. Its decor is MFI-soothing, mixed up with a number of flashy but high-street chandeliers designed to demonstrate knowing, funky elegance. Fittingly, the clientele seem almost wholly to be young blonde women, on the prowl presumably, their sights set on some eligible high-roller who has his own extruded-tubing business in the Bothwell area.

We started with the fresh seafood platter to share. Unsurprisingly, the bling controls were set to maximum. It came on an Everest of ice balanced atop what looked like an upturned wine bucket. The smoked salmon had been dyed lurid purple. At £19.95, though, it was a frightful rip-off, an unlucky-bag of mussels, salmon, mackerel, oysters and razor clams all of which were niggardly and tasted of little beyond extreme cold. There was, though, a decently authentic confit of duck terrine with Calvados jelly, all of it falling to bits, with a moist fattiness.

The mains offered three types of steak, halal chicken supreme and unthreatening fish. We had the new season lamb with spiced herb crust, which is always difficult to do badly, and a confit halibut, a brickie’s portion plonked on the plate with sauteed greens and a sweet port wine sauce that came to display a certain jamminess, giving the whole thing an apprentice quality. The cheeses included a vile thing with garlic through it.

Despite the occasional busted flush, though, I found Red Leaf strangely enjoyable, with its boom-or-bust cooking, its petri dish microculture and its weird, foreign fake glamour. All it needs is a tray of meat paste sandwiches just for old times’ sake.

Red Leaf, Springfield Quay, Paisley Road, Glasgow, 0141 555 6100, dinner for two with wine £70.

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