‘I’ve no idea why you are here,” says Ronnie Clydesdale, proprietor of the Ubiquitous Chip, amiably. That makes two of us. Ostensibly we’re meant to be talking about his recent lifetime achievement award, but in an industry with the built-in obsolescence of the neutron bomb, you do have to question the Chip’s continued existence.

Existence is too grudging a term for it. Nearly 40 years old, the restaurant in Glasgow’s west end is as close to the Ivy as Scotland gets. Last week Kylie Minogue, accompanied by her seven-strong entourage, was picking on venison haggis and organic Orkney salmon. It’s hard to imagine another Scottish establishment that could cater as successfully to a clientele as diverse as the diminutive Antipodean chanteuse, the Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich and the author Alasdair Gray.

Clydesdale founded the Chip in 1971 with his redundancy cheque from the whisky industry. The original menu was priced in pounds, shillings and pence. It was the era of Abigail’s Party, when a canapé was a Tuc biscuit garnished with a swirl of Primula cheese spread and a miniature pickled onion. Clydesdale wanted to introduce the Campari crowd to salted ling, clapshot and beef hough. It was the kind of home cooking most of them were fleeing to the Costa Brava to escape.

The ultimate sacrilege, however, was the lack of a deep-fat fryer. The received wisdom then was that it would be easier to establish a nudist colony in the Cairngorms than a restaurant that didn’t serve chips in Glasgow. Clydesdale, who with his son Colin has also established Stravaigin and Stravaigin II, has had a generation to reflect on the improbability of his achievement. He is still no closer to understanding it.

“I can’t think of any other family business in Scotland like it,” he says. “The Buttery and Rogano have been around for a long time, but they have changed hands three or four times. We wanted to build something that would last, that would still be interesting in 20 years’ time.”

It’s not as if the restaurant depends on the showmanship of its proprietor for its pulling power. Clydesdale, now pushing 70, has a diffidence that borders on bashfulness. The most theatrical thing about him is his Denis Healey eyebrows.

“I think it was an idea whose time had come,” he says of the Chip. “I was always very interested in food. When I took a holiday in Europe I was struck by the fact that the food I was eating was unique to that

area. In Scotland there was a bit of home cooking, but Scottish food didn’t exist in restaurants. It was all flambé cooking — food to read by — and it all tasted the same.”

Clydesdale ransacked his Islay grandmother’s recipes. He was one of the first chefs to put the provenance of the food on the menu. The early clientele were agog to discover that anything as exotic as squid lurked in the cold waters off Mallaig.

“People thought the menus awfully pretentious,” he says. “But I felt Scotland undervalued its produce. The Scottish cringe has a lot to answer for. I also felt strongly that the food we served here should be healthy.”

Six weeks after opening, the restaurant was favourably reviewed. It never looked back. Academics from Glasgow University and BBC executives were its staple fodder. “We could seat about 48 in those days, but we’d be cooking for 98 a night,” he says.

His lack of any training was a benefit rather than a handicap. Like David Wilson, who opened the Peat Inn in Fife the following year, and Nick Nairn, who championed Scottish produce at the Michelin-starred Braeval, Clydesdale is self-taught.

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