Watch: The story behind Redmond’s in Dennistoun, one of Glasgow's best neighbourhood bars

Located on a corner of Duke Street, Redmond’s of Dennistoun is a comfortable, cool bar notable for its quirky food menu, variety of craft beer options and record collection. It was named the city’s Best Bar at the 2024 Glasgow Pub and Bar Awards, described as a ‘destination venue’ popular among not only inhabitants of its surrounding neighbourhood also those further afield, it is a place worth making the journey to. 

We visited to the East End bar to chat to manager David Kirkwood, discover how they’ve built its character over the past decade and how its features came about. 

“Redmonds is a community pub, first and foremost. We really ferociously try to be both a pub and a bar, lots of those classic tenets of what makes a good pub but also some really nice modern elements that has sort of taken that into a different world, some really nice bar offerings as well. We’re also really proud of the fact that we are in a neighbourhood that is proud of its existence and its space. So we try and incorporate the neighbourhood aspect, the pub aspect and the bar aspect. 

“When we opened just over ten years ago, the food offering which was pretty different from what you would usually get from a pub or a bar at that point in Glasgow, came from a place of thinking lots of places do pizzas and burgers and they’ve always got their place, they’re never not going to be popular, but why not do something a bit different? If you go to another city on your holidays and you go to a bar with really cool food offerings you talk about it when you get home. That’s where that came from. 

“In the first six month we kind of organically started playing a wee bit of vinyl because we had a vinyl player. And then we started to lean into it. If you’re going to play Spotify you’ve literally got every song ever at the palm of your hand. And we’ve kind of lost touch in what it means to play a whole album and if you play vinyl it forces you to do that. 

“The craft beer - I think a modern pub should do both. Rather than just being an exclusively craft beer bar never lose sight of the fact that Tennent’s and Guinness are going to be your biggest sellers and don’t treat the two types - craft beer and major brewery beer - as any different. Have a really good offering for both.”