Places in Cambridge that you keep going to even though they're infuriating.

Le Gros Franck (lunchtime)

Why it's infuriating

The process of getting your food, paying, and sitting down is almost perfectly sub-optimal. You walk in and queue up for a bit and then get asked what you want. The food is canteen-style, so a lot of the hot meals are dished onto a plate from the counter and then taken into the kitchen to be microwaved. Meanwhile you continue queuing up until you're allowed to pay. Owing to the relative positions of the salad bar and the hot food counter, this can mean that you're stuck behind a long line of people who're assembling complicated salads, and even if you aren't then you're probably going to get stuck behind a series of people who each forget what they ordered, faff about trying to chose drinks, and then pay by card. All of this means that actually being allowed to pay can take considerably longer than it takes to microwave a plate of already warm food, and consequently you'll be stuck watching your food go cold while you wait. All this being done, you then have to go and look for a table, with no guarantee of finding one.

All that said, one of the more entertaining shortcomings of a system that was so inefficient as to be almost endearing has now been fixed with the introduction of a ticket system for steak orders. Prior to this, steaks were paired up to the people who had ordered them by the simple expedient of waiting staff wandering around the cafe shouting things like "steak frites, medium rare!" Unfortunately, to an impatient diner in a crowded cafe, "medium rare" could easily be mistaken for "medium", resulting in a misallocated steak, and a second, more attentive customer facing a long wait for their medium rare steak while an increasingly confused waitress wandered around trying to find a taker for a medium. If it wasn't your steak, this process was spectacularly predictable and hilarious to watch.

Why you go keep going there

None of this stuff is ever actually that annoying - somehow you do find a table in the nick of time, and your food is pretty much ready to eat when you get there. And the food is worth it anyway.

Aromi

Why it's infuriating

It's tiny and busy so you won't be able to sit down. You can't even queue up properly without getting jostled. It's not even worth thinking about at weekends. And the ordering process makes Le Gros Franck look like a masterpiece of user-experience design. After standing in a queue being jostled for ten minutes, you finally get to a point where you can actually see the menu - but unfortunately this is the right hand end of the counter, and there's someone trying to take your order before you've started to read it, let along try to figure out what any of the Sicilian specialities that you've never heard of actually are. Flustered, you pick something more-or-less at random. You then proceed in a leisurely fashion from right to left along the counter, with ample time to take in the view of all the things that you might have ordered, and try to guess which one you're going to end up with, and hope it's the one that you would have ordered if you'd actually had a chance to look at them. You then reach the left hand end of the counter and pay. If you're feeling inclined to tip at this point, you can't, though - the tip jar was back at the right hand end of the counter.

Why you keep going there

They basically just rule at baked products. The flatbread-sandwich thing is particularly good - if you successfully remember which of the things beginning with "S" (I think it's the one with ham and artichoke hearts...) it is then you get one of the nicest light lunches in Cambridge bar none. They also manage to rescue tiramisu from cheap-pizzeria hell and make something borderline transcendent.

The Cambridge Blue

Why it's infuriating

Two words: "reserved tables". You can handle this sort of thing if a pub's full on gastro, but the Blue isn't. It's not too bad in summer when there's a decent sized garden to play with, but most of the year you'll turn up to be greeted by an array of empty tables with "reserved from 8pm" signs, and have the choice of standing up, hopping around getting bumped from successive tables all evening, or just going somewhere with less good beer but where you can actually just wait for a table to come free in the normal manner.

Why you keep going there

because the beer really is that good.

The Pint Shop

Why it's infuriating

High expectations, basically. It's a craft beer bar, but if your idea of a craft beer bar was formed somewhere a bit more cosmopolitan than Cambridge then you'll often find the beer list a bit heavy on predictable pale lagers and pale ales and a bit light on big flavours and, well, anything dark or stronger than 5%.

Why you keep going there

Because even when it's not great it's still pretty good, and once in a while it takes your high expectations, slaps them around a bit, and hands them back to you with a glass of draught Struisse Pannepot or Lagunitas Maximus. And a scotch egg.

Afternoon Tease

Actually you don't keep going there, but you keep trying to, tempted by dreams of baked-product nirvana. And you keep failing, because it's always full. In the 2000 year history of Cambridge, only 17 people have ever succeeded in getting a table in Afternoon Tease at the weekend. Carry on up to Clowns (which will have space because it's massive) or Urban Shed, which will be full of people who had a cappuccino four hours ago and are still sitting there dicking around on their Macbooks, but at least you've got a chance of convincing someone that you're upcycling their laptop as a chair and then sitting on it.

Hipster Street Food Hits Cambridge

Street food in January - strictly for the dedicated.

Empirical evidence suggests that food trends travel up the M11 at a rate of about 2.5 metres an hour, arriving in Cambridge to considerable local fanfare about four years after they stopped being news to anyone in London. Hence 2014 was hailed as "the year street food took over Cambridge" - often by the people involved in selling the stuff, but not exclusively, and with some justification. Much of the interest has been catalyzed by FoodPark, who organize regular lunchtime markets, occasional evening and weekend events, and also act as a general purpose hype machine for their affiliated traders.

The good news is that behind the hype, the retweets and the vintage vans, there's actually a lot of very good food, often at sensible prices. The following is a subjective list of my personal favourites.

i) Guerrilla Kitchen

Really great, creative cooking. The basic idea is "sandwich bao" - essentially a plain steamed bun sliced open and filled with stuff - as popularized by Momofuku in New York. This is a pretty solid concept, but it's the execution that makes  Guerrilla Kitchen great. There are three meat options plus one veggie, each centered around a main ingredient like beef tongue or pork belly, cooked to perfection, and set off with interesting touches like puffed rice, boiled peanuts, wasabi mayo and pickled radish. The menu gets tweaked fairly regularly, so there's normally a new treat to try.

ii) Saucisse Mon Amour

Saucisse Mon Amour

Like the nearby Maison du Steak, Saucisse Mon Amour is a Gros Franck sideproject. The gleefully bad Franglais is present and correct, as is excellent value food. In this case, the core of the offer is the sausage baguettes, which for which you pay £4.50, or £5.50 with chips on top. Peppered steak or spiced burgers cost a little more, but still seem like excellent value. The baguettes come with soy-fried onions, mayonnaise, salad and your choice of delicious, oily sauces to top it off. Even without chips any one of them would be more than enough for a lunch, but somehow the chips always seem like a good idea at the time.

iii) Steak & Honour

I never liked those arteries anyway...

Steak & Honour were one of the first posh street food vans on the streets of Cambridge, and they're still one of the best. They just do burgers and fries, but boy do they do them well. Maybe it's proprietor Leo Reithoff's background in fine dining - before getting into burgers he worked as a Commis Chef at Hix Mayfair and then a Juniour Sous Chef at the Michelin-starred Alimentum in Cambridge - but there's a real sense that everything from the Cam Cattle meat patties to the flaked nori on the fries has been tweaked and tested to be absolutely as good as it can.

iv) The dumpling place on the market

A bit of a curveball - they don't have hipster-appeal, twitter hype or a pop-up at the Free Press, but they do do rather good dumplings quickly and cheaply in a handy location.

v) Inder's Kitchen

Inder's Kitchen started off as a high-class delivery service, specializing in traditional Indian cooking with fresh, local ingredients. Their van offers kati rolls - soft, luxurious flatbreads wrapped around a mixture of dry meat or paneer, onion salad and chutney. They're warm, satisfying and cheap.

Honourable Mention:
Warm Your Cockles Coffee - they're great, but despite the excellent banana choc chip loaf thing they're a coffee thing rather than a food thing...

Locations:
Saucisse Mon Amour lives on the South side of Station Road and is open most weekdays.
Guerrilla Kitchen, Steak and Honour and Inder's pop up at various places, but can reliably be found at one or more of the Food Park sites - one near the station, one on the West Cambridge Site and one on the Science Park.
The dumpling place on the market is, er, on the market.

The Pub Formerly Known As The County Arms

The County Arms was kind of my local for a while as an undergraduate - it was cheaper and less crowded than the Castle across the street, with a friendly landlord in brightly coloured trousers and a dog that would come out at last orders and play "catch" with beermats. In recent years the management has changed and the dog has gone and it seems to have become less and less well used, probably down to a mix of grumpy staff, indifferent beer, and the existence of a rather nicer pub across the road. I'd been getting worried that it might be on the verge of getting turned into flats, but instead Everards seem to have taken another route and leased it mostly-free-of-tie to some sort of alliance between the local Calverleys Bewery and the people who run The Alexandra Arms on Gwydir Street. It's been heavily revamped and redecorated and has just reopened as The Architect.

The redecoration has made the place look a lot more modern - there's plenty of tastefully painted wood around, with odd touches of industrial chic and some slightly odd schoolroom style chairs that don't look particularly comfortable. It's not breathtakingly good, but it's perfectly convivial, which is all you really need.

The beers that were on when we went in weren't spectacular - Calverleys' Citra Bitter tasted more of wet cardboard than the zingy hops that the name suggested, and Buntingford Hurricane was a bit vegetabley and rather uninspiring. Alison's Moonshine wheatbeer and (keg) Titanic Stout were rather better and the selection of bottles in the fridge - mostly familiar US craft stuff from Anchor, Flying Dog, Goose Island - was respectable. There was also some interesting looking stuff on the "coming soon" board, from the likes of Black Bar and Oakham. None of the cask ales we had were completely clear - possibly they'd been rushed out before they were ready for the opening couple of days? The barman seemed knowledgeable and interested in beer, and was also more enthusiastic about the "coming soon" stuff they had in the cellar than about what was on at the time.

It was fairly quiet for a Thursday night, but possibly a lot of people haven't spotted that it's open yet. Hopefully trade will pick up, and hopefully they'll manage to keep a reasonably interesting beer selection - there's definitely potential here.

With the main review out of the way, time for a minor rant. Calverleys' Twitter feed (currently about the only source of information about the pub) describes it as having "local ales, fantastic food [...] and welcoming staff." I'm actually beginning to find that Cambridge pubs touting their selection of "local ales" is more of a threat than a promise. This is partly because quite a lot of local breweries around here are actually pretty mediocre (given how many excellent best bitters there are in this country, I don't really understand why so many people feel the need to set up making similar but less good versions of the same beer) and I can't really be bothered plodding through half a dozen bad knockoffs of Taylors Landlord or Adnams Bitter just to get to the one that's almost as good as Taylors Landlord or Adnams Bitter, but it's also partly because they're basically damning themselves with faint praise. "We can't really promise that we've got 'interesting beer' or 'exciting beer' or 'great beer', but at least we can say it's local..." If you think you've got the best beers available to humanity then tell me so. And if you're free of tie and you haven't got the best beers available to humanity then get them. (And if you don't know where to get them, then talk to Yvan.) This has been a public service announcement. Thank you.

Urban Shed, King Street

Coffee, food, and "vintage and up-cycled" furniture - Urban Shed is So Very Hipster. Tables are made from sideways cable drums, seats range from wooden primary school chairs to pairs of recliners that appear to have been salvaged from an old plane, and 80's MOR pop LPs play on a mammoth Ferguson Music Centre. Leaflets on the counter explain that the "space" can be booked for "your pop-up". If this sort of over-the-top hipsterism makes you reach for your revolver, you'd probably do well to avoid Urban Shed.

You'd be missing out, though, because - on the evidence of today's lunch, at least - the food is genuinely very good. Alison's brie, roast pepper and oregano mayonnaise panino was a rich, melty treat, while my smoked salmon bap was fantastic, the fish set off perfectly by some rocket and a poppy seed and orange mascapone, and loaded into an lovely crusty multi-seed roll. Unusually for a cafe, the side salads that came with the sandwiches were tasty in their own right, boosted by the unusual addition of a bit of caramelized onion relish. The coffee was also fine - more straightforward and traditional than the big fruity third-wave espresso at places like Hot Numbers and Afternoon Tease, but good and tasty.

Urban Shed forms part of an axis of cafe, from the relocated Nord on Sussex Street, past Stickybeaks on Hobson Street to Clowns, Afternoon Tease and Urban Shed itself on Kings Street. It's the least central of them, and hence seems to be slightly less packed than the others, but on today's evidence it's certainly worth a visit!

The Pint Shop (and other pub news)

Well, it didn't take long for events to make my pub guide post out-of-date, on not one but three counts!

Firstly, the leasehold of the Free Press is up for sale as Craig wants to concentrate on running the Alexandra. Apparently, though, it's going to stay a pub and they're specifically trying to find a new landlord who's a good fit for the place as it is. Secondly, the Man on the Moon has been taken over by Terri and Jethro from the Cambridge Blue. This is good news from a beer point of view, although it's not clear how much it's still going to function as a music venue. Thirdly, and perhaps most excitingly, the building behind the guildhall that used to house the university's pensions department has been turned into The Pint Shop, Cambridge's first entirely new pub since the Regal opened in the late nineties.

The Pint Shop's website claims that its concept is based on the original Beer Houses of the 1830's. In practice, though, anyone who's drunk in places like Craft Beer Co or any of the Tap pubs will recognize fairly quickly that what we're dealing with here is a Craft Beer Bar. Notably, it's the first pub in Cambridge to have a beer range dominated by new-wave breweries like Magic Rock, Kernel and Buxton, and the first place to offer a really serious craft-keg selection.

All this has understandably generated rather a lot of excitement from local beer geeks, so we dropped in on friday to check it out.

The first impression was that they've done a brilliant job with the conversion. Some of the pictures online make it look a bit sterile, but the reality, full of happy chatty beer drinkers, was relaxed and friendly. The main room was a small but not cramped bar, with lots of wood and white paint, while meals are served in a separate dining room. When we were there, the crowd was mostly made up of fairly regular friday night types, and not noticeably dominated by the expected craft-beer hipsters.

The beer was almost all from on-trend new-wave craft breweries, with ten keg and six cask fonts on the bar. The beers range from Kernel's easy-drinking Table Beer up to heavy-hitters like Rogue's I^2PA - a big resinous beast clocking in at 9.5%. The selection was perhaps overly biased towards hoppy pale ales, and consequently lacking a bit of variety, but it sounds like they're already trying to correct that. While the prices of some of the stronger keg beers might surprise people who aren't used to craft beer prices, the mid-strength cask options are about in line with most other Cambridge pubs on that front. As an alternative for the non beer drinkers, there's also a shelf of 30 gins and a range of posh soft drinks - a friend who'd made the tactical error of having to drive home still enjoyed the quince cordial and the home-made lemonade.

The food also looks tempting. The bar snacks are fairly upscale, with interesting sounding things like rabbit pasties and fennel pork scratchings listed, albeit at equally upscale prices. We didn't see the full meals, although based on the sample menu on their website, we'll be going along to try them out as soon as possible.

Overall, then, the Pint Shop adds a great new dimension to the Cambridge pub scene, particularly in an otherwise fairly crap area of town. I don't think it'll be long before we pay another visit.

A Very Rough Guide to Cambridge Pubs

Writing a basic guide to the essential Cambridge pubs seemed like a fairly easy option for a blog post, until I started going through them and realizing just how damn many good pubs there are in this town. I suppose that's a good problem to have, so here we go anyway.

A common theme of the Cambridge pub scene is that there's very little in the way of a divide between "Real Ale Pubs" and "Craft Beer Bars" - it seems that beer drinkers in Cambridge have always been fairly open minded and curious, so a lot of pubs have just gradually diversified and started offering a wider range of beer styles, imported kegged stuff, long lists of bottles and so on alongside the traditional brown bitters. This is generally a good thing, although it has the downside that there are very few places that you can reliably find craft-y stuff, so if you desperately want smoked saisons and Imperial IPAs then you might be better off stopping by Bacchanalia to see what you can pick up. Craft keg is also in very limited supply. This might change soon - we nearly had a Cambridge Tap, but it fell through owing to difficulty finding a location, while Brewdog have also got Cambridge in their sights. Something like this would probably have a positive impact on the scene in general, so we're watching for developments with interest.

Anyway, back to the specifics. The following is, of course, highly subjective and based on my personal experience - there are bits of Cambridge I don't know very well, and there are probably good pubs that I haven't been to.

Mill Road

If you drew some sort of map of "cask ales per square metre" in the UK, you'd have to adjust your scale when you came to do the Mill Road area of Cambridge. It's the traditional epicentre of good beer in Cambridge, so it's a natural place to start. In this neck of the woods, the highlights are:

The Cambridge Blue
Probably the definitive Cambridge beer geek pub. Lots of handpumps, all very well kept, several unusual foreign beers on draught, plus a huge selection of (mainly Belgian) bottles. Serviceable food. Nice big garden and plenty of space, although they bugger up the latter a bit by reserving tables all the time. This would be more annoying if there weren't loads of other excellent pubs within five minutes walk. Including...

The Kingston Arms
Smaller and hence often more crowded than the Cambridge Blue. Eight handpumps plus a reasonable range of Belgian beer in bottles. I've got a vague impression that the cask beer's slightly less obscure but slightly more interesting than the Blue, although that's splitting hairs either way. The food's also good.

The Live and Let Live
A lovely pub - the sort of place where you could happily sit all afternoon and read a book or do a crossword. The beer range isn't as broad as some of the nearby competition, but they normally have a couple of Oakham beers, Nethergate's Umbel Ale, and a couple of other interesting things. They also have a massive rum list, which I've yet to sample. No food, though. It's normally a bit quieter than some of the other Mill Road pubs.

Devonshire Arms
It's a Milton pub, so they normally have a whole bunch of Milton beers and a couple of guests. Decent food, plus it's the closest of the lot to the station.  

Alexandra Arms
It's a Greene King pub, Jim, but not as we know it. Recently taken over by Craig and Jenna of the Free Press (of which more later), who managed to negotiate the condition that in addition to four standard Greene King beers they could get in four free-of-tie guests. This means that rather than the usual GK "brewed in Bury St Edmunds" guest ale selection you get some really good stuff from the likes of Oakham, Green Jack, Buntingford etc. The food is the same as at the Free Press, ie really excellent, with a lot of really good traditional English stuff. The pies - and we're talking proper pies with shortcrust pastry, none of this slop-with-a-top nonsense - are particularly good.

Salisbury Arms
Sort of included for completeness - it used to be the least good of the four key Mill Road pubs (along with the Live, the Blue and the Kingston), but since the Alexandra and the Devonshire are also good these days it's now the least good of the six key Mill Road pubs. Wells and Young beers, nothing special.

Parker's Piece to Maid's Causeway

The Free Press
A lovely traditional pub with a famously tiny snug. The beer is Greene King plus a couple of guests, which aren't as varied as the guests at the Alexandra (see above) but are normally good and are at least not actually brewed by Greene King. Also, the beer tends to be spectacularly well kept, so if you're going to drink Greene King beers anywhere you might as well do it here - the XX Mild is a decent pint.

The Elm Tree
A wonderful pub of the small dark and atmospheric type, with a sign outside promising "Friendly Beers and Well Kept Staff." An increasing number of Cambridge pubs are selling bottled Belgian beers, but only the Elm Tree has a booklet with extended tasting notes for each one they offer. They also have cask ales from Banks & Taylor plus a good range of guests.

The Hopbine
One of those pubs that you'd visit a lot more if there weren't so many other good pubs in Cambridge. It's in a handy location though, and does some decent beers.

Hills Road

The Flying Pig
Unless you start getting out into the villages, the pubs in the south of Cambridge are mostly fairly crap. One exception, though, at least for as long as it can avoid being demolished to make way for yet more boring office blocks, is The Flying Pig. The beer is pretty good and it's got nice vibes - it's fairly dark inside with lots of posters on the walls, dribbly candles and an eclectic selection of music. On nice days the surprisingly large back garden is useful, even if it does look suspiciously like a repurposed carpark. Good cheap food at lunchtimes, but nothing in the evening. Popular with the after-work and pre-gig crowds, but closed saturday and sunday.

King Street

The King Street Run, as anyone passingly familiar with Cambridge legends will inevitably tell you, used to be a pub crawl of some improbably high number of pubs. These days it's much depleted, although there are still a couple worth visiting. The eponymous King Street Run itself is a reasonably entertaining rock pub with some interesting decor, while The Champion of the Thames is a decent traditional Greene King pub. The following two are probably the most noteworthy, though.

The Cambridge Brewhouse
The good news is that they brew their own beer. The bad news is that a lot of other people in East Anglia brew better beer, so this isn't much of a bonus. They are the first place in Cambridge to do multiple craft-keg offerings, though. Whether or not this means that we'll all be drinking Watney's Red Barrel again by Christmas remains to be seen.

The St Radegund
As I understand it, the Radegund isn't actually a Milton pub, they just serve a lot of their beer. It's a lovely little place, in any case. They have a signed picture of Dame Vera Lynn on the wall, which has to count for something, and their own rowing club, who probably couldn't all fit into the tiny and oddly shaped pub at once.

North of the River

The Castle
 An Adnams pub, with the inevitable selection of five moderately hopped light-to-mid brown-bitters from Adnams plus three guests, which are almost inevitably moderately hopped light-to-mid-brown bitters. It's all very well kept, though, and when you fancy something different they've got some nice continental stuff - dark lagers and the like.

The Carpenters Arms
This pub was closed, almost turned into flats, bought out, re-opened and is now trying to sell itself as a dining pub. It seems to be doing okay, although the beer selection seems to have got a bit less interesting after a promising start.

The Haymakers
Out in Chesterton, a pub which was recently saved from closure by the Milton brewery. They've stuck in a good beer range - generally about three of their own and three guests - and started doing really excellent pizza.

The Portland Arms
It's not much as a pub, but it's one of the very few small music venues in Cambridge. It's the default venue for Bad Timing gigs, which is reason enough to love it.

The Carlton Arms
Way out in the wilds of Arbury, the Carlton merits a mention for its decent range of beers. The fact that people don't often trek out there from the centre is mostly down to the number of other excellent pubs in Cambridge - it's well worth a visit if you're in the area.

The Centre

There is a reason that I've left the centre of Cambridge til last here, namely that it's mostly crap for pubs. Go to the Eagle, sure, tell everyone who'll listen that it's where Crick and Watson discovered DNA or something, have an average pint of Abbot or something and then leave. Go to the Regal, it's massive even for a Wetherspoons. Woo. Most of the rest of the centre is similar. Fortunately, though, there are a couple of better options if you know where to look. Most notably...

The Mill
 Nice riverside location - in summer they do plastic glasses so you can sit out by the millpond and watch people make arses of themselves in punts. It's recently been refurbished in a manner which somehow made it seem older than it used to be. More importantly though, the beer got quite a bit better, with a good row of handpumps from local brewers, a couple of passably obscure euro-kegs and (gasp) a craft-keg offering - Black Isle's Organic Porter has usurped the keg-stout slot from the usual Guinness.

The Pickerel
 Another pub that's useful rather than actively great, the Pick is a handy place to stop off on the way back from town or to start an evening. It's a nice old building and they have decent beer, although it can get busy.

The Maypole
I've been leaving arguably the best til last. For a long time, the Maypole was owned by Punch Taverns and had the usual whatever from the Punch beer list plus a load of brightly coloured cocktails by the jug. A couple of years ago, though, the family who run it bought the place out from Punch and got serious on the beer selection, putting in sixteen handpumps and getting beer, generally well chosen and well kept, from a mix of local and national independents. They also have an ever expanding list of bottles, mostly from Belgium, Italy and the US. Rather excellently, they also still do the big jugs of cocktails. This, together with their late license and relatively central location, means that the atmosphere of the place tends to be a bit livelier and more diverse than the standard Cambridge real-ale haven. The location and the building aren't the most inspiring, but there's a nice covered patio area, and in any case, who cares when the beer's this good?

Nord - Bridge Street

This is another of those places that you probably wouldn't guess was there if you hadn't been told about it - which suggests either an unorthodox business plan or a bit of a marketing failure. In any case, having been a couple of times, we're quite glad that we were told about it - thanks to Franny for that one.

Nord is the Scandinavian homeware shop on Bridge Street, and will probably be familiar to people who like buying exquisitely designed but improbably expensive espresso cups. We aren't those people so we were only dimly aware of it, but it turns out that the back room has a cafe, offering a small but interesting selection of Scandinavian foods.

The menu is minimal - savouries are basically limited to cheese, smoked salmon, smoked chicken and marinated herring, each available on rye bread, as part of a salad, or as part of a "platter". I've previously had the herring platter - three different flavours of marinaded herring which, as a confirmed herring fiend, I loved. On this occasion, I picked smoked salmon on rye bread, while Alison went for the cheese selection (this being the only vegetarian option), also on rye.

I always have a nagging doubt about eating this sort of simple assemblage in a cafe or restaurant - I'm sure that I could buy some lovely rich rye bread and a bit of very adequate smoked salmon myself, and it wouldn't be too hard to put together a honey, mustard and dill sauce to go with it. I could even put a little cup of pickled red cabbage and some fresh-if-not-exactly-revolutionary salad on the side. The same goes for Alison's selection of Scandinavian cheeses - even the most exotic of them, the fudgy, part-caramelized gjetost, is available from the Cheese Shop. But in practice I never actually would, and it seems rather churlish to turn your nose up at someone else doing it rather well for less than £4 in a convenient location in town.

To carry on the miserly theme, I've always felt similarly about buying expensive deserts in artisan delis - "it's just a bunch of sugar, flour, eggs and cream, how can you justify paying £4 for a slice?", but these thoughts were blown away by the first forkful of Nord's splendid Norwegian baked cheesecakes.

All in all, we paid about £16 for a simple but interesting light lunch for two. It's not somewhere I'd eat every day - there's a limit to how often even I want to eat marinaded herring, and it's a lot more expensive than just grabbing a sandwich - but for the occasional weekend lunch Nord is, almost literally, a hidden gem.