Mill Road Winter Fair 2012

Having started in 2005, Mill Road Winter Fair is a fairly recent thing and a very good one.

The basic premise is that Mill Road and a few of the surrounding streets are closed to traffic for most of the day (the 1st saturday in december, specifically) and the area plays host to a range of events, music, art and (of course) food. Some of this is from stalls that have turned up for the day, some of it is from the shops, community and religious groups and general residents putting tables out the front to showcase a bit of what they can do.

Frankly, we were too busy eating, drinking and talking to take many pictures, but our foodie highlights included:

• Chinese dumplings from Winfield Chinese supermarket,
• lots of pakora,
• the first lahmacun I've seen in the wild since we moved away from Green Lanes courtesy of Tulip,
• a mushroom pie from Pavitt's Pies
• tastings of Moonshine beers and mulled cider at Bacchanalia
• some fairly silly chilli sauces from Cambridge Chilli Farm
• some seriously thick hot chocolate from Limoncello - a life saver on a cold December day and
• kimbab (think Korean maki rolls) from Seoul Plaza who are making no efforts at all to cash in on another recent Korean sensation:

Ichiro Ramen, Cambridge

The old adage that if you build a better mousetrap then the world will beat a path to your door conspicuously fails to apply to restaurants. A good location, a well-known name and good presentation do enough to get people through the doors that the actual quality of the food is barely relevant, while the best food in the world is going to be wasted if you aren't actually getting people to the tables to eat it.

Ichiro Ramen, the Japanese / Malaysian restaurant that used to be on King's Street and is now on Homerton Street is a case in point. Homerton Street is the odd little cul-de-sac on the opposite side of Hills Road from the leisure park, and the fact that I have to explain this should probably set alarm bells ringing. It's the home of the Chinese buffet that you can see advertised from the train as you come into Cambridge, and until recently it had a Sichuan restaurant, too. Ichiro Ramen seems to have taken over the premises (and, confusingly, the illuminated sign) of the latter. Even in its King's Street incarnation, Ichiro was easy to miss, but here it might as well be on Mars as far as passing trade goes. There are probably undercover CIA operatives in Cambridge whose presence is better publicized, and sadly this seems to be reflected in an almost empty restaurant.

What makes this most upsetting is the fact that the food at Ichiro is so damned good.

I'd been once before, and been generally impressed by the vegetable tempura, yaki gyoza, katsu curry and laksa, but this last visit we hit the jackpot. Visiting with a friend for a bite to eat before a gig, we started off with takoyaki and roti canai respectively. The roti canai was excellent - two buttery, flaky, paratha-like flatbreads served with a single chicken thigh in a deliciously spicy curry sauce - but the takoyaki were astonishing. I'd not tried these before, but they turn out to be deep fried batter balls, stuffed with minced octopus and topped with Japanese mayonnaise and one of those mysterious Japanese brown sauces. The result is beguilingly complicated in its mix of subtle and unfamiliar flavors but straightforwardly satisfying in its oily crunch.

For main courses, we'd both gone for the sort of big-bowl soups that form the backbone of the menu. My friend went for fish laksa, which he seemed more than happy with, while I went for the seafood kimchi udon. It's perhaps characteristic of what you're getting at Ichiro that where a lot of restaurants treat "seafood" as meaning a few prawns and maybe a bit of squid if you're lucky, my bowl of noodle soup came topped with octopus, prawns, mussels, seaweed and a whole salmon steak, as well as the eponymous kimchi.

As we neared the end of the mammoth bowls of soup, the chef - possibly feeling the want of anything else to do in an empty restaurant - emerged from the kitchen to offer us a delicate little apple salad, spiked with with slithers of chilli and pork crackling. Like everything else we ate, it was excellent.

The bill came £40 for two including service, for two courses plus the ubiquitous green tea.

So to conclude: Ichiro Ramen is good. Very good. Get there as soon as you can, because you might not have the chance for very long...

Cambridge Market for Beginners

Cambridge market has a bewildering array of stalls, selling everything from cheap fruit and veg to truffles to second hand records to pottery to "I *heart* LONDON" t-shirts.

What follows clearly isn't a complete inventory of the stalls, or even of the good ones: it's just a biased selection of some of the ones that I use a lot. There's loads more good things to be found (I mean, I haven't even mentioned the fudge or the cheese or the Hot Sausages...) so go and explore.

The coffee man

The phrase "a true Cambridge institution" is massively overused, not least by me, but the coffee man is it. The basic idea is fairly self-explanatory - a wide range of teas and coffees, the latter ground (or not) to your specification. The quality is generally top notch, although the bags aren't completely airtight so you'll trail a distinct smell of roasted beans around with you for the rest of the day. The coffee man himself is remarkably calm and quiet for someone who spends his life surrounded by enough caffeine to get a small army wired, and gives the general impression that he'll be there long after the university has crumbled.

The olive and spice stall

Again, fairly self explanatory - a really impressive range of spices, some really nice olives sold by the pot, reasonably priced olive oil and a few odds and ends of nuts, dried fruit, rice cakes and similar stuff.

The self-service vegetable stall near the middle

For my money, this is about the best of the regular / cheap vegetable stalls. They get in a good range of slightly obscure stuff sometimes (look out for wild mushrooms in autumn, horseradish root, jerusalem artichokes), and while I haven't compared their prices against the other vegetable stalls on the market, they seem to be significantly cheaper than Sainsburys. The quality is generally decent, and stuff is below par then you can tell by looking at it because (unlike some of the vegetable stalls) it's self-service. They also tend to sell stuff that's local and in season where they can, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

The Caribbean cake man

Nice cakes plus tasty (and cheap) Jamaica patties. Generally so friendly that if you stop within a couple of metres of them for more than a few seconds you'll end up buying something. Not that that's a bad thing.

The book stall

They sell books. We like books. They've generally got a good stock of interesting stuff, so it's always worth a look.

So what's it all about?

Basically, this is a blog about Cambridge. I've been living here for a couple of years, and I spent a few more years here about ten years ago, and one thing that I've noticed is that there's a great deal of really good stuff going on - food, music, pubs, shops - that can be quite hard to find out about. This in turn means that it's quite hard for people who do good stuff to keep it going: more than once, I've finally got around to checking somewhere out, found out that it was really good, and then come back a week or two later to find it closed.

So hopefully this blog will provide a bit of a shortcut and introduce you to a few things that you might not otherwise have noticed...