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.