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.