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.