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.
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