The Pint Shop (and other pub news)

Well, it didn't take long for events to make my pub guide post out-of-date, on not one but three counts!

Firstly, the leasehold of the Free Press is up for sale as Craig wants to concentrate on running the Alexandra. Apparently, though, it's going to stay a pub and they're specifically trying to find a new landlord who's a good fit for the place as it is. Secondly, the Man on the Moon has been taken over by Terri and Jethro from the Cambridge Blue. This is good news from a beer point of view, although it's not clear how much it's still going to function as a music venue. Thirdly, and perhaps most excitingly, the building behind the guildhall that used to house the university's pensions department has been turned into The Pint Shop, Cambridge's first entirely new pub since the Regal opened in the late nineties.

The Pint Shop's website claims that its concept is based on the original Beer Houses of the 1830's. In practice, though, anyone who's drunk in places like Craft Beer Co or any of the Tap pubs will recognize fairly quickly that what we're dealing with here is a Craft Beer Bar. Notably, it's the first pub in Cambridge to have a beer range dominated by new-wave breweries like Magic Rock, Kernel and Buxton, and the first place to offer a really serious craft-keg selection.

All this has understandably generated rather a lot of excitement from local beer geeks, so we dropped in on friday to check it out.

The first impression was that they've done a brilliant job with the conversion. Some of the pictures online make it look a bit sterile, but the reality, full of happy chatty beer drinkers, was relaxed and friendly. The main room was a small but not cramped bar, with lots of wood and white paint, while meals are served in a separate dining room. When we were there, the crowd was mostly made up of fairly regular friday night types, and not noticeably dominated by the expected craft-beer hipsters.

The beer was almost all from on-trend new-wave craft breweries, with ten keg and six cask fonts on the bar. The beers range from Kernel's easy-drinking Table Beer up to heavy-hitters like Rogue's I^2PA - a big resinous beast clocking in at 9.5%. The selection was perhaps overly biased towards hoppy pale ales, and consequently lacking a bit of variety, but it sounds like they're already trying to correct that. While the prices of some of the stronger keg beers might surprise people who aren't used to craft beer prices, the mid-strength cask options are about in line with most other Cambridge pubs on that front. As an alternative for the non beer drinkers, there's also a shelf of 30 gins and a range of posh soft drinks - a friend who'd made the tactical error of having to drive home still enjoyed the quince cordial and the home-made lemonade.

The food also looks tempting. The bar snacks are fairly upscale, with interesting sounding things like rabbit pasties and fennel pork scratchings listed, albeit at equally upscale prices. We didn't see the full meals, although based on the sample menu on their website, we'll be going along to try them out as soon as possible.

Overall, then, the Pint Shop adds a great new dimension to the Cambridge pub scene, particularly in an otherwise fairly crap area of town. I don't think it'll be long before we pay another visit.

A Very Rough Guide to Cambridge Pubs

Writing a basic guide to the essential Cambridge pubs seemed like a fairly easy option for a blog post, until I started going through them and realizing just how damn many good pubs there are in this town. I suppose that's a good problem to have, so here we go anyway.

A common theme of the Cambridge pub scene is that there's very little in the way of a divide between "Real Ale Pubs" and "Craft Beer Bars" - it seems that beer drinkers in Cambridge have always been fairly open minded and curious, so a lot of pubs have just gradually diversified and started offering a wider range of beer styles, imported kegged stuff, long lists of bottles and so on alongside the traditional brown bitters. This is generally a good thing, although it has the downside that there are very few places that you can reliably find craft-y stuff, so if you desperately want smoked saisons and Imperial IPAs then you might be better off stopping by Bacchanalia to see what you can pick up. Craft keg is also in very limited supply. This might change soon - we nearly had a Cambridge Tap, but it fell through owing to difficulty finding a location, while Brewdog have also got Cambridge in their sights. Something like this would probably have a positive impact on the scene in general, so we're watching for developments with interest.

Anyway, back to the specifics. The following is, of course, highly subjective and based on my personal experience - there are bits of Cambridge I don't know very well, and there are probably good pubs that I haven't been to.

Mill Road

If you drew some sort of map of "cask ales per square metre" in the UK, you'd have to adjust your scale when you came to do the Mill Road area of Cambridge. It's the traditional epicentre of good beer in Cambridge, so it's a natural place to start. In this neck of the woods, the highlights are:

The Cambridge Blue
Probably the definitive Cambridge beer geek pub. Lots of handpumps, all very well kept, several unusual foreign beers on draught, plus a huge selection of (mainly Belgian) bottles. Serviceable food. Nice big garden and plenty of space, although they bugger up the latter a bit by reserving tables all the time. This would be more annoying if there weren't loads of other excellent pubs within five minutes walk. Including...

The Kingston Arms
Smaller and hence often more crowded than the Cambridge Blue. Eight handpumps plus a reasonable range of Belgian beer in bottles. I've got a vague impression that the cask beer's slightly less obscure but slightly more interesting than the Blue, although that's splitting hairs either way. The food's also good.

The Live and Let Live
A lovely pub - the sort of place where you could happily sit all afternoon and read a book or do a crossword. The beer range isn't as broad as some of the nearby competition, but they normally have a couple of Oakham beers, Nethergate's Umbel Ale, and a couple of other interesting things. They also have a massive rum list, which I've yet to sample. No food, though. It's normally a bit quieter than some of the other Mill Road pubs.

Devonshire Arms
It's a Milton pub, so they normally have a whole bunch of Milton beers and a couple of guests. Decent food, plus it's the closest of the lot to the station.  

Alexandra Arms
It's a Greene King pub, Jim, but not as we know it. Recently taken over by Craig and Jenna of the Free Press (of which more later), who managed to negotiate the condition that in addition to four standard Greene King beers they could get in four free-of-tie guests. This means that rather than the usual GK "brewed in Bury St Edmunds" guest ale selection you get some really good stuff from the likes of Oakham, Green Jack, Buntingford etc. The food is the same as at the Free Press, ie really excellent, with a lot of really good traditional English stuff. The pies - and we're talking proper pies with shortcrust pastry, none of this slop-with-a-top nonsense - are particularly good.

Salisbury Arms
Sort of included for completeness - it used to be the least good of the four key Mill Road pubs (along with the Live, the Blue and the Kingston), but since the Alexandra and the Devonshire are also good these days it's now the least good of the six key Mill Road pubs. Wells and Young beers, nothing special.

Parker's Piece to Maid's Causeway

The Free Press
A lovely traditional pub with a famously tiny snug. The beer is Greene King plus a couple of guests, which aren't as varied as the guests at the Alexandra (see above) but are normally good and are at least not actually brewed by Greene King. Also, the beer tends to be spectacularly well kept, so if you're going to drink Greene King beers anywhere you might as well do it here - the XX Mild is a decent pint.

The Elm Tree
A wonderful pub of the small dark and atmospheric type, with a sign outside promising "Friendly Beers and Well Kept Staff." An increasing number of Cambridge pubs are selling bottled Belgian beers, but only the Elm Tree has a booklet with extended tasting notes for each one they offer. They also have cask ales from Banks & Taylor plus a good range of guests.

The Hopbine
One of those pubs that you'd visit a lot more if there weren't so many other good pubs in Cambridge. It's in a handy location though, and does some decent beers.

Hills Road

The Flying Pig
Unless you start getting out into the villages, the pubs in the south of Cambridge are mostly fairly crap. One exception, though, at least for as long as it can avoid being demolished to make way for yet more boring office blocks, is The Flying Pig. The beer is pretty good and it's got nice vibes - it's fairly dark inside with lots of posters on the walls, dribbly candles and an eclectic selection of music. On nice days the surprisingly large back garden is useful, even if it does look suspiciously like a repurposed carpark. Good cheap food at lunchtimes, but nothing in the evening. Popular with the after-work and pre-gig crowds, but closed saturday and sunday.

King Street

The King Street Run, as anyone passingly familiar with Cambridge legends will inevitably tell you, used to be a pub crawl of some improbably high number of pubs. These days it's much depleted, although there are still a couple worth visiting. The eponymous King Street Run itself is a reasonably entertaining rock pub with some interesting decor, while The Champion of the Thames is a decent traditional Greene King pub. The following two are probably the most noteworthy, though.

The Cambridge Brewhouse
The good news is that they brew their own beer. The bad news is that a lot of other people in East Anglia brew better beer, so this isn't much of a bonus. They are the first place in Cambridge to do multiple craft-keg offerings, though. Whether or not this means that we'll all be drinking Watney's Red Barrel again by Christmas remains to be seen.

The St Radegund
As I understand it, the Radegund isn't actually a Milton pub, they just serve a lot of their beer. It's a lovely little place, in any case. They have a signed picture of Dame Vera Lynn on the wall, which has to count for something, and their own rowing club, who probably couldn't all fit into the tiny and oddly shaped pub at once.

North of the River

The Castle
 An Adnams pub, with the inevitable selection of five moderately hopped light-to-mid brown-bitters from Adnams plus three guests, which are almost inevitably moderately hopped light-to-mid-brown bitters. It's all very well kept, though, and when you fancy something different they've got some nice continental stuff - dark lagers and the like.

The Carpenters Arms
This pub was closed, almost turned into flats, bought out, re-opened and is now trying to sell itself as a dining pub. It seems to be doing okay, although the beer selection seems to have got a bit less interesting after a promising start.

The Haymakers
Out in Chesterton, a pub which was recently saved from closure by the Milton brewery. They've stuck in a good beer range - generally about three of their own and three guests - and started doing really excellent pizza.

The Portland Arms
It's not much as a pub, but it's one of the very few small music venues in Cambridge. It's the default venue for Bad Timing gigs, which is reason enough to love it.

The Carlton Arms
Way out in the wilds of Arbury, the Carlton merits a mention for its decent range of beers. The fact that people don't often trek out there from the centre is mostly down to the number of other excellent pubs in Cambridge - it's well worth a visit if you're in the area.

The Centre

There is a reason that I've left the centre of Cambridge til last here, namely that it's mostly crap for pubs. Go to the Eagle, sure, tell everyone who'll listen that it's where Crick and Watson discovered DNA or something, have an average pint of Abbot or something and then leave. Go to the Regal, it's massive even for a Wetherspoons. Woo. Most of the rest of the centre is similar. Fortunately, though, there are a couple of better options if you know where to look. Most notably...

The Mill
 Nice riverside location - in summer they do plastic glasses so you can sit out by the millpond and watch people make arses of themselves in punts. It's recently been refurbished in a manner which somehow made it seem older than it used to be. More importantly though, the beer got quite a bit better, with a good row of handpumps from local brewers, a couple of passably obscure euro-kegs and (gasp) a craft-keg offering - Black Isle's Organic Porter has usurped the keg-stout slot from the usual Guinness.

The Pickerel
 Another pub that's useful rather than actively great, the Pick is a handy place to stop off on the way back from town or to start an evening. It's a nice old building and they have decent beer, although it can get busy.

The Maypole
I've been leaving arguably the best til last. For a long time, the Maypole was owned by Punch Taverns and had the usual whatever from the Punch beer list plus a load of brightly coloured cocktails by the jug. A couple of years ago, though, the family who run it bought the place out from Punch and got serious on the beer selection, putting in sixteen handpumps and getting beer, generally well chosen and well kept, from a mix of local and national independents. They also have an ever expanding list of bottles, mostly from Belgium, Italy and the US. Rather excellently, they also still do the big jugs of cocktails. This, together with their late license and relatively central location, means that the atmosphere of the place tends to be a bit livelier and more diverse than the standard Cambridge real-ale haven. The location and the building aren't the most inspiring, but there's a nice covered patio area, and in any case, who cares when the beer's this good?

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.

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...