Address: Venue, Cambridge
I am rather sensitive about the whereabouts of chefs after the Admiralty debacle (when Eric Guilbert, the chef whose skills I had lauded, jumped ship a week or so after my review, to the chagrin of those who booked a table on my say-so). So, imagine how I felt in Cambridge last week when I learned that the nameless chef, whose lunchtime cooking I had just enjoyed, was emigrating to Spain in three days. I was so cross that I kicked a lamp-post until my toe hurt.
In which case, why should I bother to carry on with this review, you may well ask. Well, after a long conversation with the management, I was convinced that, while the chef may change, the style of the place and its food will remain much the same, which is individual to say the least. Beyond that, in a city of a thousand Cafe Flos, Garfunkels, All Bar Ones, Cafe Rouges, etc etc etc, Venue strikes a cheerfully individual note. In that, it is not quite alone - Restaurant Twenty-Two and Midsummer House keep the independents' flag flying in Cambridge - but those two are justly celebrated in guides. Venue is not yet and, in answer to a purposeful recommendation from a reader, it was to Venue that I went.
If I had not bothered, the charming young woman who looked after me and the manager could have packed up for the day and gone sun-bathing. I shared the 50s-kitsch dining room with one other lunchtimer. All too soon, he had munched and gone, leaving me to the Arne Jacobsen chairs, the cream walls broken here and there by flat planes of candy-floss pink, ice-lolly orange and odd, larger-than-life-sized, Heath-esque cut-out cartoon figures; and the charming rope of white lightbulbs hung like a string of giant pearls over metal balustrading at the far end of the room. A piano and microphone made up the slightly surreal arrangements for the room. There was no canned music, just the ghost of jazz evenings past.
This may all sound awful to you, but it isn't. It has a gawky charm and distinct personality, qualities that we don't find as frequently as we should these days, when everything is calibrated by corporate design strategy or cloned from one or two originals. Added to which, you can have two courses of big-tasting, individually prepared, properly cooked food for £9.50 - no more than you would end up paying for conveyor-belt dishes of dubious parentage at any number of ersatz Continental-style chains.
I did not choose from the lunchtime set menu, tempted though I was by smoked salmon soup and grilled chicken fillet with lemon, rosemary, salad and potatoes. I decided that a terrine of spiced sardines and thyme with saffron, tomato and lemon dressing followed by roasted chump of English lamb with carrot-and-sultana chutney and tzatziki suited my mood better.
Mixing and matching of ingredients and cooking styles seems to hold universal sway these days, but whoever has the final say over the Venue menu has a pretty unusual touch. There were some really seriously considered vegetarian dishes for a start - chickpea mousseline frite with parsley-mint tabbouleh and creamed aïoli, for example. And then there are the herbs and spices - thyme with the sardines; cinnamon, ginger and turmeric oil; minted hollandaise sauce; carrots in ginger oil; grated potato and horseradish to go alongside a smoked salmon and samphire salad - which add a distinctly idiosyncratic, not to say quirky, cast to the food.
The terrine turned out to be a generous block of layers of mildly mashed sardines and slices of suitably waxy potatoes. It was expertly assembled and genuinely spiced. It would have benefited from having been out of the fridge for longer, as the chill killed off the thyme and damped down the other flavours, but this was an unusual and effective dish, all the more so because the dressing was first rate.
At first glance, the main course may seem even more bizarre, but if you remember that Indians temper the heat of curries with yoghurt and that Armenians like to splash the stuff into their stews, the combination of English roasted lamb, Indian chutney and Greek salad is not so odd as it may first appear. It is also really rather good. The cause of the dish was helped by exceptionally fine lamb, generously flavoured, thickly sliced, nicely pink and properly seasoned.
The "chutney" was more like shredded carrot with sultanas, gingered up with masala, but the spicy sweetness went cheerfully along with the meat, while the tzatziki added a cooling crunch. To these were added a bowl of spectacularly good slices of crisply sautéed potatoes draped in a gently garlicky sauce. Killer stuff.
A plum-and-almond tart brought things to a substantial conclusion, and a bill for £43.20 - £29.25 of which went on the food, and the rest on two glasses of wine, water and coffee. For serious headbangers, the William Hagues and Euan Blairs of this world, there's a bar upstairs, which has a generous sprinkling of cocktails around the £3.50 mark.
So that's Venue as it is now, and as it will remain - at least, until the new chef, whoever he or she may be, takes things into their own hands and starts making those changes that all chefs must make sooner or later, or else go mad.
