The Cambridge Chop House
There’s a new kid on the block. It has opened on the site of 1 King’s Parade in Cambridge, and it’s called The Cambridge Chop House. There’s a cool, clean look to the place, thanks to minimalist styling with whitewashed brick walls and white lighting which offsets polished wood-topped tables. The menu is well within the comfort zone, but with clever, imaginative touches and there’s a very good value wine list with several good quality New World wines at reasonable prices. There’s a board which features the day’s sausages, handmade on the premises, with different varieties of mash and sauce, and there’s a suet pudding of the day.
To begin with I chose a goat’s cheese pasty with mixed leaves and walnut with a honey dressing. It was like a Cornish pasty with succulent, flaky pastry but with melted cheese inside instead of meat. All very good, and with nice crisp leaves. My fellow diner went for the Beenleigh blue cheese with little gem and toasted walnuts and declared it good.
I settled on the suet pudding of the day when I discovered it was steak and kidney pudding. It was large, and featured good lean chunks of steak and kidney in an inverted bowl-shaped pudding covering. It was very tasty, but so big that I couldn’t manage the hazelnut mash and steamed greens I’d chosen to accompany it. Very satisfying. My companion selected the Grassmere Farm thick-cut bacon with duck egg and chips. It was indeed thick cut, very salty and utterly delicious, as were the duck egg, perfectly done, and the excellent chips.
To accompany this feast we drank a Magpie Estate “The Beak” shiraz-cabernet blend which managed to be both fruity and mellow at 14.5 percent. The Chop House is a most welcome addition to the Cambridge dining scene, and with fare of this quality is set to become very popular.