David Jenkins’ Weblog

It was a bit of a squeeze to get in because the St John’s Chop House, in common with most other restaurants this month, is heavily booked for Christmas parties. However get in we did and we had a fine table upstairs close to our own ‘private’ bar!

I remember the time when there was no a restaurant on the site where the Chop House now trades. In the mid 60s there was a grocer’s shop but it was then reinvented as an Italian restaurant: the Bistro Italo. This was a sister restaurant to theVino Bistro in Mill Road and both restaurants offered ’sophisticated’ fare at affordable prices. I remember 3 course lunches for ten shillings and a dinner for 2 including wine for three quid.

There’s a gap in my knowledge of about 30 years but I do know that in the Mid 90s it was Michel’s, a rather up market establishment, then Prezzo, pasta and pizza, before becoming St John’s earlier this year.

Inside it is what you’d expect of a chop house: plain wood, cool lighting and, what has now become de rigeur, black uniformed serving staff. The service was good: efficient and attentive. And there’s an excellent wine list with most wines available by the glass.

And food? Starters are modest and heavily salad based. The salads where pleasantly aromatic. The menu of mains was maybe disappointing. It’s a chop house so where are the chops?  Fair enough there was a pork chop, pronounced excellent by one of our number, but no lamb chops. I’d have expected at least a Barnsley Chop.

5 out of our 6 were happy. My steak was excellent and the hand cut chips were impressively variable. Two sea bass were fine, the pork chop was good as noted above and the lady who took the suet dish pronounced it excellent. The disappointment was the goose: chewy and dry. Perhaps an aberration.

The desert menu is very heavy and certainly after a suet pudding you can’t handle a toffee pudding. Perhaps the next version could be a little lighter. But there is a real coffee machine and the espresso was just fine. £30 a head, including service, is not a bad deal.

Nobody goes to Cuba for the food. In restaurants the choice is generally chicken, fish or meat and the meat is usually pork.You get some salad (good) and some vegetables cooked English ie over-cooked (bad). And for dessert it always seems to be flan. But the Cafe Cienfuegos is different. (more…)

The Guardian yesterday ran an article about Suffolk for the benefit of Roy Keane who’s just taken over the manger’s role at Ipswich. It talked of sheep and tractors and contrasted the pace of Suffolk life with that of Manchester and that part of Cheshire beloved of its footballers. (more…)

For collectors of meaningless trivia: if you want to find a restaurant midway between Histon and Market Harborough go to Keyston. Keystonis just oof the A14 west of Huntingdon and it strikes me as a rather affluent village. The blue bins mark it out as being in Huntingdonshire and it boasts a fine church, a manor house and a fine restaurant at the Pheasant. (more…)

Yesterday was a good day for food. I started off with a cardiac breakfast at my hotel, the Crown, in Harrogate. And after a 4 train journey back to Cambridge I enjoyed my weekly steak which is the one meal that I’m allowed and expected to cook. In between was lunch at the Drum and Monkey, small but perfectly formed. (more…)

Tuesday evening we fancied Japanese food and instead of going south to Teri Aki in Cambridge which is very good we headed north instead and ended up in Leeds at Little Tokyo. Actually that’s not true. It was number one daughter’s birthday and we went up to surprise her. The wife hatched a plot with Clare’s number 1 man, Alex, and we headed north. (more…)

Have you noticed that when you find a restaurant with a super value set menu you generally end up spending twice as much as you expected when you went in ? So it was with me today when I was attracted by the £9.95 on offer at Edwinns in Cambridge. By the time I’d added a glass of wine (it was Saturday) and an espresso my bill added up to £17.27! (more…)

It’s Sunday lunchtime. There’s nothing in the fridge and you decide to head off and find a pub for lunch. As long as it’s not Mothers’ Day you’ve got a chance or have you? But you head off hopefully without any specific plan just looking for the perfect pub. (more…)

Last Saturday saw me heading north ‘into the Fens’. We Cambridge people, and if you live in Histon like I do you really are a Cambridge person when it comes to thinking about the rest of the county, tend to think of the Fens like others think of a foreign land. Cambridge is flat but as soon as you get north of Cottenham (a so called Fen-edge village) you get to understand what flat really means. And we rarely go there (although I was up in Parson Drove, which is practically Lincolnshire, earlier in the month). (more…)