Review
William Sitwell reviews Market House, Cambridge: ‘Some excellent hits – and experimental misses’
With fine and friendly service, Market House is a mixed bag that would do well to fire on more cylinders
I shared a house for a time at university with two chaps who, so they could be properly distinguished, I nicknamed Mr Big and Mr Friggin’ Enormous.
All these years later and they remain joyously sizeable. Mr Big’s mother, a tiny and unfailingly kind little bird of a lady, died recently. So Mr FE and I journeyed to a crematorium near Cambridge for her funeral. In a speech at the wake Mr Big recalled her near-miss with death a few years back. He stood with his brother and the doctor by her bed and his mother beckoned him close. A final, historic last word? ‘Stand straight, dear,’ she admonished him in a whisper.
Before the crem Mr FE and I booked into a new place called Market House on the site of an old Italian restaurant called Don Pasquale on Market Hill. Research revealed a ‘wine bar and restaurant’. I liked the idea of the wine bar: a few sips of interesting wines in bustling surrounds to steel our nerves for Mr Big’s eulogy.
I booked it rather than the restaurant. The wine bar turns out to be in the basement, and it’s a low-ceilinged sort of crypt that’s really a café. Apparently it only ‘transforms into a stylish wine bar’ in the evening. So, with the detective in me establishing no actual bar nor discernible signs of life down there, we ventured instead upstairs to the restaurant, where there was, at least, a couple on one other table.
The decor is an awkward mix of bare-brick walls, a feature wall of Japanese-style wallpaper, pea-green banquette seating, strip wall lights and back-lit alcoves with plastic-looking orchids. The emotional effect being more of teeth-pulling than bonhomie.
Mr FE saw the words ‘ham hock’ on the starters, which appealed to him as he could easily eat an entire ham as an amuse bouche. Meanwhile the word ‘Pinney’s’ tempted me – a devotee of Aldeburgh and its environs – to the smoked salmon.
Mr FE’s starter was a ‘ham hock panna cotta’. And very experimentally disastrous it was too, although the concept did rather match the decor in that it really didn’t work. In a large glass bowl (on a bed of raw kidney beans on a blue-grey china plate) sat a heavy panna cotta, on top of which were some strips of pulled ham, some yellowed cauliflower tops, pea shoots and a sprinkling of onion seeds.
The whole thing ached to be a pâté or a mousse, but the chef was forcing it to be a panna cotta, and a panna cotta that got nul points on the wobbleometer. I had a spoonful – you could slice it like a cake, and it ate like ham-flavoured jelly.
Poor old Mr FE. Especially since I was revelling in a joyous, rich and soft piece of salmon, with (more) pea shoots, perfectly dressed and with dollops of sweet crème fraîche.
Order was restored for us both with excellent main courses, showing the chef at his best. Precision-cooked cod (Mr FE) was in a rich stew of butterbean and chorizo; and my seriously excellent monkfish came atop a pile of smooth, rich and deftly spiced yellow dahl topped with strips of pickled carrot and coriander, with a little pouring pot of broth of mussels and coconut. This was wholesome, generous cooking.
We finished with a chocolate delice that reminded me of mass-catered awards-ceremony desserts. It reflected how I tend to feel at awards ceremonies: flat and unaccomplished.
With fine and friendly service, Market House is a mixed bag that would do well to fire on more cylinders – as Mr Big did as he delivered a rip-roaring eulogy as we bade farewell to wee bonnie Ruth.
Read last week's column: William Sitwell reviews Compton, London: ‘This place is good – I’d take my favourite aunt’