Tom Womack

I've had two elaborate restaurant meals in Cambridge this week, which is two more than I have most months.

The first was last Wednesday ghoti's 29th birthday, for which she'd booked the downstairs room at 22 Chesterton Road. They had excellent bread: a really malty, cinnamonny fruit loaf, a really nutty brown and a really rosemary-ridden white. I had a red wine risotto as starter, wonderfully fishy haddock served on some kind of seaweed base as main course, and a particularly unsubtle pudding composed of a lake of salt-caramel inside a square of chocolate hazelnut mousse, served with chocolate and milk sorbets and a wafer-thin hazelnut biscuit the shape of Wisconsin.



After one evening of gourmet delectation, proposals for a second evening of gourmet delectation go down more easily; I'd been looking forward to seeing nou, who I'd met at Oxford and not seen for years, on Wednesday but she couldn't make it. So she organised another meal, at the newly-opened Alimentum on Hills Road; me, nou, ewx and karen2205 who I'd encountered on IRC but never in person.

Leather chairs, wall-covering seemingly made of satin pillows, a big glass window to encourage people-watching if only the Cambridge Leisure Centre was a haunt of people worth the watching at eight on a Tuesday evening, slightly intrusive background music, a general sense of slightly OTT deliberate poshness. Cocktails to start - gin and blackberry for me. As a starter, smoked eel, served with potatoes, microtomed artichoke and a couple of thin slices of truffle, little cubes of tasty jelly which on request turned out to be balsamic-vinegar flavour. Clearly excellent eel, though I'm not sure truffle in slices is a taste I'm so keen on. The others had a single chicken raviolo served with mushrooms and baked jamon iberico.

The main meal for me was lamb done three ways; slices of neck cooked pink, a sweetbread (I had traded haddock for a bit of uisgebeatha's sweetbread at the previous restaurant, and liked the dumpling texture and sheep-pate taste), and a little pot of a moussaka made with lamb braised to dissolution, and raisins. Others had bavette of beef - a very large slab of beautifully-cooked cow - and sea bass.

For dessert (nou has pictures) I had a deconstructed apricot crumble; a clingfilm-thin piece of hard caramel, a swoosh of apricot jus, a blob of just-barely-mashed apricot, and an ice cream, topped with crumble topping, that itself tasted of crumble topping.

These are both fancy restaurants - 22 was £45 a head, Alimentum £55 a head, wine and service included - but both worth it when you've assembled a critical mass of friends to whom the prospect of really fantastic food is more appealing than money. I only have to forgo Monday pizza and Thursday liver-and-bacon at the pub for the month of August to break even, and it's probably well worth it.