‘Crimes against tarts aside, the food is sublime': William Sitwell reviews Margaret's, Cambridge

Telegraph

10-07-2025

Some folk get remembered by having their names carved on park benches. But since only weirdos or people who want to be pranked by Dom Joly sit on park benches, it's better, for posterity, to be bolted onto a restaurant. Hence Margaret being immortalised in Cambridge. She's a much-loved regular of Restaurant 22, a posh gaff on an unusually plain street in Cambridge mere minutes from all the handsome ones and magnificent buildings ringed by bicycles.
Her name adorns a second, more casual offering by the 22 team, also on Chesterton Road, and, because it is so well conceived, styled and delivered, Margaret's name has a chance of remaining in lights long into the future while the park benches are subsumed by panhandlers and pigeon spoils.
The restaurant is a paean to beige and brown, with comfortable seating, a fine-looking window bar and dinky, gorgeous little booths for two. There's a set menu (not a tasting menu, mind), modest and manageable both in terms of tummy and wallet. You need only pick your main course and pud.
It is all beautifully executed, and I'll tell you how, once we deal with the one duff bit – the one part that would have poor Maggie falling out of her punt. Because Margaret's can't make a proper treacle tart. It's too smooth, its crust too thin, its texture all wrong. The filling needs those bitey crumbs that fully divorce it from a smooth custard. It should be rustic, earthy and sweet, and tempered with cream. Not trying, as this one does ill-advisedly, to melt in the mouth. (The finest shop-bought treacle tart I ever had, and had lots of, was from Browns of Blakesley, an old-school grocer's in Northamptonshire. Just thinking about it makes me yearn for long-gone Sunday lunches at home of roast chicken then that pud…)
But crimes against tarts aside, Margaret's food is seriously sublime – the cooking without fault, delivering well-balanced dishes and the finest cheffing nicely short of too many knobs on top.
I challenge you to find a better focaccia, so soft was the bread we started with, so thin and crisp the crust and with the lightest dab of olive oil. It came with a chickpea hummus and one made of broad beans, deftly done; they can end up all horrid and cardboardy in the wrong hands. Here they were light and fresh and summery. There was oil, too, mixed with a vinegar of blackcurrant which was literally heroic – so tart and tasty, even if it was, spookily, the colour of blood.
Then came a waft of starters: in a beautiful little pot, a pea soup that would astonish the greatest horticulturalist, so vivid was its flavour (with little bites of wild garlic to make the dish a strong contender for favourite slurp of 2025). There was a terrine of chicken – a masterclass of soft, fresh pressing – and a bit of monkfish, the flesh so tender and batter so thin and crisp I wondered quite how the hell they did it.
And then, boy, can they source and cook a piece of lamb. My main course was rump, the skin rendered just right, the flesh pink, served with a sauce that was rich but not enough to cramp the lamb's style. It came with sweet Jersey Royals in a gentle mayo and a salad worth pausing at: served at room temperature, starring ripe tomatoes that I've not experienced this side of the Mediterranean. They had that soft bite, that warming flavour – tomatoes that make you hate all other tomatoes, just as turning left in a plane ruins flight travel for life.
Then that treacle tart. Which, with Margaret's being so otherwise wonderful, I've forgotten all about.