"Take a Wheeldon-esque companion while you’re at it: he might actually enjoy it."Isobel Cockerell

Tom Wheeldon

In the outer Siberia past Christ’s pieces lurks the sub-culture of Mill Road, full of independent restaurants where Cambridge’s doyennes of the metropolitan elite such as Miss Cockerell go to eat, in a vain attempt to absolve themselves of a totally unnecessary guilt at growing up in nice houses in Notting Hill. There are many fine culinary establishments around here – the Turkish restaurant Tulip being its delectable jewel in the crown – but Norfolk Street’s Zhongua Traditional Snacks is not one of them.

Issy suggested that I liked it more than the impression I gave, as epitomised by the look of furious dismay in the picture above. Admittely, the pork and prawn dumplings were exquisite – the crispy texture on the outside combined delectably with the juiciness of the prawns and the tenderness of the pork. They pulled off the tricky feat of putting two subtle flavours together, without one overwhelming the other.

But this single success serves only to highlight this place’s appalling culinary standards. Churchill’s famous description of Russia as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ springs to mind when one is confronted with the question of how Issy or anyone could describe the seaweed as ‘delicious’. It looked and tasted like it was picked up from the beach at Skegness, imbued with the flavour of the nuclear waste and raw sewage with which it was carried from the sea onto the shore.

After attempting to eat this monstrosity, I moved onto the egg and ‘edible fungus’ dumplings (they may well feel the need to specifically designate it as ‘edible’ because so much of their food is inedible). Instead of utter egregiousnesss, I found bland mediocrity. It was like Aldi ravioli, with the same absence of flavour, the same sweaty yet starchy exterior – but I suppose nothing could have prepared me for the following course: pig’s ears. I was expecting a crunchy batter coating – like that which the best Italian restaurants put on the finest squid the shining deep blue Mediterranean sea can offer. Pig’s ears are a horrible enough food as it is, but Zhonghua made a pig’s ear of cooking them. It was like trying to eat my own measly, unchewable biceps. It was a culinary experience down there with the vile moment in that vile book American Psycho when Patrick Bateman takes his girlfriend out for her birthday, gets a urinal cake from the toilets, asks the chefs to coat it in chocolate and subsequently tells her it’s a special dessert, and so she actually eats it.

If you want dinner amongst the edgy vibe of the Mill Road earlier, I would ardently recommend – with every fibre of my being – that you opt for the fine Anatolian cuisine at Tulip, instead of exposing yourself to the cruel and unusual offences to the palate on offer at Zhongua.

Isobel Cockerell

"I ordered for both of us, like a fat businessman would for his lady companion, with relish."Isobel Cockerell

Zhongua Traditional Snacks on Norfolk Street is, naturally, Tom Wheeldon’s nightmare in a restaurant. Wheeldon is the kind of man who one would fully expect to drag a teddy around campus, who reveres the cold stone and hushed traditions of old Oxbridge, and deplores Cripps courts, technology, lefties, general hoi polloi and the seething mass of cretins he views as most people outside the enclave of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The crowd at Zhongua, therefore, were perplexing to him. On one table sat a man in a fedora strumming a Ukelele, on another a noisy family, and dotted around were a number of Chinese students eating separately and alone with their headphones plugged in. We were directed to sit down next to one of these – to Tom’s utter amazement.

Zhongua is a popular pre-Picturehouse hang out for the dark horses of the Cambridge student scene. Those rare birds who live outside College on Mill Road populate this place frequently, the types who wear black, smoke roll-up cigarettes and slurp their noodles over a volume of Isherwood. We ordered the seaweed salad (Wheeldon cheered up when he thought it would be old fashioned crispy seaweed, and flagged visibly when he realised it was actual kelp, tossed in a zingy chilli and soy dressing, eaten like spaghetti, and quite delicious). I ordered for both of us, like a fat businessman would for his lady companion, with relish. Along with the kelp, we had the egg and black fungus steamed dumplings, the prawn and pork fried dumplings, a tom yum soup and – this, perhaps, was pushing it – the five-spice pig’s ears. These last were, well, cartilage-y. I sort of thought they would be like dry, crunchy crackling, but they really were just like munching on bits of tragus. They went cold incredibly quickly, and weren’t any better for it.

But the dumplings, soup and salads are the understated triumph of Zhongua, with their zinging freshness and savoury depth. If you don’t mind sharing slightly sticky tables with Mill Road’s finest, you’d be hard-pressed to spend more than a tenner on a varied and satisfying lunch. Drag yourself away from your collegiate bubble and over to Norfolk street. Take a Wheeldon-esque companion while you’re at it: he might actually enjoy it.