Yesterday I spent four hours in Tatties. I’m not sure whether this says more about me or whether it is more revealing of the homely qualities of this Cambridge institution.

There are two Tatties: one on Sidney Street and the other, to which I refer, on Trinity Street. There is something generally quite comforting about Tatties.  It’s like visiting a friendly grandmother who is overly enthusiastic about jacket potatoes.  It’s like a big hug in the form of a restaurant-cum-café. It’s somewhere where every day feels like a Sunday. (This may or may not have something to do with the fact that I have only ever been there on a Sunday.)

Tatties specialises in ultimate comfort food. For those of you who are unversed in the terms of Scottish gastronomy, the etymology of the title lies in the tradition of using potatoes in Scottish staples such as ‘mince and tatties’ which is a combination of minced beef and mashed potato or ‘neeps and tatties’ which is a mixture of potato and swede. A ‘tattie’, singular, refers most commonly to a jacket potato. But the menu of this little abode stretches far beyond the boundaries of the baked potato (which can be served here with any combination of various fillings); one can order fish and chips, scrambled eggs on toast, or even, as I discovered, surprisingly good quiche.

Tatties literally caters for every type of hunger: if you want a full-blown meal you can have a jacket potato or a burger; for tea time you could get baked beans on toast; for a sweet pick-me-up there are countless flapjacks, croissants, scones and cakes and all the hot beverages you could ever want. In fact, there is something almost magical about the way in which Tatties never fails to really hit the spot. I almost ordered a jacket potato on default but when pausing to confront, very honestly, the specifics of my hunger, I became aware that it was not jacket potato that I was craving at all but something light and nutritious, substantial but not fundamentally carb-based. And what was staring me in the face from the counter but something to tick all those boxes - a spinach and cherry tomato quiche. I rarely crave quiche. Only Tatties could anticipate such a bizarrely uncharacteristic craving on my behalf.

The quiche arrived with some fresh salad on the side. Between my friends a whole variety of food was ordered to include a BLT sandwich, a veggie burger with chips and a lasagne. All of these foods risk being sickeningly stodgy but, somehow, the dishes at Tatties manage to elude this common characteristic of comfort food. None of the meals were overwhelming but rather sated the immediate pangs of hunger that are specific to that curious time of day which lies somewhere inbetween the late afternoon and early evening, labelled by a linguistically-minded friend of mine as the hour of “dunch”.

It is without doubt that it is within this realm of dunch that Tatties really thrives. And what’s more, all the food is served by the friendliest, most hospitable waitress in the world. There is quite literally nothing to complain about: Tatties symbolises comfort dining at its indisputable best.