When a pair of former foodie rat-racers slogged up to Cambridge from Camden for a meeting about a restaurant in 2011, they hadn’t quite predicted what would happen. As the landlord of an ailing Fitzbillies, the austere then-master of Pembroke College led Tim Hayward and his wife Alison – raised in the town with birthday cakes from the shop she feared would shut forever – for a stroll around the Pembroke quads.

“It felt like Lord So-and-so interviewing me to marry his daughter,” Hayward recalls, perched on a window seat at the Bridge Street branch, which he opened in 2016. “Or, I thought, this must be what it’s like getting tapped to join MI6. It turned out, of course, that he had been head of MI6.”

Almost eight years since he was handed the keys to the cake shop after lengthy scrutiny, a lot has changed for Hayward, 55, bald, bearded and garrulous – with a generous tablespoon of camp. As well as opening a new branch, the former advertising executive has published three food books and become widely followed as a restaurant critic for the Financial Times.

“We’re probably the youngest institution in Cambridge at nearly 100 years old,” Hayward says, sipping a very modern flat white. “But we’re acknowledged in enough people’s PhDs as where they wrote it that we’ve got our place in history.”

"Or, I thought, this must be what it’s like getting tapped to join MI6. It turned out, of course, that he had been head of MI6"

He has rejected circling investors begging to open franchises in Oxford, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Hayward insists Fitzbillies is not leaving Cambridge, though he doesn’t rule out a third branch in the town.

As I darted out of my room to head to this interview, I bumped into Elaine, the formidable housekeeper on my college staircase. She recalled how in the early 1960s she’d leave school and walk to work as a window dresser, stopping off at Fitzbillies to pick up some famous Chelsea buns for her colleagues for sixpence each. (The secret Chelsea bun syrup, by the way, comes from a small company in Croydon which also sells it to Theakston for its ale.)

Fitzbillies is not Hayward’s first experience of making good grub. After art college in Bournemouth he ventured across the Atlantic and met his first wife in North Carolina (“she’s now a pilates instructor to Madonna”), escaping shortly after her father took one look at Hayward’s Volkswagen Rabbit and made him buy a truck. The duo worked illegally in diners across the country to pay their way. “I would sling hash and she would roll around on roller skates dishing it out.”

Hayward worked as a fashion photographer on the side. “I was going to gallery openings and surviving off canapés. Then I got a job as a bouncer in a Tex-Mex restaurant called Break for the Border, which should’ve been called Break for the Bathroom – it was that bad.”

He learnt lessons from the experience and tries to make Fitzbillies emulate the role of the American diner. “People think diners are rock-and-roll and jukeboxes – they’re not,” he explains. “They’re proper community restaurants which work by understanding the community they’re in.”

But is he pricing it right at Fitzbillies? I doubt many students are ecstatic to pay nine quid for an eggs benedict or seven-fifty for avocado on toast.

Hayward umms and ahhs, before mumbling something about free range eggs. His is far from the cheapest breakfast spot in town. Scrolling through its TripAdvisor reviews, the two words which jump out frequently are “delicious” and “pricey”. (He ignores TripAdvisor religiously because, he says, it is “poisonously warped towards negativity”.) But it’s hard to call Fitzbillies overpriced. The expert staff, who seem genuinely to adore Hayward, are paid well and trained properly, and they stick assiduously to proper food regulations.

“If you really want to know why it costs so much for an eggs benedict, it’s the number of times you’ve got to remake the sauce because the time it can [legally] be held is so tiny. There’s a tight set of rules for how long you can hold a hollandaise for. Or you can buy a premade hollandaise that’s been sterilised and you can squirt it out of a plastic tube.”

Picking at my truly sticky but very scrumptious three-quid Chelsea bun, I worry I have betrayed my (probably far more savvy) student audience by insisting on paying my own way in the name of journalistic integrity when Hayward kindly offered me his goods for free. While he gets a generous splurge allowance from the FT to “write about what rich people have for tea”, Varsity has not given me a penny for my coffee and Chelsea bun. Young and bitter, I bite hard into another syrupy sultana and chide myself for thinking squirty hollandaise wouldn’t be all that bad if it improved my fraught relationship with Student Finance England.

"If you really want to know why it costs so much for an eggs benedict, it’s the number of times you’ve got to remake the sauce"

Perhaps surprisingly for a food writer, Hayward rarely eats at high-end places when he’s not reviewing them. Restaurant 22, Trinity, and the rest of them? They’re just not his thing. “Out here, there’s an element of local audience, led by TV programmes, who think that if you’re going to spunk £70-a-head on a restaurant, you want to see 14 courses and you want to see it piled high,” he says, calling it “little-blobs-of-stuff plate painting”.

Rather, he loves Parker’s Tavern (“smashing” though not cheap), Steak and Honour (“amazing burgers”) and Nanna Mexico (“their burritos are the size of a fucking baby”). On pubs, he has soft spots for The Cambridge Blue and The Punter.

Conflict of interest means he generally never reviews Cambridge restaurants for the FT. This week, however, he has made an exception. He has snuck in a review of Noodles Plus+, a plain-looking joint on multicultural Mill Road with front windows as steamed as its dumplings, which he is comparing to Din Tai Fung, an international Michelin-starred chain which has just opened in Covent Garden.

“It was a local farmer who tweeted me and told me to go to Noodles Plus+,” Hayward says, adding it’s now probably his favourite restaurant in Cambridge. He adds that many people at the University have a sceptical attitude towards Mill Road due to its distance, which he does not share.

Meanwhile the enduring Fitzbillies represents all that is safely ‘Cambridge’. No roller skates in sight, it is conservative in a way, but heartwarming. You can leave with a smile, fattened up and a fiver down, and you don’t even have to write a PhD there – any old essay crisis will do.

The original Fitzbillies is reopening on 18th January after a renovation.