Buren - bistro-casual classics
It’s cute, right?
Buren - the new-ish venture from Steak & Honour - is the playful slice of bistro kitsch I didn't know Cambridge needed.
The name means neighbour, drawing on the team's Dutch roots, and that's the niche it’s slotted deftly into. Buren is next to personal favourite Tradizioni on the Mill Rd broadway, filling out a little run of community venues you're happy to keep going back to. They have a solid regular menu, with specials for the regulars, and won my heart over summer by adding Lyonnaise salad to their roster of fun throwbacks.
There's black and white tiles, wood panels, and half-curtains for the bistro vibe. But the curtains are on scaffolding poles, there's a stack of records and a turntable in the corner, and the décor has some sharper edges and colour pops. It's fun, it's retro, and so is the food.
The hero piece is the steak haché, picking up a beef patty from the Steak & Honour heritage and serving it with excellent fries, a well-balanced peppercorn sauce, and a scatter of raw onion that pulls it together in a way I can't explain without unappetising words like "astringent", but that it just wouldn't work without. I'm calling it brilliantly classic because I don't want to end two paragraphs on the trot with the word "retro", but the whole presentation is challenging me not to.
I keep telling myself I will not just order the steak haché, and I keep telling myself lies.
I mean, other mainstays include a Caesar salad, for goodness sake! But the optional bacon on the side is a chop the size of a small hunting hound. That's what we're up to here. There's aubergine parm, and a carousel of seventies-coded buerre blanc fish variations that look great but I'm yet to order. For starters we've got bitterballen (beef croquettes) with mustard which are excellent, juicy, and rich; there’s rollmops (yes, you read that right), and a prawn cocktail!
Then we have to talk about the dessert trolley. Again, yes, you read that right. At first I thought the little hostess stand with all the cut glassware and bottle of Fernet-Branca was part of the affect - and it isn't not - but then I saw the lemon meringue pie. An alpine range of mallowy meringue decorating rich-sweet-sharp lemon filling and a crisp sweet short crust. They have other desserts. The other desserts look nice. I will keep ordering the pie. Again, they're keeping it simple - two desserts on a trolley and they bring you a big slice. It's brilliant, and they’re only a bottle of Mateus Rose away from doing a bit, but they honestly mean it, and it's good.
What's less good? Not a lot. On the busy nights you really feel they could use some acoustic baffling, and probably another member of staff. But both of those also feel like the troubled new normal for a hospitality sector that's really suffering, so I'm not convinced it's distinctive enough a them-problem to be sniffy about. The first time I went, the pepper sauce was far too salty, and the consistency was swingy overall for a month or two, but that's well past now. And frankly, I've been salty enough about Steak & Honour over the years that it feels like fair turnabout. We're well past that too. It is worth noting that they only open Wednesday - Saturday, which I suppose you could grumble about? But folks deserve a weekend and that seems mean-spirited.
No, Buren is having fun with bistro-casual classics, and I am extremely here for it.
