The Tipsy Vegan - little dishes of joy on Cambridge quayside
I have this whole love/hate thing with "small plates". It's a great way to try a lot of tasty food. It's also an extra cognitive tax on the process of simply trying to have lunch.
From tapas to dim sum, through mezze, and right out the other side of the latest fusion fad, it's a (tasty!) game of crockery Tetris. If you're dining in any party larger than about three, the game comes with a bonus admin round in which however hard someone plays Dim Sum Dad, there is somehow always one too many or too few portions of hot wings at the end. I love it. I wish it would stop.
So I was a bit nervous about The Tipsy Vegan, despite having heard good things.
I shouldn't have been, it's great.
They keep it simple with a small menu, and everything on it was sufficiently appealing that I'd have happily ordered by rolling a few D6. Helpfully the menu also quite explicitly suggests two to three dishes per person. Two and bread to share was an ample lunch for the pair of us, and three would be a solid dinner with questionable room for dessert. This is room I advise leaving, because the chocolate mint cheesecake was delightful, a beautifully pitched balance of milk chocolate and bright mint.
Cheesecake? In a vegan restaurant? That's another touch that endeared me to the menu before I'd even picked up a fork - the names. There's no "sheese", "facon", or "I Can't Believe it's Not Albatross™". For sure, you could make the case for either approach, or even a more forensic breakdown of the ingredients, so long as nobody has to say the words "nut cheese" out loud with a straight face. But I think doing it this way keeps things simple for whoever walks in.
It also plants a flag. This is a vegan restaurant, not a Vegan Restaurant. It's relaxed and fun. Lunch, not a lecture.
In the spirit of which I should probably start telling you about the actual food and stop fucking on about the menu copy. It is good though - really tight.
We started with the focaccia and Ajo Blanco, a Spanish bread and almond soup that turned out to be one of the stars of the meal. I'm going to use the word "bright" a lot talking about The Tipsy Vegan, but that - along with almonds, apparently - really seems to be a theme. Using herbs and a dash of sourness to lift things is very much their flourish. And so with the Ajo Blanco, which could have been dense, especially with bread, but was instead light and slightly tart, and not too garlicky with a little fruit note.
A great start.
Next out of the kitchen were tofu crusted with coconut and a sweet chilli mayo (unremarkably good) and "bacon and leek" arancini with a maple mustard sauce. The arancini had a meat-adjacent warmth and umami depth with a suggestion of smoke, all cut through by the fresh green of the leeks, and the maple pulling it together just so. Definitely order these.
Our final dishes were my other two stand outs, Espinacas con Garbanzos and the Buffalo Cauliflower Tacos.
The spinach chickpea stew is something I've been making my own comforting and chorizo-forward version of for well north of a decade. How would it be without that succulent oily paprika hit, and based - once again - on almonds? Wildly different and absolutely delicious.
I'll be needing the 'b' word again, in fact. The sauce was thinner and less reduced than you might expect, with the chickpeas and spinach scattered through rather than forming the bulk of it. The spinach was just wilted, letting it lend an earthiness to the whole dish while retaining some bite. Keeping it more soup than stew leaves some space for the tomatoes to stay slightly acid, and the chickpeas to give contrast. This is really working the textures and letting the individual ingredients show off. It's not spiced to overpower - just a little cumin. I'm sold.
Espinacas con Garbanzos
The Buffalo Cauliflower was good buffalo cauliflower. It's hot and acid but not too much of either, and served with these cute blue corn tortillas and a ranch dressing whose creaminess really balances the acidity. There's slaw, and lettuce that realistically nobody is eating gets to feel virtuous imagining they might.
And the "Tipsy" part? We barely got to that as it wasn't an especially liquid lunch. But the drinks list is well curated, skewing to cocktails and with beers from local favourite Wylde Sky. Nice choice. I'd have liked a bit more hibiscus and a bit less berry in my hibiscus and berry mimosa, but I honestly think that's a "Roger wants" problem, not a "the market needs" one, and it was still good.
Aesthetically, The Tipsy Vegan is "that place in Soho we used to go for brunch", jammed into the weird floor plan of what used to be Teri Aki. It works. The staff were lovely, too.
We're absolutely going back to The Tipsy Vegan, and it's gone straight into my guide to where to eat in Cambridge. I’m super keen to try the Sunday brunch, and to see how the vibe feels for dinner.