Restaurant review Fitzbillies, 51-52 Trumpington Street, Cambridge.

I'm walking through Cambridge at twilight, and there's a touch of magic in the misty air. Lights twinkle distantly behind college windows. Students stream past on bicycles, heading back to their digs. Apart from the fact that most of them are talking on mobile phones, we might have slipped back into another century.

My destination, the Cambridge institution Fitzbillies, maintains the time-slip illusion. Its art nouveau windows, apparently unchanged since it opened in 1922, display the kind of many-tiered wedding cake that Downton's Mrs Patmore might have sweated over for days. The shop-front is in semi-darkness. Then, from the shadows, a burly man in chef's whites steps forward to the window, and begins to light the silver candelabra with a sacramental intensity.

I recognise him as Tim Hayward, though the last time I saw him was in a different context; as a fellow judge at a rather rowdy restaurant awards lunch in London. Could this calm, priest-like figure, surrounded by camply decorated baked goods, really be the tattooed hard man of British food writing? Could the editor of the magazine Fire and Knives really have regenerated amid candlelight and teaspoons?

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