Noodles Plus, Cambridge: ‘We attacked the dumplings with a lusty relief’

The hunger was kicking in. A daughter, traditionally, has to eat before 1pm or the spirits rise in her, the furies and the sorrows, but we were on the A1 and had to buy a kitchen. The plan was this: couple of hours roadtrip to visit a guy from Facebook Marketplace, hand over cash for his gran’s old kitchen, then find a bit of lunch. I gave my daughter an apple to tide her over. It was all going to be absolutely fine!

Our family drove quite merrily towards Cambridgeshire. It had been raining for weeks, but the sky now was a silky papered blue, white clouds reflecting in puddles, that sort of thing. I take my adventures where I can get them at this point in my life, and if one presents itself on Facebook Marketplace, then it is my responsibility to put on my seatbelt and drive to an onion farm. Lunch, though, that was the big unknowable – its presence, or lack of, hovered smokily between the three of us. The subject rose and fell as the miles dropped away.

One thing we learned quickly about the A1 was, it has a lot of sex shops. A lot. After Little Chef went into administration, the owners of sex shops started buying up their premises, and McDonald’s, and some Happy Eaters, too, hence, in part, our lack of immediate lunch. Now they proudly line the motorway between flower drifts – signs say SEX SHOP. Approaching our turn-off we passed one beside a flooded field, white with swans. They skimmed across the surface as if liberated and alight, hundreds of them, euphoric, honking, a dangerous spectacle beside such a busy road, I thought. Not very health and safety to have such wild and decadent glory in a 70mph sightline.

Which is when I saw, floating as if a swan itself, the Vanilla Alternative. The Vanilla Alternative is an old inn converted into a private “lifestyle venue”, with regular events like Milf Club on a Wednesday. It looked unlikely here, its dilapidated haunch right up against the tarmac, but behind the hotel were grounds where guests can camp (I scrolled online as we sped through Bedfordshire) and last year they opened an outdoor play area – it’s here I believe, that the swans were nesting.

We got to the onion farm around half past two (“Is it just onions or…” I made small talk with the farmer as we paid for the kitchen. “Anything you can fit in a combine harvester,” he explained, kindly, in his jumpsuit) and we asked if there was anywhere local for lunch. “At this hour?” he frowned. He recommended a local pub (“I think it’ll be ‘your kind of place’”), but when we arrived I was suspicious of the expensive fine-dining menu and humiliated to have been read to filth. I turned everybody around, to much ire.My pic:

The hunger in the car was almost visible now, a new child silently screaming. What would be the fantasy meal, I asked my livid family, everyone’s body now breaking down fat and muscle tissue to sustain itself, whatever you like, anything? There is no perfect meal, of course, each tongue is different, each plate contains a different cut, but the silent car insisted I choose. Having denied them the pub’s £40 steak, I decided on noodles. They would be quick, and probably lovely. And there was a place (the internet said) that made their own, so off we went, less merry, but it still counted as an adventure if we were out of the house, that’s the rule.

We joined the queue for Noodles Plus around 3pm. In front of us was a young couple who were studying PPE and kept kissing each other wetly on the throat. Behind us a family had cunningly brought snacks for the wait. As we snaked towards the door of this roughly converted snack bar, so small it can only sit 20 if someone sits on a knee, we realised it was cash only and frantically took it in turns to run to ATMs, our accounts having been frozen due to that morning’s kitchen withdrawal. Tension sprouted from our joints like feathers.

As 4pm slithered round, my daughter now white faced, her eyes glassy, it was late enough that my partner, too, was desperately trying to contain his hunger, and his jaw was clenched with the efforts of not saying, “These noodles had better be good.” The pressure weighed upon me like a wet swan. And then, we were ushered inside.

Behind the counter, owner Dong Huang pressed together dumplings and threaded noodles from boiling kettles, while beside us Hui Yan Li hurried between tables with little pots of jasmine tea. Having handed over the responsibility of our hunger to somebody else, a wary cheer returned, rising suddenly to joy with the arrival of a plate of dumplings stuffed with pork and chives. They were slippery and plump, and we attacked them with a new kind of lusty relief, plopping them in vinegar that activated some new borough at the back of my tongue. The tiny table, pressed up against the drinks counter, was soon too full for elbows. There was a vast bowl of soup studded with wontons, exquisitely savoury, and a leg of roughly cut steamed chicken, cold, glittering in chilli sauce, surprisingly sweet.

Behind the Coke cans the chef was his own production line, squeezing dumplings into his palm precisely, at a pace that seemed respectful but less hurried than a belly might have desired. We’d wait. It was OK now. There was ritual and restraint; watching him felt terribly intimate and sort of lovely, a muted spectacle of skill, swanlike. I picked the beef brisket off my noodles with scallion oil and soy sauce (the meat an unnecessary desperate flourish while ordering, like when you go delirious with hunger to the supermarket and exit with coleslaw and a pack of cappuccino KitKats), but the springy, silky noodles themselves were the thing.

We devoured the Shanghai xiao long bao, soup dumplings that threaten to derail an entire outfit. You get six a portion – we could’ve eaten 60. They were lively and hot, disorienting in their delicacy. By the end of the meal we were all friends again.

There is something about a good restaurant that can carry you through a crisis, whether large and griefy or portable and hungry. In our new kitchen at home we’ll eat noodles and they’ll be good, of course, but not like this. In the same way your own bed will never feel as exciting as the one you’ll find in a lifestyle venue on the A1, or a swan’s lake will never be as liberating as a flooded field, you need a certain flake of peril, I think, to allow a lunch to become sublime.

Noodles Plus, 24A Mill Road, Petersfield, Cambridge CB1 2AD (01223 362185); steamed buns £2.50; noodles from £7; dumplings from £9; side dishes from £7.50; tea from £2