The restaurant, which takes its name from a made up word used in a song from American indie rock band The National, will be located on Mill Road in Cambridge, sited in a former Subway sandwich shop.
It marks a return to running a restaurant for Rushmer following the closure of The Hole in the Wall in July 2017.
Led by Rushmer, a former MasterChef finalist, and Lawrence Butler, the restaurant’s primary focus is on sourcing and cooking local, ethical and sustainable produce and using it to create a daily changing menu dictated by what is made available by its suppliers each morning.
Vanderlyle will feature its own version of a chef’s table where diners can sit at a counter-top pass for up to four people with views directly into the kitchen and have their food served by the chefs as they work.
It will offer a fixed five-course menu, which changes daily, for £55 per person, which can be booked and pre-paid for using the reservation and payment system Tock.
Rushmer said in October that the idea behind the restaurant was “simply to cook really great food, without bluster or pretension,” and that the choice of restaurant name “had to be ambiguous enough not to have any connotations or create a sense of expectation”. He wrote to The National to ask them if he could name it Vanderlyle – which appears in the song Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks – and was granted permission by the band.
