FOOD & DR INK
tepping up onto a bus is rarely a memorable moment: anyone familiar with public transport will reflexively turn right round the corner to hunt out a seat – but one of Cambridge’s buses provides a different experience entirely. Instead of a brief nod from a driver and a wall of grey commuters clutching tickets, you’re greeted by a riot of colour, diners carrying trays of piping-hot, flavour-packed Latin food, and beaming smiles from Catalina Uribe and Nelson Rodrigues, working the neat kitchen packed in the back half of the ‘bustaurant’ – AKA La Latina, one of the simplest yet also most exciting eateries that our city has to offer. The double decker’s winding stairs lead to the top floor, where every second seat has been flipped to make comfortable booths for four, smartly upholstered in hardwearing coffee sacks. Tables of varnished chipboard and strings of colourful bunting are illuminated by light from the bus’s large windows, even on the greyest of days. And the bustaurant becomes even more impressive when you discover that the transformation was carried out by the duo standing behind the stove downstairs. “We didn’t have the money for a proper restaurant, so we had to start from somewhere,” Catalina says. “I said ‘Let’s do a food truck,’ and my mum said ‘You know – the food you want to sell is different, so think out of the box: find a
way to stand out.’ The idea of the bus got into my head, as Nelson used to work for Stagecoach for many years, so he knew how to fix the bus, he had the bus driver licence: everything just… fit, you know?” Catalina and Nelson have been together for ten years, meeting when Catalina arrived in Cambridge for postgraduate study. “I’m originally an environmental engineer – I came to Cambridge to do my Masters, and then I met Nelson and life just… got hold of me,” she laughs. “The plan was to come here for two years, but then I met him…” Prior to arriving in Cambridge, Catalina spent two years working for an engineering firm in Colombia – and though she enjoyed her work, something
was missing. “Having a restaurant was definitely on my to-do list,” she says. “I grew up with my mum and my granny running businesses and restaurants, working for themselves. I always wanted to do that but they never allowed me to cook – they sent me to uni instead!” The idea for La Latina was born after the arrival of Catalina and Nelson’s second child: faced with the prospect of returning to her office job at the end of maternity leave, Catalina decided it was now or never to press go on the pair’s long-held dream of running their own restaurant. “Let’s start the business, let’s give it a go!” she says of their conversations at the time. “If it works, it works – if it doesn’t, we can do other things.” After long discussions with her entrepreneurial mother (who was visiting the UK at the time to help with her newest grandchild) Catalina and Nelson travelled all the way to Liverpool to pick the bus that would become La Latina back in September 2016. “It was a proper passenger bus,” Catalina smiles. “When I did the business plan I planned in the conversion for three months: it actually took us eight months,
“We didn’t have the money for a proper restaurant”
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