I try Leicester's 'legendary' poutine - also known as chips with gravy - and it was soggy

According to Deliveroo's app, poutine is big in the city at the moment. The Street Food Collective, based at the Rutland & Derby Arms in Leicester's Millstone Lane, has a relatively small selection to choose from, but poutine seems to be the focus.

According to the blurb on Deliveroo: "Inspired by the 1950s Canadian dish of French fries, cheese curds and gravy, these bowls of flavour have become legendary on the streets of Leicester."

Having never tried poutine before, and since the only other options were burgers or giant hotdogs, I thought I'd give it a go. The food arrived in less than 25 minutes and there were some great fold-open cardboard boxes, which were pretty impressive.

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But I decided to start with the starter, which was a white carton of deep fried mac and cheese bites for £6.50. They came with a red sauce that was served in one of those paper ketchup pots you get in McDonald's, covered in cling film.

It wasn't easy to fight my way through to the sauce because the flimsy paper just folded in on itself every time I tried to get hold of an edge of the film. I helped myself to one of the bites while I was working on the sauce and it tasted great.

It was pretty much what you'd expect a spoonful of mac and cheese, coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried to taste like but I was addicted after my second hit.

I got past the cling film and the sauce turned out to be sweet chilli and it was a great combination. The insides of the bites were creamy and cheesy, the outsides salty and crunchy - they couldn't have been any better.

Next up, stupidly, I'd ordered loaded waffle fries, which were basically poutine without the gravy. I'd beeen expecting chopped up waffles of some kind and "loaded" usually means a bit of meat or something more interesting but these were just the lattice kind of chips you can get in Iceland with a few extras.

The £5.75 dish had a little sauce - Marie Rose, I think - to give it a bit of a kick, as well as heaps of chopped spring onions and some grated hard cheese. For a box of chips, it was actually pretty fancy and while other places really mean it when they say "loaded", it was enjoyable.

Not wanting to over-do it on the potato ahead of the main event, I closed the clever box back up and unfurled the poutine box. Disappointingly, the contents of the big £10 box looked pretty identical to what I'd just eaten, with a load of chopped spring onions and more cheese on a box of slightly soggier chips.

While some people like to smother their chips in ketchup, vinegar, mayo, gravy or some other kind of moistness, I've always preferred to enjoy the crunchiness, so I doubted I was about to get on board this new poutine craze, based on what I was looking at.

I don't know what I'd been expecting but I'd thought there would be a bit more to it. It was just ordinary chips with some ordinary melted cheese - sticking them together and making them pretty hard to eat - and then a puddle of brown gravy on the bottom of the box, slowly soaking through the cardboard.

And it was just gravy. Not special French Canadian gravy or gravy with nice bits in. The chips towards the top of the box that had avoided a drenching were crisp and tasty but the lower I got - further into the congealed cheese and drenched mass of potato - the more disappointing it got.

Our rating: 3/5 I loved the mac and cheese bites, I enjoyed the waffle fries and the boxes were brilliant. But despite the haute cuisine French-sounding name, poutine is just cheesy chips soaked in gravy and it's nothing special.

Official food hygiene rating: 5/5

The Street Food Collective did not know we would be visiting, and we paid for our food.