Restaurant review The Three Horseshoes, High Street, Madingley, Cambridge.

Across all nations and centuries, the essential ingredients of a wonderful restaurant form an enduring trinity: delicious food, affordable prices and a lovely setting. I'm not sure I've been to any place in England that more effectively combines these criteria than the Three Horseshoes in Madingley. Let's take them in reverse order.

A 20-minute cycle ride west of Cambridge, Madingley is a small, tranquil village distinguished by the presence of Madingley Hall, where the future King Edward VII rented a room while an undergraduate at the university. Today, the hall is a conference centre and home to the university's Institute of Continuing Education.

If you are driving up to the village from either Cambridge or London, you'll pass a very beautiful American cemetery, where nearly 4,000 US servicemen are remembered. Picturesque is putting it mildly.

The Three Horseshoes is a thatched building which was once the village pub. For two decades, the chef-proprietor has been Richard Stokes, an alumni of the River Café in London. He kept the bar in the front, raised the quality of the upholstery, and converted the conservatory into a spacious and well-lit dining-room. What he also appears to have done is taken a solemn vow to keep his prices down and his standards up.

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Restaurant review Midsummer House, Midsummer Common, Cambridge.

You want to talk about money? Fine, we can talk about money. A few weeks back I reported my grim experience of the two-Michelin-starred Gidleigh Park in Devon, a joyless corporate retreat charging £110 for a five-course tasting menu with coffee and petits fours (though other, shorter menus were also available). In the process I managed to infuriate some of you by seeming to be one of those spoilt rascals who gets paid to write about food and manages, somehow, not to enjoy it. My beef with the place was that the prices were wholly unreasonable, despite the excellent food.

Well, it will hardly make your weekend, but I am thrilled to report that, as you would expect, two-Michelin-starred food doesn't have to be so forbidding. It can even come at a significantly better price. Still expensive, I know, but at Midsummer House in Cambridge there is both a 10-course tasting menu for £95 ("Taste of Midsummer") and the seven-course tasting menu for £75 ("Taste of the Market") I sample, which is outstanding. In other words, if you're going to save up for a starry Michelin meal, you should exercise more, not less, discretion – and heading to this Victorian villa just off central Cambridge is about as sharp a choice as you could make.

There is a remarkable absence of pretension about Midsummer House. Architecturally, it is underwhelming – a plain townhouse on the bank of the River Cam, adjacent to the common on which an excellent annual fair is held, and opposite the rowing houses of the universities' colleges, wherein some students obtain levels of fitness their peers think obscene.

Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/