It was like going into someone's home. Come to think of it, Sycamore House, quietly resting beside a quiet street in the quiet village of Little Shelford just outside Cambridge, probably is someone's home. A nice home, too, though there's nothing particularly special about it; nothing to attract the eye of a Pevsner, say, or a Meades. It's decent, trim, almost handsome, in a modest kind of way, and it is the domain of Michael and Susan Sharpe - he cooks, she looks after you.

She looked after Humphrey and me with the pleasantness of true hospitality. There was nothing showy in the performance - if anything, it was a bit understated - but we felt in good, kindly hands. Then again, there's nothing really showy about Sycamore House, unless you count the wine list. It is a long, long time since I've come across one that is so stuffed with goodies and at prices that even your local wine shop would be hard to match. Humphrey and I made do with a bottle of Les Fiefs de Lagrange 1996, the second wine from the impeccable Chteau Lagrange, which was the knockout drop I knew it to be and, at all of £22, well, almost a giveaway.

Sycamore House's menu itself does not rhapsodise or indulge in menu poetry. It is penny-plain. Four first courses - onion tart with olive pastry, sweet potato, leek and chickpea soup, that kind of thing. Four main courses along such lines as roast fillet of cod with a herb crust, and grilled fillet steak with melted Cashel Blue. And a salad course in between. Not to mention a pudding or two to close. The nearest thing to a theatrical flourish were the roasted pigeon breasts, which were "flamed in Armagnac" before being placed on a blackcurrant and orange sauce.

Now, this may not be the stuff of romance, exactly, or dishes to set the pulses racing, but to my eye there is a quiet, insistent edibility to them. So we set out to eat them: Humphrey steamed spicy chicken with lemon and chive dressing and, as back-up, the fillet steak and melted Cashel Blue; I for the onion tart with olive pastry and then the pigeon breasts.

The steamed chicken was something of a surprise. What arrived were balls of chicken, indubitably steamed, incontrovertibly spicy, but more chicken cakes in the mould of fishcakes than what had been expected. After the initial shock, however, Humphrey declared himself rather pleased: a touch on the solid side, he said, but they tasted of real chicken and the fillip of chilli was grand, as was the rocket salad.

Which it was, because I had one, too, to go with my onion tart, which also had a surprise tucked up its sleeve: it was cold. I think it would have been even better hot, as this would have brought out the melting sweetness of the onions even more, and also suited the olive pastry, which was shorter than a guardsman's haircut. But never mind: had my last attempt at onion tart turned out half so well I would have been well chuffed.

Then, after a pause for an obligatory salad to give the kitchen breathing space, along came my pigeon breasts, grouped on a plate with artless sincerity. They must have come from a mighty-bosomed bird, and not one of the hand-reared squab variety, because the meat was too dark for that. And they had none of the rank chewiness of poorly cooked wild ones, the cooking being as pure as the provenance, because they had a firm but acquiescent texture and a full but well-mannered flavour. In other words, this was another case of first-rate raw materials being treated with admirable simplicity. I was not sure about the Armagnac, but the blackcurrant and orange sauce was judicious.

Humphrey's steak was presented with a similar lack of visual razzle-dazzle, but benefited from Mr Sharpe's superlative supply line. On the whole, I am a sirloin man - too often, the look of a fillet steak proves more substantial than its flavour. But not those served at Sycamore House. I was not quite convinced by the thatch of Cashel Blue, but there could be no quibbling with the pedigree and potency of the protein underneath. It was a tremendous piece of meat, and cooked to a juicy nicety.

So we came to some tip-top cheese for Humphrey and to Toblerone ice cream in a brandy-snap basket for me. I have thought long and hard about the ice cream, and it seems to me to be, in a kind of way, emblematic of Sycamore House's style. It was terribly toothsome, not too sweet, with those nice little chippy bits of chocolate with those chippy bits of honey inside. But really, it's a dinner party dish, a Delia dish, or maybe a Jamie dish, if you see what I mean, and that's what the food at Sycamore House is like: domestic dishes cooked by an unusually competent home chef with a true passion for food. I don't say this by way of criticism, because I have eaten in a great many restaurants of greater pretension and less achievement. No, I am only trying to pin down the exact nature of the pleasure that eating there gave me.

And the pleasure was considerable, from which the bill did not detract: £73, or two meals at £23.50 each, a bottle of water at £2, the £22 wine and £2 for coffee. A fair price for a fair place