Telephone: 01672 514776
Address: 7 Kingsbury Street, Marlborough, Wilts.
Rating: 16.5/20

Only the other week, I mentioned Billy Reid in this column. He is the chef, if you remember, who used to grace the kitchens of the Vineyard at Stockcross and, before that, L'Escargot in London, and whose food I remember with cheery pleasure. Hardly was the ink dry on that column than I ran into his name again and discovered that he had moved to Marlborough, which is not a million miles from Stockcross. His new place of work is 2XS.

I would pass by the name of the restaurant in silence, but for the fact that, as a piece of text dialect or pop-culture speak, it seems more than slightly at odds with the prevailing Barbour-and-green-welly, Beamer-and-Land-Rover-Discovery smartness of Marlborough, where the wind from the surrounding rolling acres brings with it the unmistakable whiff of money - lots of money.

In fact, I am not sure what 2XS does to excess. The setting is small, all black beam and white wattle and daub framing, contemporary chairs, tables, cutlery, artworks and flower arrangements. I was struck by the oddity of the conjunction, but the daughter and her friend thought it "cool". Anyway, idiosyncratic though it might be, 2XS wasn't what you could call excessive.

Nor is excess a word that I would apply to Reid's menu. I suppose that you might consider black pudding with scalded scallops, salad and shallot jus, or filo-wrapped crottin de chavignol, tomato, shallot and basil salad, or marinated Scottish salmon with guacamole, mixed leaves and lime dressing excessively tempting, or even, at £7 a dish, excessively reasonable, but classic is the word that springs to my mind.

Reid, for all the paring down of the dishes, is a classicist to his fingertips, and a French classicist at that. He knows how to make a stock properly, how to use a stock to make a sauce and how to find the balance between sauce and main event. He knows how to cook meat and fish with precision, how to construct a dish and dress a salad. He is a sauce and protein man at heart, although vegetables have an important subsidiary role. And he is a dab hand at puddings.

All this made for a thoroughly satisfactory and satisfying dinner. The girls chirruped. I smiled benignly, as anyone would who cherishes broad-bosomed, benign flavours that have just the right degree of sophistication without slipping over into the finicky or distracting. Black pudding and scallops is a tried-and-tested combination, and here were fine scallops, although they appeared to have been seared rather than scalded, and fine black pudding, of the drier, British school rather than the sloppier French one. Marinated salmon and guacamole are less familiar partners, at least in my world, but they made a smooth union, with the lime dressing providing an edge to the prevailing blandness and offsetting the richness. Similarly, the tomato and shallot salad was set against the melted voluptuousness of goat's cheese in its crackling filo wrapper.

After that, the ladies sorted through breast of chicken that had been stuffed with a most succulent, garlic-tripping Toulouse sausage, which, on reflection, was the only dish that had the technically fancy trappings of a Michelin-starred kitchen. Still, it was a dish to chomp, and the girls chomped away with gusto, French beans, fondant potato and all. The process was helped by a particularly fine gravy.

The fondant potato and beans turned up again with my sirloin steak. You could argue that such routine veg work points to a lack of imagination in the kitchen, but more probably it suggests constraints placed by a £12 ceiling, the price at which all the main courses are set. And for £12 I got an impeccably cooked piece of well-chosen beef, a lush helping of "woodland" mushrooms and a rippling sauce all of its own.

For pudding, the daughter followed her muse and went for a chocolate and digestive terrine with a raspberry coulis, and shared it with her friend. This was everything a young chocolate lover could desire and, while a raspberry coulis is rather dernier cri, it worked well with the muscular chocolate and with my daughter. I dispensed with crème fraîche for my treacle tart and demanded double cream instead. I am both a sucker and a stickler when it comes to treacle tarts, and this was a superior example - thin, crisp pastry; tooth-pulling treacle, but not excessively sweet.

While the menu lists all first courses at £7, second courses at £12 and puddings at £6, you get two courses for £17.50 or three for £22. So it was £66 for the three of us, and that strikes me as pretty damned reasonable for serious, assured cooking that majors on flavours not froufrou. The service was charming and highly efficient, which is not always the case in restaurants in the regions, or the towns, come to that. They were happy to mix special non-alcoholic cocktails for the ladies, and, inspired by their example, I was modest in my own consumption, tempted though I was by a careful and intriguing wine list. Excessively modest, you might say.

· Open Lunch, all week, 12 noon-2.30pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 7-10pm. Menus £17.50 for two courses, £22 for three. Cards All major cards. Wheelchair access.