"Settling in nicely"

A review of The Devonshire Arms by Kevin Jones written on Tuesday 26th of July 2011

My wife and I visited the pub during a day out to Cambridge in June 2011, around eighteen months since the pub was taken over by Milton Breweries and the place has gone from strength to strength. I'd read about it in CAMRA's magazine and had added it to my List of Pubs to be Visited immediately - and I was not disappointed.

The range of ales includes the usual Milton favourites with three guests on tap when I visited and a range of bottled beers, some of which have to be tasted to be believed. The pub also has at least one good cider at any one time and a lager on tap - can't remember the name, but it's definitely not Stella or Carling.

The pub's certainly a lot more popular these days - there were three groups having roast dinners on the Sunday I visited and an assortment of others dropping in for a lunchtime pint. The barman, who didn't look old enough to drink - but perhaps that's just because I'm in late middle-age! - told me it can get packed on a weekend evening. Since the front bar is narrow, this would put some people (including myself) off, but he also told me they have casual staff who can be brought in if necessary. The clientele, he said, is generally a friendly collection of professors, students, engineers, hippies, artists, musicians and others drawn from the locale and beer lovers from miles around.

The food is excellent - on my last visit, I had what was possibly the best pork joint I've ever eaten and the portions are more than adequate. My wife had a steak pie, which she also declared excellent but felt the vegetables could have done with five minutes less on the boil.

In addition to the front bar - which has some lovely stalls, each able to accommodate a fairly sizable family for Sunday lunch, the large back bar can seat many more around its eclectic selection of tables. On a cold winter evening, when the wood-burning stove is working, it must be a cosy and convivial place. We stayed until 7.30 when the place began to fill up - there's a very small beer garden out the back with three tables, the largest of which was occupied by a group of hippy-geek scientists and, somewhat bizarrely, a rabbi, all engaged in a heated discussion about physics; which sums up the clientele perfectly.

We will certainly drop in again when we next visit Cambridge - in fact, this pub could be the reason for our next visit..

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