The Sorn Inn,

35 Main Street,

Mauchline

01290 551305

Menu: There are steaks, no chops, and a full blown unusual menu that's half fine dining, half crowd pleasers. A little bit of most things. 3

Atmosphere: Either a bit confused about what it is or defiantly catering for everybody. Dining room a bit underlit. 3

Service: Excellent, friendly, chatty and, most importantly, relaxed waiter helping things along. 5

Price: In amongst the steak house, the blackboard and the a la carte, it's good value. The starters, especially, are of high quality. 5

Food: There's cooking of a very high standard here. The confit beef starter was superb, and an attempt to provide dishes that people want. Very good. 7

Total 23

YOU know you're at a country inn on a wet winter's night when the table right next to you is full of duck hunters. Duck hunters? In Scotland? Do our ducks even fly? Anyway, Tweedy breeks, long woolly socks and high boots left at the front door, all ruddy from splashing about in the flooded countryside out there. We've just moved seats from the chop house next door because the language through there had been a little bit country. Couthy even.

I don't have a problem with that. Guilty of it myself often. I had been quite enjoying eavesdropping the lurid tale from a table nearby but then I remembered who I was with. And that an 11-year-old's ears can swivel to pick up a conversation round three corners, up some stairs, even 100 yards away. Especially if it concerns either of the following a) Christmas presents b) sweary words. And they weren't talking about presents.

So we moved through here. To talk about the weather, share a disk of sweet, tender confit'd beef with a crisp black pudding slice in a smoked onion veloute. To crunch huge black pudding beignets whilst our neighbours wonder about where all the ducks have gone tonight - Kelvingrove Park possibly - and the excellent waiter charms my son with some top football chat about Ronaldo and the island of Madiera.

By the time the Shetland salmon with crab dumplings, pickled grilled cucumber, crushed potatoes and dill mayonnaise arrives I've had a chance to look round. It's years since I've been to the Sorn Inn and back then it was a full blown fine dining restaurant.

Tonight half the tables are set with white linen, the others are bare topped - a bit pubby. Is this some cunning country metaphor? Many people seem to be eating steaks, others, like us, are eating from the a la carte. And there's now, of course, a chop house through the wall. That earlier chop house chat?

Me: "Chop house? Umm, I don't see the chops on the menu."

Waiter: "Yes, sir. When we say chop we mean steak."

Ah, back to the main courses then. Black pudding and panko crumbed chicken supreme with, wait for it, macaroni cheese and thyme jus. Unusual? Actually the macaroni cheese is lovely, with a hint of blue maybe, the chicken is moist, crisp, not entirely sure about the flavour of the crisp panko crumb but there's no denying that with the sweet jus, dotted with fine green beans, it's a pleasant dish.

As for that salmon? The crab dumplings are little gnocchi: light, delicate, tasty, the potato lemony. Almost everything on the plate, and there's a lot on it, has flavour. Only the salmon, a slow cooked fillet, is a little dull. Dry tasting.

Turns out, incidentally, as the conversation continues I know one of the duck hunters. And most of them are actually lawyers. I've never tasted wild duck and have half a mind to try this sometime, but then realise Luca has radared into the chat and is a now expressing an 11-year-old boy's interest in blasting things - and that ain't ever going to happen.

Moving swiftly on. We have before us now an apple crumble baked Alaska. It's filo pastry, wrapping apple and cinnamon, topped with a layer of crunchy stuff, then ice-cream and the whole thing covered in meringue and fired. A bit confused? As a an edible everything-you-ever-wanted-in-a-dessert it's up there. But I'm wondering whatever happened to that fine dining concept? The dishes may be more robust, the restaurant a lot more country inn but it's still here.

The formal, trained, cooking skills are obvious, but kind of half buried in crowd pleasing dishes. Why? Maybe restaurants that survive become defined by their customers. You've got to give them what they want. Whatever you would really like to cook.

Country inns then? They don't fit the normal pattern. Maybe they're better for that.