Hunter's Hotel is like an old friend to me. I've been going there sporadically for the past twenty-five years for the occasional lunch or dinner. Even when I lived in Dublin I used to like the drive there for a Sunday lunch. It's a place with immense bucolic charm and beautiful gardens that produce much of the fare on the menu. All of which makes it harder to tell you how little I enjoyed a meal there this week.

My friend Sarah Owens was about to go London for a couple of months and so we planned a farewell meal. She's recently become a Wicklow resident and she wanted our meal to be in Wicklow, which is why we settled on Hunter's. We arrived early so we could have a drink in the bar before we went to eat. It's an old coaching inn with beams and low ceilings, polished wooden and stone floors and dark wood furniture, which gives it the traditional feel of a country hotel. There's a timelessness about the decor, which is to say it hasn't changed for as long as I can remember - even the sofas seem to have the same coverings. While we had our aperitifs we looked at the menu. It's a set menu costing £25 excluding service, with the sort of dishes that you might expect - plain, simple recipes like sirloin steak, potroasted pork, soups and salads. Just the sort of homely things that you want to find in a setting like this. But here's the thing; at £25 for a table d'hote, simple dishes have to be well-made to justify the cost - especially if the room verges on the Spartan and the service is perfunctory.

Sarah picked a chicken and ham ramekin to start, a tomato soup to follow and sea-trout for her main course, while I chose the ox-tongue salad, Wicklow Bay soup and the pork pot roast. With that done I turned to the wine list. There's fifty or so wines listed, a page of half bottles, some champagnes and a couple of after dinner wines. It's heavily weighted toward the French wines, although most New World producing countries have one or two wines listed. A 1997 Gigondas from the Rhone valley at £21 caught my eye, a wine that I like and one not often found on wine lists, so I chose that.

We were called to the table and we walked down the corridor to the dining room. We were sat at a corner table next to a closed-off fire place which Sarah wished had been blazing with logs. Our wine was already on the table and already opened, which is not something I like to see. I like the ceremony of having it opened in front of me and I like to examine the cork, which had been taken away. Our waitress brought the starters and left, leaving me to taste and pour the wine. I'm not incapable of pouring wine, in fact I've had quite a lot of practice at it, but I do feel that if a restaurant is going to charge me double the retail price, the least they can do is go through the little tasting ritual and pour the first glass.

I'm not going to go through our meal in detail, but it wasn't very good. Sarah was fighting a rear-guard action in defence of her food, probably because it was her choice that we were there. By the time the main courses arrived she had to admit that what we were getting was unremittingly mediocre. I ate my pork, tasted the fish, and picked desultorily at a flat of vegetables. I felt like a man at the dinner table of a good friend who's just been handed a plateful of food that he can't eat. What can you say? When our waitress came to take away our plates we asked for an ash tray and were told it was a non-smoking dining room. I suggested to Sarah we could go back to the bar, have our smoke and then come back for desserts.

We were sitting in the bar in front of the fire enjoying our delicious Gigondas and a ciggy when we were approached by Mrs. Gelletlie, the owner. We chatted for a while and she told me that her chef was away doing the Eurotoque competition and her sous-chef had the night off. That meant the sous-sous-chef was on duty and she was worried that perhaps our meal had not been up to scratch. I know well the vagaries of running a restaurant and how hard it is to maintain standards, but there's a crucial point here. If you know that whoever is in the kitchen isn't up to it, why open? Alternatively why not tell me when I book, so that I can choose whether or not to come? Or why not stick a postit on the menu saying that since the kitchens aren't up to the usual standard there's a 33% discount on the price? What you really can't do is treat your Monday night customers with less respect than those who come on a Friday or Saturday night.

We went back into the dining room for desserts; crepes Suzettes for Sarah and a tart tatin for me. Crepes Suzettes were once the stalwart of many a restaurant - a piece of theatre, a flashy demonstration of the art of flambe. What Sarah got was a huge piece of thick pancake delivered with little ceremony. We asked for coffee and said we'd take it to the bar where we could enjoy it with a cigarette. Sitting once again comfortably in front of the fire I felt sorry that our meal had not been a success. Our waitress arrived with a tray containing two stacked cups, a bowl of sugar and a cafetiere of watery coffee. She put it on the table and left. Am I being difficult when I say that that's not my idea of service? I can pour coffee just as well as I can pour wine, but in a restaurant I want to be served - that's what I'm paying for. We were joined by some friends who were also dining that night and we lingered and chatted and laughed. The truth is that despite this unfortunate meal I still like Hunter's and I'd like to be able to go back there, although I mightn't be as welcome now as once I was. The bill, including some after-dinner drinks, came to £87, to which I added an £8 tip. Sitting here now I can't imagine what on earth prompted me to do that - I can only put it down to habit. That has to be the least-earned £8 tip any waitress has ever made.