Online Editor's note: If you have come to this page after searching for the Drumbeg Hotel on Google please read the response to this review from the hotel proprietors. The hotel owners felt it was unfair that our review had acquired such prominence on such an influential search engine. We felt that we could not remove a page from the web on these grounds, but thought they should have the opportunity to put forward their view. The letter is here. The Drumbeg Hotel is at www.drumbeghotel.com.

I will remember only one thing from my trip to the Drumbeg Hotel and Seafood Restaurant in the Scottish Highlands: hunger. Pit-of-the-stomach, hand-trembling hunger. This is never a good recommendation for a restaurant. The American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten once said that he has not been hungry since 1974. Until I went to Drumbeg, I was with him.

I decided to go there because the menu read so beautifully I wanted to be eating from it. It said things like, 'a plate of local Drumbeg chanterelles' and 'creel-caught langoustines with mayonnaise'. It was all about the best Highland ingredients simply prepared. It was a menu of great virtues and it seemed reasonable that I should make the effort to get there.

Drumbeg was the original reason for the trip that took me eventually to the marvellous Summer Isles Hotel described here recently, and required the same flight to Inverness and then a long drive to the very northern edge of the Assynt peninsula, to that bit of the map just before the sea starts flowing over the edge of the world.

I missed lunch on the plane, but decided that, rather than stop, I would make straight for Drumbeg. After two-and-a-half hours of mad driving, through spectacular scenery, I arrived at the sombre, grey-rendered building with its beautiful view of Loch Drumbeg. As I signed in, I said to the woman present, one of the owners: 'Any chance of a sandwich? I missed lunch, you see, and...' She looked at me as if I'd made an indecent proposal. 'Oh, no. The kitchen is closed. We're a small hotel. We can't do you a sandwich.' Really? Nothing? 'Well, I might be able to find you a dry oatcake.'

It wasn't just the lack of hospitality that grated. It was the sneer that went with it. Come round to my house and I can run you up a bloody sandwich. Perhaps she saw my hand trembling, for she dug me out a couple of tiny biscuits, but delivered them with such ill-grace I felt embarrassed eating them. By the time dinner came round I was starving, and this is no way to order; decisions in restaurants should not be driven by the physical imperative of survival.

The ingredients at Drumbeg, once you get to eat them, are as good as they sound and as good as they should be, but there really is a dismal parsimony to the whole operation. A plate of five different charcuterie sounds good value at £4.80, but is less so when you get only one mingy slice of four of them. The seafood platter - five langoustines, five oysters, one brown and one velvet crab and half a small lobster for £25.95 - was a sight to behold. But is it reasonable to charge another £2.90 for a side salad, and did you really have to look so put out when I asked for extra mayonnaise? For the record, breakfast next morning continued the theme: it presented the saddest sausage I have seen in a long time.

The view from the dining room over the loch is gorgeous, but the dining room is a grey space with all the charm of a dentist's waiting room, but without the promise of anaesthetic. The bedrooms, at £50 a night, are suburban-semi chic. I know the owners will respond that theirs is a small operation in the middle of nowhere. Sure. But you are also charging people to stay. If you can't meet your responsibilities, stop trying to entice people up to see you. Drumbeg is too far to go for hunger.

· Drumbeg Hotel and Seafood Restaurant, Drumbeg, Lochinver, Sutherland (01571 833 236). Dinner for two, including wine and service, £75.