Marine Road West, Morecambe, Lancashire (01524 424 000). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £80-£100

Sometimes all you crave from a restaurant is competence. You don't want culinary fireworks. You don't want gymnastics or derring-do or the gastronomic equivalent of people swinging from the chandeliers. What you really want is for everybody involved not to screw up. Just that. The dining room of Morecambe's Midland Hotel is the parent to such thoughts. There may be more lovely settings on England's west coast, but not very many of them. The curving Midland is an Art Deco gem by architect Oliver Hill, complete with friezes by Eric Gill, white stucco sweeps and rotundas, and hard-edged jutting ledges, as if it is sticking its thoroughbred chin out to sea.

It first opened as a railway hotel in 1933, but went through many incarnations before falling into complete disrepair. A few years ago it was rescued and sympathetically restored, with a few modern twists. The dining room occupies what was once the sun lounge, with its long curving wall of glass that looks out across a neatly manicured lawn to the bay beyond. Sunlight bounces off the sea. Glassware and white lines flash and shine. The sounds of white-tie-and-tails 30s jazz wafts gently around the echoey space – a cliché, but a necessary one in a hotel which is a whole raft of glorious clichés made of bricks and mortar. Do I need tell you the place once featured in an episode of Poirot? No, I don't think I do.

With all that going for it, the food simply needs to be solid, competent and unworrying. A few weeks ago a new chef, with experience at the likes of Chez Bruce, took over. The result is a menu which is all those things. At lunch there's a choice of four dishes per course, plus a couple of specials. Curiously the one thing that isn't currently available at lunch, but appears to be available at every other time of day, is Morecambe's famed potted shrimps, sealed with a bung of mace-spiced butter. (Less surprising is the lack of Morecambe's other famed product, cockles. The view from here is marvellous, but it's impossible to ignore the fact that the bay you are looking at claimed the lives of 23 Chinese cocklers a few years ago. Only the night before my visit another cockler had needed rescuing off the sands.)

There are many other good things here. Soft, sweetly soused fillets of mackerel come with crunchy autumn salads; a competently made piggy terrine, with a strip of beetroot running through it, is served with slices of still-warm toasted brioche. A sea bass fillet, with skin seared to crisp, is laid on grilled globe artichokes which in turn float on a gentle chive beurre blanc. Best of these savoury dishes is lamb, both as medium-rare fillet and as braised shoulder, on puy lentils and roasted winter vegetables. The meat is especially good, which is as it should be. Some of the best lamb in Britain is raised on the lush hillsides of Cumbria just across the bay, and this is the best of that, complete with the depth of flavour that only comes with a little age.

The dessert menu – a crème brûlée, a chocolate delice, a sticky toffee pudding, cheese – is on the big C side of conservative, and also delivers the meal's only misstep. The sticky toffee pudding is dry and dense. Given that Cartmel, the spiritual home of this classic, is also just across the water, this can be regarded as a shameful crime, which could invite punishment involving ducking stools and mouldy root vegetables. The crème brûlée is more than workmanlike, however, and the choice of cheeses a little more extensive than usual. Though, as we already know, a good cheese board is little more than a victory of shopping. The wine list is divided up by price, offering a clutch of bottles at £16, £19 and so on, with two-thirds of it below £30.

While it would be great to be able to say service is faultless, it isn't – not quite. All the senior people are on the money, but the ones who arrive table side, sweet and polite as they are, have about them the air of people only doing this until something more engaging comes along. I am also completely baffled by the apparent belief among hoteliers at this level that their staff aren't complete unless they are wearing plastic name badges. It's cheap, tacky, low rent and unbecoming. All things the rather lovely Midland Hotel is not.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place