Mozart's Requiem was playing when we reached Washingborough Hall, a Georgian building housing a hotel and restaurant on the outskirts of Lincoln - and that was as cheery as it would get. But that's a little imprecise. What I mean by Mozart's Requiem is Mozart's Requiem having been given the production treatment once favoured by Messrs Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Somebody had listened to this sublime piece of music, in other words, and concluded that it lacked something that could only be supplied by the machine-generated drum beat that once enlivened the work of Rick Astley and the young Kylie Minogue. And someone else had bought the CD to play to strangers.

You should be so lucky (lucky, lucky, lucky) was the gist of the reply when I asked receptionist/ waitress Kerry if there was a log fire in front of which we might enjoy the music to the full. "No, I'm afraid it's not lit, but you can sit in the lounge," she said, and led us into a room apparently designed in the hope that a production company making a drama based in the waiting room of an out-of-fashion Harley Street consultant in the 80s heyday of SA&W would come hunting for a set.

"Give it a chance," I urged my cousin, Nick, an increasingly battle-scarred veteran of provincial eating disasters, when he flashed me a sardonic look while trying to swallow a canapé. "One internet guide raves about the 'fantastic eclectic menu', another calls the food 'exquisite', and Johansen's says 'mouth-watering cuisine is served in the superbly decorated dining room'."

Kerry returned to lead us into a dining room lit like a funeral parlour for albinos, so that it was hard to discern the colour scheme, let alone whether it was superbly decorated. But from what little we could make out (cheap gilded mirrors, chandeliers possibly bought in a Sainsbury's Homebase sale), it probably wasn't.

The Salzburg drum machine had moved on to the overture from the Marriage Of Figaro by the time Kerry unveiled the fantastic eclecticism of the menu (five choices in each course) by announcing "tomato soup with a swirl of pesto" as the day's special. We stuck to the regular dishes, and soon enough not only another diner (perhaps inevitably, a lone man) but the starters had arrived.

Nick's parfait of Gressingham duck with balsamic and orange chutney and curvy toast was "barely adequate, although not wilfully offensive". My sautéed foie gras came with vinegary, caramelised apples and calvados making a cameo in the guise of baby sick around the plate's perimeter, the foie gras being so mystifyingly tasteless that you had to suspect a pro-goose liver campaigner of infiltrating the kitchen and replacing the real thing with a water-based substitute.

We asked the incredibly nice Kerry if there was any chance of turning down the volume, and this she did before returning with the main courses. My "cranberry and rosemary-crusted spring lamb" was horribly overcooked, the requested pinkness restricted to the odd random tinge, and swamped by a weedy port gravy, but roasted sweet potatoes and assorted vegetables were good. Nick went for the fish of the day, cod on a bed of grainy mustard. "Cold and chewy, and in a blind tasting I wouldn't know I was eating fish," he said, malevolently passing over a forkful of what proved not only the alleged cod, but also a large piece of plastic. I asked Kerry if it might have been boiled in the bag. "I wouldn't have thought so," she said.

Some sort of chocolate slab with the consistency of a compressed cannonball had come and gone, when Kerry nipped out to warn us that "it might take a couple of minutes longer than usual, because I'm putting fresh coffee through for you". Flattered as we were to be the recipients of special treatment, it didn't seem enough to rescue the experience of eating in what had come to seem much less a hotel restaurant than a repository of broken dreams. "Ah good, the requiem's back," said Nick. "It catches the mood to perfection." And we sprinted for the car.

Rating: 2.5/10

Telephone 01522 790340.
Address Church Hill, Washingborough, Lincs.
Open All week, lunch noon-2pm, dinner 6.30-9pm (last orders).
Price Around £45-50 a head for three courses with wine.