Telephone: 01900 823579
Address: 13 Castlegate, Cockermouth, Cumbria
Open: Tues-Sat, 7pm onwards (last orders 9.30pm)
Price: Dinner for two (with organic wine) £63.75
Limited wheelchair access. No disabled WC. No smoking throughout.

Speaking as a former five-a-day man (and I admit five lighters a day was quite a habit), I can honestly say that I've missed smoking every nanosecond of every day since I gave up 15 years ago. It therefore pains me to see face-tube addicts being increasingly treated like quasi-criminal outcasts, so much so that I've set up a Tar Donor Card scheme, which will allow them to put their antisocial habit to good use. All heavy smokers have to do is carry a signed card in their wallet, so that when they inevitably expire from some pulmonary disorder or other, doctors will be legally entitled to scrape the tar from their lungs and use it to macadam a new London relief road, the Bronchighway. Touchingly, the hard shoulder will be decorated with commemorative plaques celebrating each smoker's sacrifice ("Fred's bronchial congestion is now easing your traffic congestion"), a sight so altruistic that even those tobacco-Nazis at Ash would surely have to applaud.

There's a no-smoking policy at the Quince And Medlar in Cockermouth, and quite right, too, because having a smoking area in a restaurant is like having a pissing area in a swimming pool, and inevitably leads to passive inhalation. But I soon began suffering from passive smugness at this vegetarian restaurant (a sort of bonsai country house with an interior like the boudoir of an Edwardian pox doctor's clerk), because the place reeked of self-righteousness, from the menu (apparently printed on recycled paper, then paradoxically laminated with plastic) to the organic wines and the Fair Trade coffee. This wasn't haute cuisine, just oat cuisine, regrettably typical of the northern European approach to meat-free cooking: cold, heavy, bland, anal, gastronomically frigid and parsimonious in spirit. And the clientele? Well, to be frank, they were so worthily grim and morbidly ethically conscious that I can only describe them as, well, as Guardian readers (not you or me, of course, but you know the type I mean).

Now, I've nothing against the "red meat is bad for you" brigade, although I do wish they'd point out that it's the blue-green meat that's really bad for you. Indeed, I recently ate at La Zucca Magica in Nice and was almost fully converted to the cause, because one exquisite dish after another kept arriving (there's no menu; they just present the courses) and the clientele there clearly lived to eat. But here in Cumbria, even the amuses bouches failed to amuse, being rabbit-ear shapes made out of tomatoes and olives, served mortuary-cold from the fridge, like something John Noakes might have made on Blue Peter circa 1972. And the waitress (whose entire body was seemingly knitted by Laura Ashley) reminded me of a dim bulb that makes the room appear darker when it's switched on, because when I finally left her presence and walked out into the chill night air, I actually felt warmer .

Being someone who hates the surprise of an unfriendly bit of lung, testicle or brain turning up in the middle of a hitherto amiable Scotch pie, I like the feeling in a vegetarian restaurant that I can bite into anything without fear. But, blow me, I found myself also biting without hope into my spiced courgette and sweet potato pancake on dressed leaves with a fried quail egg (which looked like an onion bhaji that had been sat on), while my veggie companion's walnut terrine wrapped in Nori seaweed with Parmesan toasts had a texture like rum baba (neither liquid nor solid) and no discernible taste whatsoever. As for the pecan nut and cranberry crown ("chopped nuts, crushed root vegetables and bulgar wheat layered with cranberries baked and topped with crème fraîche and strips of roasted parsnip, and served with a Madeira sauce"), what arrived resembled the indifferent turkey stuffing that might have been served on Christmas Day by someone with 1960s-style Cordon Bleu aspirations. My companion's smoked Cumberland cheese and mushroom filo ("smoked cheese soufflé topped with button mushrooms, cherry tomato and chestnuts, encased in filo pastry and served with a white wine sauce") contained croutons so hard that chewing them made the sound of a soldier marching over gravel. So, by 9pm, the restaurant sounded like the German army in full retreat from Stalingrad (I recorded the noise on my Dictaphone, in case you don't believe me).

"Is that sufficient?" I heard the miserable waitress ask a miserable couple at a nearby table, who looked as though they'd been eating with a gun pointed to their heads. At which point my mobile phone suddenly bleeped "SOS calls only" (it's never done that before), and we decided to leave before any of the bland puddings could be inflicted upon us.

Before exiting, I visited the khazi ("twice winner of the loo of the year award," so a plaque informed me), and saw a certificate signed by Peter Cushing, who apparently used to be big in the Vegetarian Society (I suppose he got all the blood he needed in his day job), along with a sign reading: "On no account should hard objects be flushed in this loo." The bog has an electric shredder, it seems, which meant that ralphing up those croutons was pretty much out of the question.