One of the greatest mysteries of the catering world is why all those old, big, sink-in-the-bedroom hotels seem to possess the same smell. You notice it the moment you walk in, just as you do in hospitals, the ubiquitous olfactory signature common to each and all of the kind.

I trust you know the scent I mean: a slightly stale, biscuity sort of smell, made up of a thousand fried breakfasts and the dust that settles on reproductions of Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, with a soupçon of mad, flowery carpet and porter sweat, of the polish on cheap cutlery, of boiled tablecloths.

The Dunblane Hydro sports it strongly. It’s a sad, tired sort of smell that is not present at, say, Gleneagles or Skibo Castle.

Since the late Victorian era, Dunblane Hydro has sat on the hill atop the town offering at family rates small, affordable tastes of the expansive country-squire lifestyle: a spot of golf here, a whizz round in a Land Rover, some hydrotherapy and dinner. Stylistically it’s still stuck in the cavernous room model, with reproductions of Highland landscapes on the walls. It was always less like a hotel and more like a kind of Scottish baronial Butlins, and a renowned fixture on the hospitality circuit here since time immemorial.

This only makes the next bit all the more depressing. It was rather difficult to believe that in this day and age a significant, well-known establishment is still serving food so mediocre and militantly behind the curve. It was a bit like walking into a grocer’s to find it stocked with powdered egg, Woolton pie and mock-duck, it was all an unpleasant blast from the past.

Somehow the news of modern styles and standards has failed to make it up the hill; what prevailed reminded me of a time when diners who were presented with disappointing meals were too abashed to complain.

In fairness, though, it’s difficult to imagine that, being stuck on the peak of a hill, it does much passing lunch trade. Most customers probably make the journey for dinner; I imagine that’s where the kitchen focuses its energies.

As for lunch, it all felt a bit stopgap, a touch make-do-and-mend. Consider for a moment my starter, a terrine of chicken and chorizo. I shall type that again while you scoop the marmalade from your lap: a terrine of chicken and chorizo. Now, you can, at a pinch, have a chicken terrine, though it’s less common than versions with game or venison. But with chorizo? It wasn’t even shredded through, there was simply a big orange chunk in the middle around which the chicken had been formed like some weird meaty Liquorice Allsort. Together it seemed like the product of a dare, bet or culinary challenge in a kitchen that contained only chicken scraps and lurid sausage.

Another starter of cream of mushroom soup, or “mushroom cream” as the waiter dubbed it, was perfectly acceptable, rich and well-seasoned, but it was merely a lull before the full-scale assault of the mains. It’s impossible to imagine a pizza worse than the mozzarella and Parma ham version presented here. The slices of meat and cheese had fused together and calcified like the residents of Pompeii, the base was a tough pre-prepared discus and, to top it all, literally and figuratively, the pizza came with a handful of lettuce and tomato plonked in the centre. It was bizarre and inedible. Once the frizzy cheapo salad had been discarded, the molten amniotic caul of cheese and ham detached itself from the base, thus creating two separate taste experiences: a toupee of hot chewy matter and a Frisbee of unyielding dough.

The supreme of chicken wasn’t much better; dense strangled-in-Motherwell fowl in a gloopy brown slurry that tasted faintly of blood. It came on potatoes that claimed to be fondant but which had the marshmallow springiness of packet Smash.

And this appalling and embarrassing fare came on a £14.95-a-head lunch menu, in a landmark four-star facility amid a tourist heartland. Perhaps somebody important was off that day; perhaps the residents of Dunblane enjoy living in a culinary 1972, but, really, it was was altogether quite shockingly inept.

The Dunblane Hydro, Perth Road, Dunblane, 01786 822 551, meal for two with wine £70

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