They like to plan ahead here. After we’ve ordered dinner and handed back the menus, the bar manager, crisp as a biscuit, asks: “And what time would you like breakfast?” We mentally fast-forward 12 hours to poached eggs. “To tell the chef,” she explains. Maybe he serves his eggs hard-poached.

It confirms a feeling that, despite the Weavers Shed’s many accolades, our stay is just part of a timetable, processed with a disappointing lack of warmth.

This restaurant-with-five-rooms is in Golcar, a sturdy, stone-built village near Huddersfield, with grand moorland views across the Colne Valley. Set back from the road, it occupies a former 18th-century cloth-finishing mill, complete with chimney.

The mill became a restaurant in the early 1970s and the rooms were added in 1999, in the adjoining mill-owner's house. Ours is appealingly plain – white walls, teak four-poster and furniture, and complimentary decanter of sherry: all very cheering on a wuthering West Riding evening. The spacious bathroom has (and so many don’t) plenty of places to put things.

Downstairs we read the lounge walls. They’re covered with menus from posh restaurants. These, and framed foodie newspaper articles by Stephen Jackson, the chef-patron, suggest: “We’ve been around and we take food very seriously.”

And how. The à la carte is not so much a menu as an eco-manifesto, with passionate footnotes about sustainability and local sourcing. The restaurant has its own kitchen garden, chickens and ducks for eggs, and its milk comes from a local farm.

The waitress, Shirley, used to live in the mill-owner’s house, has worked here for 30 years, and is full of stories. But even she can’t do much about the subdued, awkward, midweek atmosphere in the dark-beamed restaurant. The food is expertly finished, brimming with finesse, but bland. Best is my light, creamy pea-risotto starter; a salmon fillet with leeks lacks the edge that mustard sauce should have given it; a falafel croquette has little definite taste and, at £17.95, is as laughably overpriced as an £8.75 warm Eccles cake (with cheese) would have been for dessert.

Breakfast eggs, however, are poached to perfection.

Efficient? Yes. Welcoming? Not very.

Bottom line: Stephen McClarence paid £90 for a double room with breakfast.
Sampling the fare: Two-course dinner for two was £55.10; wine was £15.50.
Best thing: The bed.
Worst thing: Atmosphere.
Access all areas: One ground-floor bedroom with wheelchair access.

Need to know:
The Weavers Shed, 88 Knowl Road, Golcar, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD7 4AN.
01484 654284
www.weaversshed.co.uk

Room: 7 out of 10.
Food: 6 out of 10.
Service: 6 out of 10.
Value: 8 (room); 5 (food).

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