It has long preyed on my conscience that waiting staff in restaurants seldom get to hear the punchlines of jokes and anecdotes. It’s a situation we’ve all experienced: we’re in a restaurant and right in the midst of delivering a colourful, fully-detailed account of what happened when Rowan from Telesales did his disastrous parachute jump for cystic fibrosis. The tale is building nicely towards its explosive denouement, you are preparing to deliver the climactic coup de grace. And, for some reason, it’s always at this crucial moment that the waiter chooses to proffer a basket of bread rolls, thus destroying one’s comedic momentum irreparably. You sit in awkward silence until the staff have completed their ministrations and resume only once they’ve gone.

How do waiters identify this critical moment of maximum inconvenience? I have no idea. It’s either instinct or training. But the net effect is always the same: a breed of employees who don’t know the conclusion of any story they’ve ever heard during working hours. They don’t have the first clue why the chicken crossed the road or what the bishop said to the actress. I often wonder whether if, when they recount anecdotes to friends in private life, they get to the final line and some kind of Pavlovian conditioning kicks in forcing them to tail off into silence and fiddle with their napkin. In the long term, then, our reserve and our need for privacy really can’t be good for waiting staff.

As I say, this situation has long annoyed me. It took a visit to the Cross Keys in Kippen, Stirlingshire, to witness the revenge of the waiting staff. I suspect it can be observed in many country pub/restaurant places. If, in cities, the problem is that waiters never get to hear the end of things, in the country the problem is that the customers never get to hear the start.

Throughout our visit to the Cross Keys three waitresses stationed themselves at the bar (it was a very small room) and chewed over the local gossip. Not being familiar with the area or the parties involved, or with the full historical background as to how Smiley Bob came to get a pitchfork in his ankle, it was a form of higher gibberish to us, a cryptic anthology of local scandal and in-jokes. Frequent loud gales of laughter suggested that Kippen was racier than it looked. A small sheet of dramatis personae should have been stapled to the menu: “Mike Mann has never been the same since his wife converted to Wicca in the mid-1990s. He is often to be seen in the town square with her dowsing rods, sobbing inconsolably.”

This aspect of things kind of summed up the Cross Keys. It is striving to be one of those mini newfangled hotel/pub/restaurant gastroentities, tricked out with fashionable log fires and crushed new potatoes (these are on every menu now; they’re the new polenta). In the endemic style forged by St John’s in Spitalfields, the menu is in a strictly san-serif typeface and the prices are rounded up to the nearest pound. The fixtures and fittings are pleasingly oaken and medieval, and the height of the doors redolent of an age when the locals did not have the nutritional benefits of roasted breast of guinea fowl and sea bass. Walking into the place from bright sunlight is a little like going suddenly blind.

But the whole thing hasn’t quite been thought through. Why aim at culinary sophistication when the service screams local bowling alley? As did the somewhat untidy toilets and the racks of tourist leaflets that comprised our view from a table by an open door that remained open despite our conspicuous replacement of coats and jackets. There seemed to be an unresolved conflict between the establishment’s place at the heart of a small community and its requirement to be a magnet for transitory tourists. Its commitment to its own premise seemed less than total.

What arrived on the plates was fine largely, if a touch rudimentary: a tart of roasted mixed vegetable and halloumi was a perfectly decent quiche but pumped up by the gratuitous use of a trendy central ingredient; a starter of pan-fried chicken livers featured good offal but came on a tough crostini with an underpowered thyme sauce. The Sunday roast of rib eye beef with a Yorkshire pudding was superb, a generous slice of rare and yielding grade-one meat. Fillets of sea bass came on crushed new potatoes with a grape and white wine cream — it was competently done but ultimately a so-so version of a dish we’ve all had so, so many times before. Judicious plagiarism of some slightly more contemporary dishes and approaches would be well advised if the Cross Keys is to make itself worth driving out of town for.

The Cross Keys, Main Street, Kippen, Stirlingshire, 01786 870293, dinner for two with wine £55

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