Restaurant review, Summer Lodge Country House Hotel, 9 Fore Street, Evershot, Dorset

Evershot, in West Dorset, reeks with literary association. It turns up in Tess of the D'Urbevilles as "the small town or village of Evershead" where Tess pauses on her way to call on Angel Clare's parents: "She made a halt here and breakfasted a second time, heartily enough – not at the Sow and Acorn, for she avoided inns, but at a cottage by the church." The church is St Basil's (patron saint of hoteliers, I expect) and the poet George Crabbe was rector there. Had poor Ms D'Urbeville lived a century later, she could have had her breakfast at Summer Lodge, a former dower-house whose grounds were part-designed by Thomas Hardy, when he was the local architect.

It's now a country house hotel of sumptuous, indeed fabulous, excess: its décor and furnishings so plumped and primped, so louche and luxuriant, that you find a tut-tutting puritan lurking in your conscience, muttering: "This is too much." The lounge in which we sat before dinner is full of plush fat sofas. The ruched gold ball-skirted curtains are the kind of thing that used to be seen on the shoulders of the Duchess of York. On two tables, left there as though by an eccentric ducal host, are at least 100 bottles of whisky, gin, brandy, rum and Armagnac. There's a huge fire in the grate – unlit on this warm night – and a big portrait on the wall of a troubled Hispanic beauty in a frock, from the school of post-operation Frieda Kahlo.

As we took all this in, along with our (huge) G&Ts, the amuses-bouches arrived: delicious tiny arancini, a miniature Waldorf salad with the blue cheese heftily predominant, and a mini-burger, with tomato relish. A plate of enormous green olives added to the general air of opulent over-stuffed-ness.

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