18 at St Andrews serves huge steaks to golf lovers, but more imaginative dishes are well below par

18, Rusacks, Pilmour Links, St Andrews KY16 9JQ (01344 466 899). Starters £13-£18. mains £24-£57.50, desserts £10-£12.50, wines from £32

Busy restaurants often have their own particular smell: of good things searing on the grill, or garlic fizzing in hot butter, or perhaps of a strategically placed trolley full of ripe cheeses trying to make a run for it. The 18 restaurant atop Rusacks, a fancy hotel in St Andrews, smells of newly pumped testosterone. On a weekday night the place is filled with a certain kind of middle-aged man, most of them American. They are not just seated at the tables but thronging between them and leaning over the shoulders of friends at other tables to bark with laughter at each other’s jokes and war stories. The thing that unites them lies on the other side of the long plateglass window at the back of the dining room, shrouded now by night’s fall. It is the 18th hole of the Old Course, the oldest golf course in the world and therefore the holy of holies for golfers the world over. Let us pray.