In this line you get asked one question more frequently than any other: have you been to the Three Chimneys? You can get asked it several times a week if you play your cards wrong, by speaking to the kind of yawns who enjoy nothing more than a game of restaurant Top Trumps.
But the renown of the Three Chimneys is egalitarian too. It's a place that has become a touchstone, a golden mean, with a fame vastly out of proportion to the number who have actually experienced it first-hand. It's Scotland's single transferable upmarket restaurant, the one whose name is bandied about even by those who know nothing about food and have to consult a loaf of bread for the instructions.
The restaurant's situation must have a lot to do with all this. It's hidden in the northwest corner of Skye like a Jacobite's dinghy. Up there, where crinkly, knobbly Colbost dissolves into Loch Dunvegan, you half-expect to find Buzz Aldrin bouncing along the bare, pitted landscape. It's lunar and lonely there, primeval and spooky.
And then you open the door of a little stranded whitewashed cottage and there's a guy in penguin rig-out handing you a menu attached to a sheet of black slate. You pop your head back out the door and, no, you weren't mistaken, there is indeed a bleak, howling Doctor Who set out there. Then back in again to starched, ice-and-a-slice gentility, with a sinking-Titanic clientele acting as though there's nothing amiss. It's all a bit Alice in McWonderland. The weirdness is worth the hour's drive from Portree alone.
Weirder still, you can't get in for love nor money. Getting a booking for dinner might take up to a week. Lunch is a better bet. It's the perfect interlude after a visit to Glendale Toy Museum down the road. That's run by Terry and Paddy Wilding. There's something about this couple that suggests they have spent their married life engaged upon charmingly doomed enterprises, grand schemes and Heath Robinson fancies, maybe earwig farms or underwater bicycle parks. You think, hang on, who would come all this lonesome, wending way just to look at a 1930s chemistry set? Then you remember you've come all this lonesome, wending way just for a plate of sausages or some such.
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So, there you are, sitting in the literal evocation of what the novelist Douglas Adams termed the Restaurant at the End of the Universe - and what might there be for lunch? The style at the Three Chimneys is evolved baronial. Big deal, there are more posh Scots in restaurants these days than there are bedwetters at Gordonstoun.
But perhaps I haven't made the point firmly enough. This is posh Scots in excelsis. It's a menu and a package that stands defiant like the bloke on the Scott's Porage Oats packet, defying you to find fault.
You can't, of course. There's nothing much to do up there, so Michael Smith, the head chef, has plenty of room in which to get this right - such as the totaig neep bree, a turnip soup so glutinously silky it resembled the baby food of a royal scion, or the main of baked Lanark Blue cheesecake that was really more a sort of soufflé that had enjoyed a misspent youth.
There was a soupy stew of Mallaig mackerel, halibut, hake and razor clams, again predictably superlative, wrought with the kind of lively spontaneity it takes hours to prepare. Desserts were worthy of separate consideration, including an aggressive chocolate délice with boozy plums and the kitchen's trademark hot marmalade pudding with Drambuie custard.
Every mouthful of everything was a deep and abiding pleasure - and, what's more, I'm now able to answer that persistent question in the affirmative. And enquiries pertaining to the toy museum too.
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The Three Chimneys, Colbost, Dunvegan, Skye, 01470 511258, dinner for two with wine £140