1998-04-30 

There's a big difference between eating a meal in a restaurant when the intention is to review it, and sitting down to a meal when the intention is purely to enjoy the company in which you find yourself, with the food as an important, but secondary consideration. I confess that when I'm in convivial company I find it a lot harder to concentrate on the minutiae of a meal. Bearing this is mind, when I arranged to meet Mary Finnegan - writer, broadcaster and equestrian wizard for dinner, it occurred to me that something simple would fit the bill. Mary is a Dalkey resident, and when she suggested P.D.'s Woodhouse, a restaurant specialising in barbecued food, I agreed at once.

1998-04-27 

This is a story about fashion, trends and fickleness. Many years ago Jack Donnelly, the then manager of the Cashel Palace Hotel, said to me a propos of restaurants, 'There are some people who love to be treated badly: the worse you treat them, the better they like it.' I've thought about that over the years and have often wondered if it's true. I tell you this story because it came to mind the other night and I found my own reaction to be that I didn't like it.

1998-04-20 

I've gone on a bit lately about leaving things to chance and the vagaries of fortune, but occasionally it really does work and the surprise is all the more pleasant for it. I try never to book into a restaurant because I like to remain as anonymous as possible, and giving a false name seems a little dishonest. Since it's my habit to go midweek, getting a table rarely presents a problem. Anyway, I wanted to go to the Ranelagh area as there's a plethora of restaurants there and I wanted to try somewhere outside the city centre.

1998-04-13 

When a dull, rainy day gives way to a sunny afternoon and evening, the idea of driving across the Wicklow Hills becomes increasingly attractive. Because I've been to Dublin a lot lately, I thought that a drive over the Wicklow Gap and into the plains of Kildare might make a pleasant change. The arrival of longer evenings and better weather makes it less of a trek and more of a pleasure.

1998-04-11 

It was raining heavily as I walked Leeson Street with my guest for the evening. He was the director, the actor and poet, Alan Stanford. Alan is a big man, more than a head taller than me, and I walked beside him holding my umbrella aloft rather like the Statue of Liberty holds a torch, trying to keep it above his head. We must have looked an unlikely pair to an impartial observer.

1998-03-19 

Sometimes choices can be hard. I thought that it was about time that I explored the gastronomic hub of Monkstown, where on the Crescent a long line of restaurants lie almost side by side. I'd gone with my wife and we walked slowly along the road letting the gods decide for us - or so I thought. We stopped outside FXB's, which specialises in meat, and read their menu. 'Look,' I said, 'a sixteen-ounce T-bone steak. Imagine that, a pound of red meat on one plate. Mine, for example.' My wife looked at the menu silently. Then she spoke. 'Let's look at Wong's menu.'

1998-03-10 

A pizzeria is by definition a cheap and cheerful affair. All over Italy they are plentiful, clean, bright and plain. Their purpose is to provide a simple staple that happens to taste good, but is none the less pretty plain fare. A pizzeria is a place with no pretensions. Until McDonalds arrived in Italy, pizzas were regarded as fast food - a quick and simple meal available when either time or money was short.

1998-02-16 

Here's a theory for you: every restaurant has its optimum number of customers and that number will be less than its seating capacity. An inbuilt corollary to this theorem is that a full restaurant doesn't function at its best. There is a number that is harmonious; a number of customers that fits the capacity of the staff to perfection; not so smal l as to induce boredom, but not so large as to overwhelm.

1998-02-09 

Les Freres Jacques is the kind of place that business men like for lunch. There's plenty of room between the tables so no one can overhear your conversation, there are plenty of waiters and the food is reliable. When you walk in you get an immediate impression that this is a professional establishment where everything works exactly as it should. But then, first impressions aren't always entirely accurate.

1998-02-02 

After reviewing a few restaurants in the greater Dublin area in a row, I was looking forward to going a little further afield. My guest for the evening was Lainey Keogh, who had taken a night off to keep me company even though she had an unbelievably busy schedule preparing for her London Show, which was only two weeks away. When I arrived at her studio in Anne Street I told her I was thinking of 'The Old School House' for dinner. Being originally from North County Dublin herself, going to Swords was, she said, like going home.

1998-01-24 

A few weeks ago I went to lunch in the Indian restaurant in Ballsbridge called Chandni. I took my mother and my friend Antonio Breschi, the Italian pianist and composer, which meant that we could all speak the same language. At the time I thought it might be nice to pick another ethnic restaurant in the same area and compare the lunches. Today I put that plan into action and set off for the Moroccan restaurant that I remembered being just across the road from the Indian one.

1998-01-16 

For as long as I can remember people have asked me where I would go if I wanted to eat an Italian meal in Dublin. My answer had become completely routine: I wouldn't. The fact is that I can eat good Italian food at home, so there is little temptation to spend money in order to eat something mediocre or worse. The bald truth is that since Roberto Pons closed his 'Il Ristorante' in Dalkey there hasn't been a place that I would take Italian friends to and expect them to be impressed.

1998-01-09 

It was only a couple of weeks ago that we were sitting on the coral sand shores of the Indian Ocean eating wonderful food. Perhaps it was an urge to relive those times of midsummer; or maybe a hope that the mid-winter hanging over could be banished even temporarily by those exotic tastes, that made the idea of a Thai meal so appealing. The Thai House is at the end of Dalkey's main street on Railway Road, the bar is downstairs and the dining-room is upstairs. One of the first things that I noticed on entering is an array of fine wines behind the counter; things like Figeac, Mouton Rothschild and Latour. I guessed none of these were the traditional accompaniment to Thai food, but it augured well for the wine list.

1998-01-02 

I have to admit I've never thought of Bray as a gastronomic hub, yet there I was driving to Bray sea-front for the second time in a month, this time to eat a vegetarian meal. I'm a fairly committed carnivore and from time to time I'll even kill what I want eat, but my son assured me that 'Escape' was a place worth visiting.

1998-01-02 

There are advantages to advance planning. I know that's true, but somehow I don't always manage to incorporate the concept into my life. You see, there was this restaurant that I wanted to go to, but I didn't reserve a table. Consequently when the time came to pick up my guest for the evening, a last minute phone call ascertained that the restaurant was booked out for a week in advance. Enter plan B: - drive into Temple Bar and see where chance might land us. Conversely there are disadvantages to not planning ahead. Sometimes chance favours you and all ends well and sometimes chance throws you a cruel curve-ball.

1997-12-19 

In just about any sphere of human endeavour the hardest thing to be is innovative. Trying to do something new, something untried, takes courage and sometimes can be seen by others as suicidally insane. It's especially true of restaurants, since we the punters tend to have fixed tastes in food and are rarely willing to go for something beyond the scope of our normal fare. In short, sticking your head above the parapet invites brickbats as surely as an Aunt Sally in a fairground.

1997-12-13 

Bray sea front must be one of the last remaining anachronisms in the greater Dublin area. The houses that line the esplanade have the same kind of weather-beaten grandeur that you can find in any Victorian resort like Torquay or Bognor. There's the obligatory Stella Maris, an Esplanade Hotel, arcades and the Palace Bingo, all of which makes me think the town ought to be renamed Bray-Super-Mare. When I first knew it, it had the kind of seediness that only once popular resorts past their prime can have. Today it shows all the signs of having benefitted hugely from the largesse of the German taxpayer.

1997-12-06 

Imagine a wet winter Wednesday with sod all on telly. Now imagine that your house is still in the process of drying out after a flood; that's to say there's an irritating drone from the dehumidifiers, the furniture is piled up all over the place, the floors are denuded of carpet and on top of that, outside you can hear the sound of even more rain bucketing down. If you can imagine all of that, then you've got a pretty good idea of why my wife said 'yes' to my suggestion of going out for a meal.

1997-11-20 

What's in a name? Take 'Eden'; immediately it conjures up the garden of earthly delights - a terrestrial paradise. Take 'Nuremore' on the other hand; it's hard to pronounce and easy to forget. And then there's the location. Eden is in deeply fashionable Temple Bar, and the Nuremore is in deeply unfashionable Co. Monaghan. If the proverbial visitor from another planet were to embark on a gastronomic tour of Ireland, let's face it, he'd be unlikely to start the tour in Carrickmacross.

1997-11-11 

In thirty years of dining out in Ireland I can say with complete conviction that one thing has changed: it isn't as easy as it was to get a bad meal. That's not to say that a good meal is easy to find - just that the awful, the shoddy, the unimaginative and the plain unappetising are not as abundant as once they were.