Dalis Restaurant, Blackrock.

Good chefs are perfectionists. They won't allow anything under par out of their kitchen and into the dining room. Good waiters make their customers feel at ease and never leave them waiting. And lastly a restaurant needs good management, who will let their chefs source good ingredients, who will put together a wine list to match the style of the restaurant, and who will hire competent staff and motivate them. Getting all of this right is a tall order, so it should come as no surprise that for many restaurants it's a hit and miss affair. Some days it comes together, and then sometimes it doesn't. Getting it right all the time is something only a few restaurants manage, and doing it for years on end is an even more amazing achievement.

About five years ago I had an excellent meal in a Blackrock restaurant called ‘Dali's'. Since then it's changed hands and changed chefs, but the word on the grapevine had it that it still served good food, so this week I went along to see if high standards were still to be found. My guest this week was Mary Finnegan, the journalist and CBS producer.

It's a nicely furnished dining room with soft chairs and benches, booths and tables that are big enough to be comfortable at. Despite its name there's nothing either Catalan or surreal about it, it has neutral colours and an easy air.

We got the menus and the first thing that I noticed was that the starters, except for the soup, were all over €10: two €12, two €13 and four €14. You know at once you're in a higher than average price range, so expectations are raised. There were tempting dishes listed; crab spring rolls with seared tuna, a char-grilled cannon of lamb, a ham hock terrine, seared scallops, guacamole, sea trout with samphire and Dublin Bay scampi. Main courses run from €25 to just under €30 and include a rack of lamb, crispy duck confit, roast monkfish, a veal chop, char-grilled tuna, fillet of beef, vegetarian spring rolls and a supreme of free-range chicken.

The menu read very well and the choice of accompaniments for each dish was carefully chosen. Difficult to find samphire was paired with sea-trout, a caper Hollandaise with the lamb cannon, spiced cauliflower purée with the scallops, to name a few. I thought the combinations were inventive and thoughtful and I was looking forward to seeing if the reality of the eating matched up with ideas. Mary chose the scallops to start and followed with the free-range chicken supreme, while I picked the ham hock terrine to start and the tuna for my main course. The wine list is serviceable enough though not long. I did feel later on after discovering how good the food was, that the wine list could be improved to match the quality of the food. The mark-up is somewhat above the average and from it I chose the Albariño from Galicia, a crisp and aromatic white listed at €36.

The starters arrived and they were excellent; Mary's scallops were big, perfectly cooked and surrounded with a spiced cauliflower purée and a ratatouille of lemongrass and coconut. It was an unusual mix of flavours but it worked well. My ham hock terrine was equally daintily presented, surrounded by a green olive tapinade and a shallot vinaigrette. The small, slippery thing on top turned out to be a poached quail's egg, more than a little overcooked.

Our main courses were up to the same high standard as the starters; Mary was completely delighted with her supreme of chicken, although by this time her appetite was wilting. I had no trouble with the tuna before me - cooked just as described seared on the outside and raw in the middle. Good quality tuna, like fillet of beef, can be eaten and enjoyed raw, as any aficionado of sushi will tell you. Actually I'm convinced that the more it's cooked the less edible it becomes as the texture starts to turn to cotton wool, my only caveat being that it should always be premium grade tuna. A beetroot purée and an orange piperonata surrounded it and on top there were calamari rings and deep-fried aubergine slices, which were cooked to perfection.

Despite the temptation of a fine cheese menu and dessert menu that offered a fine array of puddings, we picked just one to share between us, the white chocolate and blueberry blondies with vanilla bean ice-cream. It made a tasty dessert, but the ice-cream was granular and rather took away from the dish. A pretty good espresso for me finished our meal, which was well above the average in skill and presentation. The bill came to €131.50 and did not include a service charge.