Throughout human history, whenever times are good and starvation is a long-forgotten memory, food has been as subject to fashion as clothes or morals. When I first started eating in Dublin restaurants in the late sixties, menus had a uniformity: you knew you could always find prawn cocktail, steak Diane and crepes suzette. All wine lists contained Barsac and Graves and not much else. Good restaurants like Jammet's tried for the French feel, others simply offered steak and chips or a mixed grill and chips. How times change. Gastronomically, Ireland today is hardly recognisable from those dull, unimaginative days. There is now an eclectic streak running through our restaurants where Italian, French and Tex-Mex dishes frequently sit side by side on the menus.

I put this down to a new self-confidence in our food, and partly down to the fact that there is no large corpus of national recipes to stop chefs from trying and choosing the best dishes from around the world. Freedom from the straight-jacket of a traditional cuisine has allowed us choices that the French or Italians are denied in their restaurants, bound as they are by their traditions.

Despite the variety of unusual cuisines available to me now, I decided to go to The Hungry Monk in Greystones. I ate there a month or so ago and was delighted with the uncomplicated and well-prepared menu. I knew I could expect and would probably get good, simple food. Added to that there is the joy of being able to park without difficulty just outside the restaurant - an unlikely event in the city centre.

There is something pleasingly old-fashioned about The Hungry Monk. Upstairs, just off Greystones' main street, the 'L' shaped dining-room is decorated with a monk motif - paintings, prints and figurines, it's even on the wineglasses. Not here the new minimalism: every surface, both vertical and horizontal, is covered in monks. I don't know why, but it kept reminding me of Berni Inns - perhaps because of its abundance of wood and homeliness.

The tables are well-spaced and the chairs are comfortable, two things that always please me. We passed on an aperitif and elected to go straight for a bottle of wine. Now Pat Keown, the owner, was for many years in the wine trade and The Hungry Monk's wine list is a testament to that. There are about 550 wines on the list, covering all prices and all tastes. I don't think I've ever seen such a comprehensive list anywhere in the world - it's staggering. There's a whole page of Côte Rôtie in different vintages and from different shippers, there are eighteen Chateau Neuf du Papes to choose from, good and reasonably priced Grand Crus of the Bordeaux for the well-heeled, wines from Germany, Chile, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand - a wine lover's nirvana.

It's a thoughtful list, page upon page for the wine buff, and a page of carefully chosen 'recommended' wines for under £15 a bottle, which includes the excellent Italian Salice Salentino, for those who may be a tad intimidated by the choice on offer. After what seemed an eternity of browsing I settled on the Chateau Musar 1989, a wine made defiantly against a background of war by Gaston Hochar in the Lebanon. With a selection finally made we were able to turn our attention to the menu. Pat explained that this was the last week or so of the summer menu and that shortly the winter menu, with game and other autumnal fare, would replace it. It's a menu that manages to combine good, straightforward dishes unfussily prepared with just a little of the newer food fashions so prominent in many of Dublin's restaurants.

For a starter I chose an old favourite, lamb's kidneys in mustard sauce, and my wife chose a Caprese salad. While we waited, a selection of breads and rolls were offered and when the starters came they were excellent. You can spoil even something as simple as a Caprese salad by using cheap olive oil, or the deeply unpleasant Danish mozzarella, or by being skimpy with the basil, or by using under-ripe tomatoes - or any combination of these. To my wife's delight all the ingredients were exactly as they should have been. My starter, too, is a simple enough dish that can be easily spoiled by carelessness, but what I got was perfectly cooked halved kidneys in a cream reduction sauce well flavoured with Dijon mustard. As an aside, it occurs to me that simple dishes are often the ones that go the most wrong. Despite our big and beefy red wine, my wife chose the sea-food symphony, a large platter of a plate which arrived decorated with lobster, monkfish and scallops - all of which stood up well to the Chateau Musar. Apart from the menu there is a blackboard with daily specials on a wall. From here I chose one of my favourite meats, wild boar. It was the saddle cooked with figs, not a combination that I would have thought of, but it worked well.

The vegetables are selected by the chef to go with the particular dish; my wife's fish came with rice, stuffed courgettes and a julienne of vegetables, while mine had figs, broccoli and carrots. We also had baked potatoes that had been halved, scooped out, mixed with cheese, refilled and grilled.

The food in The Hungry Monk is well-presented and pleasing to the eye, but what is clear from its menu is that its primary objective is to please the palate. The emphasis is not on making pretty creations out of food, but rather on using good ingredients and cooking them simply and well. A good example of this is the dessert that I chose; well how can you refuse something called 'Death by Chocolate'? It's not an elaborate dish, but when, as here, it's made with Callebaut chocolate with a 70% cocoa butter content, it becomes by virtue of good ingredients a fine dish - because in my view, simple dishes made with the finest ingredients are hard to beat. My wife, being less inclined to go for fattening foods than I am, chose the coconut sorbet with mangoes - refreshing and light. I finished with a real espresso made with an authentic Italian Gaggia.

Restaurants have a high failure rate, especially the very fashionable. This is true by definition since they become very quickly unfashionable. Others, though never much in the public eye, survive by doing what they do well. The Hungry Monk is one of these. Although not impervious to food fashions, it retains a sense of its own identity unswayed by passing fads. To survive, like The Hungry Monk, for ten years as a restaurant you have to be doing something right. The bill totals food and drink separately and we had a food total of £47.40. Wine and drinks came to £19.95 which, with a 10% service charge, made a grand total of £74.09. No restaurant can please all people all of the time, but if the mood should strike you for robust food, simply and well-prepared and served with generous portions, The Hungry Monk will suit you well.