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.

The Old School House is a pretty stone building, with manicured gardens around it. Even in the dark the outside is attractive and there's the pleasing sound of a fountain in the garden. You walk into a conservatory where you can sit and have an aperitif while studying a long menu and an impressively long wine-list. I couldn't quite work out how the wine-list was divided up, but there were at least half a dozen wines for under a tenner, plenty between £10 and £20, and a good selection of the more expensive wines, which were spread over most of the wine-producing globe. The South African Groot Constantia Pinotage 1994 from the Cape caught my eye, largely because I've been to the winery and have happy memories of a wine-tasting afternoon there. It's perhaps not quite as good a wine as its neighbour Klein Constantia even though their names suggest otherwise, but it's still a good wine. It was listed at £23.50, which by my reckoning puts the mark-up on wines over 100pc.

The menu is also long. There's a whole page devoted to fish starters and main courses, another of a la carte starters and main courses, and a set dinner at £23.95 which consists of four courses and coffee. We chose from the table d'hote; Lainey went for the crab cakes and I went for the duck liver terrine. We both passed on the home-made soup and while I chose tournedos Rossini, Lainey chose pork Frangelica for our main courses.

We started on our wine in the conservatory where we sat until our table was ready. Once inside the dining-room I had one of those instant first impressions: surely this isn't the dining-room of a £24 a head meal? It's nice, but it's very plain. Plain pine tables, wooden chairs seated with raffia, a plain wooden floor, simple place settings and a plum-coloured tongue-and-groove dado around the walls. All perfectly acceptable - just at odds with the cost. I don't want to labour this point, but it seems to me that what you pay for in a restaurant isn't just the food; you're paying for the staff, both waiting and kitchen, and you're paying for the room. These things should all be in balance, and to me the balance here didn't feel right. In my view this was a eighteen pound a head dining-room with eighteen pound a head service. I don't mean that the service was bad - it wasn't - it was just a little too perfunctory to square with the price. The room was very full with some big tables of eight and more, as well as smaller groups. I know that that puts a strain on both the kitchen and the waiting staff, but I only counted three waiting staff, which I felt were too few.

There are consequences to this: cold dishes have to be prepared well in advance and hot dishes have to be kept hot until there is time to serve them. Our starters arrived nicely presented and my terrine came with Cumberland sauce on the side. I never got to taste the sauce because it had set as hard as epoxy resin on the plate - even my knife couldn't shift it. The terrine was good, although I would have liked some toast with it, and the crab cakes were fine.

Lainey is great company and I was enjoying her insights into the fashion world. I kept my first impressions of the restaurant to myself, not wanting to break the happy mood. When the main courses arrived I stared disconsolately at my plate. My tournedos, two slices of beef fillet served on toast covered with pate, were covered in a dark sauce that had a skin on it. My guess is that the plate had spent too long under a grill before being brought to the table. To be fair, this didn't affect the taste but, as I said before, if you're going to charge top money for the food and your surroundings are Spartan, then the food really ought to arrive in front of you virtually flawless.

I bit the bullet and gave Lainey my impressions. Whatever inherent politeness had made her refrain from commenting on what she was eating relaxed its grip. She felt that the balance of the flavours in her pork dish wasn't right: I tasted it and agreed. It was stuffed fillet of pork cut roughly into medallions with a cream sauce, that was described on the menu as being flavoured with nut liqueur. I could taste what I thought was a Nocino liqueur, but the sweetness of the stuffing over-powered the dish.

This all sounds very harsh, but it's not meant to be. Had this meal been priced at the medium rather than the top end of the range, I would have had a different approach. To repeat myself, all I'm saying is that if you find menu prices that are at haute cuisine levels, then that's what you should be served and those are the high standards by which judgement should be made.

By those same standards our desserts were excellent, especially my chocolate truffle cake. We had chosen a half bottle of the Californian 'Elysium', a red dessert wine made from black Muscat grapes, which was priced at £12.50. This was new to me, and it had a wonderfully fruity taste and smell which complimented the desserts to perfection. There are times, I suppose, when everyone suffers from selfdoubt. For me it's been this past week, when in two different restaurants my opinions seem to have been at variance with everyone else's. In the Bella Cuba I found myself really impressed with the food and yet they could clearly do with more customers; in The Old School House I found myself not so impressed in a restaurant that was stuffed to overflowing on a Thursday night in February. But perhaps there's a simple explanation; competition in Swords is not as keen as it is in the city centre.