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.

My guest was Gill Hall the designer, who specialises in textiles. She's an old friend and I suspect she wasn't completely won over by my theory that leaving things to chance is often a wondrous thing. Still, we steadfastly walked the cobbles of Temple Bar looking for somewhere that would hook us instantly the moment we saw it. By the time we'd walked most of it and were still unhooked there was 'La Med' which looked welcoming and had empty tables, and that meant we would get fed. A sign on the door saying 'Chef Wanted' might have rung alarm bells in someone more sensitive to these things than me.

Inside there's a pleasant space; a bar on the left, some tables on the right and a split level further in. Stairs go down to the kitchen and up to another dining room. This is one of those restaurants that goes for the hard-surfaced look and feel, which unfortunately is also applied to the chairs. Still, we had a table and would soon have some wine. All would be well, or so I thought.

Actually I would have liked to have taken Gill to somewhere specialising in fish or vegetarian dishes as she is a confirmed vegetarian, but there was enough on the menu to give her a reasonable choice. I thought I'd make amends by getting a really good wine. La Med has a short wine list and it's very fairly priced but if you want something a little special you won't find it. The most expensive wine is under twenty pounds, and there are times I'd be delighted to find that, but this time I wanted something that I couldn't have.

So before we looked at the menus we ordered a big bottle of mineral water and a bottle of Sancerre Le Paradis 1996, which at £16.50 was one of the better French wines listed. The menu had some interesting looking dishes: Greek Mezze, which is a selection of dips, Goat's Cheese Crostini and Tortilla de Papa - all starters. The main courses were a little less adventurous, ranging from fish, pastas, chicken and steaks. To start Gill chose the Greek Mezze, and I had the Calamari. The Mezze were served with triangles of pitta bread for dipping into three ramekins of dips. They looked well and tasted good. My calamari were nicely done, deepfried in a light batter, but the two sauces that accompanied them were not good. The spicy tomato sauce tasted strongly of metal and the aioli, a garlic mayonnaise, was either overpowered by mustard or started life as a rather bad mayonnaise, I'm not sure which.

For main courses Gill went for one of the pasta dishes; fusilli with olives, leeks, pimiento, lemon juice and basil served with a spinach sauce. I chose the fish of the day which was skate's wing, simply pan-fried. I chose well, the fish was fresh and well cooked and although simply done, its own flavour was enough to please me. I tasted Gill's pasta and was unimpressed. The trouble with putting too many flavours in a sauce is that you don't end up with a sauce - it has no definable flavour. What you get is a mouthful of conflicting flavours that don't blend in any way at all.

I am firmly convinced that no one goes to a restaurant with the intention of being displeased. In fact the average customer, including me, deeply desires everything to be right and makes all kind of allowances for small shortcomings. A restaurant has to go quite a long way down the road of doing things badly before that good will is lost. It's quite hard to pin down the moment when your attention shifts from enjoying yourself to focusing almost completely on the things that are annoying you; you just suddenly find that you're doing it. Being left sitting in front of empty plates after finishing the main course for three quarters of an hour is enough to do it for me. One waiter and a maitre d' doing their best to cover two dining areas on different levels with the kitchen on yet another is quite simply not enough. There really is no excuse for it. So from having a few minor quibbles about the food I found myself getting cross and those quibbles began to assume a greater importance.

The fact is that 'La Med' isn't expensive - starters are all between £3 and £5 and main courses between £8 and £13. Given that, my expectations weren't overly high and had the service been better I might even have overlooked the rest. But it's a cumulative thing; one niggle leads to another. The kitchen has a bell to tell the solitary waiter that a dish is ready. Each time I thought I might catch his eye it would ring and we knew that another opportunity was gone as he dashed off to deal with it.

When we eventually got our plates cleared and dessert menus to look at, the waiter was back almost immediately pressing us for our order. I chose the selection of sorbets and Gill chose the chocolate marquise. This was the second time recently that I've been handed just a spoon for dessert and I don't approve. It's hard to chase an ice-cream around a flat plate without another implement to hold it still. However I was delighted to discover that the marquise tasted very good indeed and my sorbets, especially the strawberry one, were exceptionally good. It took me some way towards regaining a sense of pleasure in dining.

I do feel that a restaurant ought to be aware when things go wrong and should, at the very least, apologise for delays. Pretending that nothing happened merely treats me like an idiot; it presumes that I've noticed nothing or that I don't care. An acknowledgement that things were not up to standard on the night would have left me a lot less discontented.