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.

I was meeting Rebecca Robertson, the circulation manager of the new Business Plus magazine, and I thought that if I were to be in the company of a fashionable young person perhaps a fashionable, young, kicking, in-your-face restaurant would be just the thing. The smartest people I know tell me that 'Mao' in Chatham Street fits this description. I ate there a couple of weeks ago in a party of eleven, which is every restaurant's nightmare. Now seemed the perfect opportunity to go again in a more manageable number.

It was another rainy night and we walked from the newly refurbished Horseshoe Bar to Mao. A Tuesday night is not normally a night that you would expect to find a full restaurant, but even if I'd wanted to book a table at Mao they won't let you. You just turn up and hope for the best. We were met at the door and kept on the pavement. 'We're full, come back in fifty minutes and we might have a table.' I asked could we wait inside and have a drink. 'No, we're full. Try again in three-quarters of hour or so.' Well, I suppose that was an option, but not one that I particularly liked. We decided to walk around the corner to Johnny Cooke's.

As we walked I was thinking about what Jack Donnelly had said. There must be something about queues that make people think that there has to be something worth queueing for at the other end. A queue generates interest and excitement, and for Mao it clearly works just fine. A few years ago Cookes generated exactly the same sort of interest; it was always crowded and it was difficult to get a table. Arriving there we found a reasonably busy restaurant, which thankfully still had tables for those like us with no booking. There is nothing nicer on arriving at a restaurant than being warmly greeted and being made to feel at ease instantly, which is exactly what happened at Cookes. It's so easy to do you wonder why it's still possible to find the opposite. Sitting down and relaxing the thought occurred: is there a predictable life-cycle to restaurant? A new restaurant will always fill, after all we all want to give it a try, but then it settles down to a more comfortable and less frenetic pace. Is this the probable future for Mao?

Cookes dining room is rather nice. It has a kind of Pompeian feel, classical friezes on the wall and a warm red paint. Maybe it's something in my racial subconcious, but I like the effect. While Rebecca studied her menu I had my nose buried in the wine list. It's not a long list and it's marked up at well over 100pc, which is not not something I like to see. Three reds and three whites at £14 make up the house wines, then there's a page of reds and a page of whites. With nothing unusual or different to be found I fell back on an old favourite, Chateau Musar from the Lebanon. Cookes had it listed as a 1991, which is getting hard to find, but that's exactly what they had. I justified its price of £23.50 to myself by concentrating on its vintage.

So to the menu. It's the sort of menu that ladies with small to zero appetites like. Lots of different salads, dainty fishy dishes - you know the kind of thing. The starters are all around £7.50 and the main courses range from £12-18, excluding vegetables which are priced separately. Rebecca made up her mind quickly; goat's cheese salad followed by monkfish. I took a while longer, determined to find something unequivocally macho. I settled in the end on polenta to start and a duck confit for my main course. A visit to Cookes isn't complete without their selection of breads and olive oil dips, so naturally we had that to nibble on as a pre-starter. The breads are very good, but for some reason I had less of an appetite that night than usual, so I only ate three or four slices.

The starters arrived, and like everything in this restaurant, they were well presented. Good, big plates and nicely arranged. Rebecca's salad was very fine; the combination of various greens was perfectly chosen to compliment the taste of the cheese. My polenta came with a Gorgonzola sauce which was wonderfully rich. The polenta itself was good, but of a much finer consistency than I'm used to - I'd prefer a coarser semolina. It was served with a salad much like Rebecca's, but it was undressed. I really thought the days of undressed salad had gone, it's been so long since it's come to me like that. I asked for some dressing and was brought another ramekin of olive oil; not quite what I had in mind.

The wine had opened out in the glass and was truly delicious. At 14 degrees this is a big and punchy wine, so I ordered a bottle of water to slake my thirst. Our main courses arrived. Rebecca's monkfish tail was neatly sliced, well cooked and was exactly to her taste. My confit of duck was presented not on a potato cake as one might expect, but on a bed of salad. The salad was, as before, undressed. The duck legs were really tasty and continuing my theme of macho-man behaviour I ate them with my fingers.

We chose one dessert between us - a rich, unctious chocolate tart with an orange sorbet, which arrived like so many desserts these days on a large plate with a drizzled pattern thereon. A tall, thin pastry shape completed the design by giving it the fashionably obligatory height. To sum up; we had a good meal in pleasant surroundings with a price tag of £79.40 including a service charge. Subtracting the wine means about £30 a head for the food, which I felt was a little over-priced.