There's a big difference between eating a meal in a restaurant when the intention is to review it, and sitting down to a meal when the intention is purely to enjoy the company in which you find yourself, with the food as an important, but secondary consideration. I confess that when I'm in convivial company I find it a lot harder to concentrate on the minutiae of a meal. Bearing this is mind, when I arranged to meet Mary Finnegan - writer, broadcaster and equestrian wizard for dinner, it occurred to me that something simple would fit the bill. Mary is a Dalkey resident, and when she suggested P.D.'s Woodhouse, a restaurant specialising in barbecued food, I agreed at once.

The evening turned into something of a Dalkey experience. We met in The Queens for a pre-prandial drink and almost moved on from there to the eponymous Finnegan's before dinner for just one more, but thankfully didn't. This wasn't pure Epicurean hedonism, no, but rather because P.D.'s Woodhouse does two sittings - an early half-past-seven and a nine thirty. We had a late booking and an hour and a half to kill.

Fairly punctually we arrived at the restaurant to be shown to our table. It's not a big room, hence the two sittings; long and quite narrow with tables ranged along the sides, with a smaller room off the main one. Just off the centre of the main dining-room, steps lead down to a huge barbecue where the main event takes place. This is the indoor oakfired centre of P.D.'s. I love the taste of food cooked on wood, and it's especially nice to be able to have it without standing outside in the rain doing it for yourself on a summer's evening.

Looking back on it now, I suppose the fact that Mary knew a lot of the other diners should have given me a clue as to what was likely to transpire as the night went by, but it didn't at the time. I started by looking down a laminated wine list, whites on one side, reds on the other. It's a fairly basic list, but it's well matched to the dishes on offer on the menu. There's a selection of wines from most of the wine-producing countries of the world, the majority between £15 and £20. There's also a few in the thirty to eighty pound range, none of them bargains and I'd guess them to be slow movers. Since both Mary and myself are fans of big, beefy reds, I chose the Campo Viejo Gran Reserva 1989 at £21.95 which turned out to be a winner. Old enough to have rounded out nicely but still full of colour and taste. If you don't like barbecued food obviously this isn't going to be a restaurant that you'd visit. Barbecuing is what they do and they do it well. To start I chose Baby Spare Ribs and Mary had the Prawn Kebab in a chilli sauce. It's got to the stage that we rarely eat red meat at home now, what with a near-vegetarian daughter, so it tends to be something I only eat when I'm out. It wasn't that long ago that I had a monstrous steak in a restaurant, but when I saw a twelveounce sirloin on offer once again I thought what the hell, go for it Paolo. Mary, being more ladylike in her appetite, chose the lamb chops.

This is not haute cuisine, nor does it pretend to be. This is simple, well made food with an added twist of difference supplied by the wood smoke. By the time our starters arrived the second sitting was complete and the restaurant was full. Now it was my turn - a table of four beside us turned out to be friends of mine; two of them locals. Again, cleverer or more sober people than me might have spotted the warning signs, but once again I didn't. I was concentrating at the time on my spare ribs which were so perfectly cooked that the meat came off the bone with barely a prod of the fork. Mary's prawns were also good, but you'd have to like chilli: these were hot.

Without even noticing it our bottle of Campo Viejo had come to an end just as our main courses arrived. A second bottle seemed like a really good idea, so we had one. Both Mary's chops and my steak were served with a jacket potato and let me quote you Mary's analysis: 'These are baked potatoes from heaven.' I'd call that an endorsement. And what can you say about a plateful of beautifully cooked red meat with the taste of oak smoke? All I can say is that I ate every bit of it and wasn't hungry enough afterwards to eat my greens, despite Mary's exhortations to do so. There is something definitely atavistic about a meal that is essentially just meat or fish cooked on an open flame. It's probably what our hunter-gatherer forbears ate while huddled around camp fires many millenia ago. For this modern equivalent you don't have to sit outside and you don't have to hunt your meat - you just pay for it. You can expect to pay about £22 a head for a meal in P.D.'s.

I suppose it must have been after the main courses that the decorum of the evening started to unravel. I thought it would be a great idea to join my friends for coffee and after dinner drinks, and Mary, not being the shy or retiring type, agreed. We pushed tables together and made one for six. It might have been me who first suggested something bubbly in a bottle, but anyway that's what we had. And then another bottle. I have a dim recollection that we were given Sambucas on the house as well. Sometime after two o'clock the staff, who were all poised by the door coats in hand, suggested that we might like to go home, so that they could too.

We left the restaurant, but as is so often the way in Ireland, it's hard to bring a good night to an end. So that's how it came to pass that Mary and I and the Leonards ended up at the Kenny's house dipping into more wine, coffee and cognac; talking and laughing until half-past-five when taxis came to take us home as a bright new dawn filled the sky. I might need to get into training should another Dalkey night beckon.