What are you looking for when you go out to eat? Good food? Fun? A few snatched hours of romantic tete-a-tete? A chance to let someone else do the washing up? When it comes down to it there's a myriad reasons why we choose to go out to eat and the food isn't the only one. It goes without saying that bad food should be avoided if at all possible, but even mediocre food is sometimes acceptable provided you get whatever else you're looking for.

Now this preamble is to set the scene for what follows. My guest this evening was Heather Osborne, who lives in Enniskerry, and I asked her if she could think of somewhere nearby. After a little thought she came up with Johnny Fox's. As soon as she'd mentioned it I thought 'What a good idea.' At last, a change from restaurants that take themselves seriously. I'd been in Johnny Fox's a while ago on a Sunday afternoon and I don't think I've ever seen so many people in one building. Heather booked us a table for two at eight and we set off from Enniskerry across the Dublin Mountains.

It was a misty night, but you could see the lights of Fox's across the valley long before we got there. There's a definite feel of 'El Paso' lawlessness here. It's a big place and it sits at a cross-roads from where each road goes for miles with no traffic lights or Garda stations. The huge car park was completely full and there were two large tour buses parked right out front. There are bright lights all around the place which is what we'd seen from afar. As we walked to the front door we passed the most extraordinary array of bric-a-brac I've ever seen: arrayed outside the front door is a British Telephone kiosk, a pony cart filled with turf, butter churns, old aluminium milk pails, an old fire-fighting pump, an elderly Esso hand-cranked petrol pump and a green Austin 7 with the number plate FU 2. If that makes you laugh, you'll love some of the interior stuff.

Inside the theme of covering every available space - both vertical and horizontal - with something olde-worlde continues with unabated fervour. It's very near to sensory overload as you walk in, passing the hand-painted boards detailing the head girls of The Hall Monkstown over the years. Why these should be the first thing displayed to the customer on entering will need to be explained to me. The first thing that strikes you on arriving inside is the number of people. This is a very busy place. We found a table and sat, watching various people who seemed to be affiliated with the place walk past us. After a while I decided to get our drinks from the bar. At an empty counter I watched three barmen engaged in what I can only suppose was a riveting conversation, because they were unable to see or hear me until I raised my voice to Stentorian levels. By the time I got back to our table, Heather had made contact with someone who had gone to find the restaurant manager.

Somehow I found myself reminded of the palace at Knossos, which is probably the basis for the maze in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Here too, there is an endless array of small rooms linked together with no discernible criterion - at least not to me. Each of them is packed with people and each is packed with every imaginable piece of paraphernalia and impedimenta. We drank our drinks and someone came to show us to our table. As he walked in front of us, a walkie-talkie strapped to his belt blared piercing instructions as to what he should be doing next. Odd, I thought - but it wasn't as odd as what followed.

The room we were eating in had some ten tables or so, and like everywhere else was full of brass things, wooden things, pottery things, cast-iron things, enamelled things, wicker things and wood shavings on the floor. Yes, that's right, it's got designer sawdust on the floors. I can't imagine a worse job than having to dust this place. The other thing the dining room had was a tannoy which every few minutes would bark out instructions along the lines of 'Would the Bolger family please come to the main bar?' and 'The table of eight for the Moran group is now ready in the restaurant.' Why do either of these things need to be announced in the dining room? I mean, if the table's ready for the Morans and they're not in the dining room, then why announce it there? Bizarre.

Not having done any research before arriving, we found to our surprise that even though we were high in the hills and far from the sea, this is a sea-food restaurant. There is not one piece of meat on offer unless you count alligator, which sits next to frogs' legs on the amphibian section of the menu. As it happened sea-food was fine by Heather and fine by me. The menu had all the usual offerings like smoked salmon, shell-fish in various guises, white fish and fresh salmon. I have to admit that 'home-made coconut king prawns' had me puzzled, but in the end Heather chose the whitebait for a starter and I couldn't resist a prawn cocktail. I can't remember when I last saw this on a menu, it seems to have gone so far out of fashion that it's probably safe to bring it back. For main courses Heather picked the prawns with Gorgonzola while I chose the scallops wrapped in bacon.

The whitebait were good, crisp and cleanly fried, but were let down by a thin, watery sauce which may have been a tartare. My prawns had that soft, wet consistency that you get with frozen sea-food - not so great. Heather's main course was good, but this is the second time I've had scallops wrapped in bacon and I just don't see how it can work. On both occasions the bacon's been well-cooked, which means the scallops inside are hopelessly over-cooked becoming small and tough. How can you cook two things together that need different cooking times? I don't get it. We'd drunk a bottle of Australian Chardonnay, which was better than I expected for £11.95, and we finished with a couple of Irish coffees instead of puddings. Two starters and two main courses came to £42.30, which ain't cheap. Before we'd finished eating, the band in the next room had started to play the kind of songs that go with shillelaghs and shamrocks, and then it hit me: this is like a Hollywood set-designer's idea of an oirish pub. I wouldn't come here to eat again, but I just might bring a foreign visitor for a pint and a laugh.