One of my annual pilgrimages is a trip to Clew Bay. I'm lucky enough to have friends who live near Westport and who kindly to have us to stay, so the road to Westport is no stranger to me. I haven't been there since what we laughingly called last summer, so when the chance came to go to the re-launch of the Hotel Westport I jumped at it. Every year the drive there gets easier as new by-passes and stretches of motorway are opened along the way. Being winter it was a wet and muddy drive, and there were sections where the countryside seemed to be one large puddle. I asked about this on arrival and the consensus of opinion in Westport appears to be that it hasn't stopped raining there for six months. It certainly looks that way.

Westport is an attractive and very busy town; my tourist brochure explained that it's one of only two towns in Ireland that were laid out to a plan at the outset - I'd guess Enniskerry is the other. It bustles with people and traffic even in the cold, dark days of January - which must be why the Hughes family have seen fit to invest £7 million in refurbishing and enlarging the Westport. It is now a comfortable hotel with a leisure centre, a twenty metre pool and state-of-the-art conferencing facilities. These were not the reasons that I had gone, however. I'd been told that The Islands dining room served good food, and since I hadn't stopped for lunch on the way, I arrived with a fine appetite, augmented by a glass or two of decent champagne prior to dinner.

The dining room is large and high-ceilinged with big windows that look out over Clew Bay - or they would have done were it not for a large video screen that stood in front of them. Actually I didn't pay it much attention at first, since I was more interested in the menu. Obviously a dinner to celebrate a re-launch has to be a show-case for the kitchen, but I was surprised at the range of choices on offer. It takes a brave kitchen to offer that many choices for a set dinner for close on a hundred people. Starters were smoked salmon parcels filled with salmon mousse; cheddar pastry bowls filled with a crab confit; or a simple melon filled with wild berries. Then a choice of soup - carrot and coriander or Clew Bay seafood chowder, and then a choice of three main courses; baked fillet of beef, baked Atlantic salmon, or half a crispy roast duckling.

Thankfully I was sat at a table of sharing people who were prepared to swap tastes of their choices with mine. I'd chosen the smoked salmon parcels which were dainty enough for any Sushi chef. Neatly made packages tied with thin strips of leek, they came with an excellent chive sauce. I also tasted the cheddar bowls of crab, which were little filigree baskets filled with white crab meat and with a herb crumb. Both of these starters were prettily presented: I had a feeling that whoever was in the kitchen knew their trade and I began to relax, helped by an acceptable Cotes de Blaye red and white.

As I was looking around the room which is styled in the manner that is increasingly common - large expanses of wood stained in two shades and effective geometrically designed coloured glass lighting - we were called to hush. The video screen came to life, and there, talking to us live over a ISDN video connection, were the Taoiseach and the Minister for Tourism, who sent their best wishes to Westport in general and the Hotel in particular. There's no doubt that such distinguished company, even at the distance of a video link, added a sense of occasion, but I have to admit that I was marginally more impressed with the technology than with the content of the speeches.

With the speeches and good wishes over, the soups arrived. I studied my Clew Bay chowder. It had a large variety of fish and shellfish and was good and rich. I couldn't help remembering how many times I'd been out on Clew Bay with my friend Dave Brabazon baiting and pulling up lobster pots, and finding either nothing at all or the same two kinds of fish - dogfish and pollock. Late at night, around barbecue fires, I have heard muttered tales of lobsters being found in them - which is why we persist - but I suspect they really ought to be re-named pollock pots. When the main courses arrived I still had enough appetite to try all three - well, mouthfuls of them anyway. The salmon came with a herb crumb which was perfectly cooked, the duckling crispy as described and with a well-made orange sauce. The slices of beef that I'd ordered were tender and cooked exactly as I like them; seignant. The main courses were served with a good variety of vegetables; the tiny, roast garlic potatoes being my favourite.

After this came a real treat: the Mas de Blanc Banyuls, an amazingly complex red dessert wine made from the Grenache grape which was served as it should be, slightly cool. Banyuls is rapidly becoming my preferred after dinner wine, lighter than a vintage port and with less price to pay the next morning. There were three desserts to go with my wine; a tiramisu in a chocolate cup, a baked apple and blueberry pie and a mille feuille with creme patisserie, all of which I picked on and enjoyed. The evening ended with traditional music and after that a horse race. The big video screen became the setting for six videos of horse races on which we were invited to bet some play money. By listening carefully to the form of each horse, noting the name of the trainer and jockey on my race card, I managed to lose my fifty dollars of play money by the end of the fourth race.

Over a somewhat fragile breakfast the next morning it occurred to me that this was a place I'd be happy to come to the next time the lobster pots come up empty and there's no supper. Good, well-prepared, unpretentious food at reasonable prices. A four-course dinner plus coffee in the Westport Hotel costs £21.95.