The week before I went to the Clarence Hotel it had been London Fashion Week, where my old friend Lainie Keogh was wowing the press with her faux fur fabrics. Her sister Irene had spent the last three weeks working with her, so when I met Irene in the Octagon Bar she was still fired with the news from the fashion world. It did occur to me that The Clarence was a good place to be when talking about fashion because it is itself rather fashionable. Whenever show-biz celebs find themselves in Dublin, increasingly it seems that The Clarence is where they stay.

Irene had booked a table for us in the Tea Rooms, which despite its name, is The Clarence's dining room. It's a large, high-ceilinged room with a balcony, whose most notable features are the large leaded windows that are backlit with cool blue, giving the illusion of day-light. It's very modern in a clean, clinical way: plain wooden tables with a linen runner, wooden floor, designer polished steel cutlery, magnificent floral displays atop the wooden dividers and comfortable seating. Crisp might be a good epithet for the decor.

If this was a social diary rather than a restaurant review, it would be easy to fill this column with a lot of fluff about who was there - the temptation is enormous. But since it isn't, I'll just give you a brief run down since its celebrity customers are part of this restaurant's appeal. Come to think of it here's an extraordinary tale: I'd just found the script for a pantomime that I'd written with Michael Colgan twenty-seven years ago in a box in a shed. I'd brought it with me to get it photocopied, since I thought that it could become a treasured memento of youth. At the next table to Irene and I was Paul McGuinness, my Wicklow neighbour, with a large group that included the artist Damian Hurst. Paul was one of the original cast members and was amazed to see that the script still existed. He introduced me to Robbie Robertson of The Band, who was also dining in the Tea Rooms. Before the night ended Michael Colgan arrived along with his wife Susan Fitzgerald, straight off the stage in the Gate where she is playing in Arcadia. She had made the costumes for the panto all those years ago, so that meant there were four people dining in the restaurant who were involved with it. Now I'd call that a pretty big coincidence.

After we'd settled down at our table the first thing that I looked at carefully was the wine list. Considering the prices on the menu and the classy surroundings, the wine list struck me as rather lacklustre and uninspired. It seemed at odds with the care and thought that has gone into everything else. Marked up by a factor of three, even mediocre wines are expensive and the only attempt at categorisation is dividing the wines by colour. After a long look I found Norton, an Argentinean Malbec varietal which, unusually, is unfiltered. At £23 it ranked in price low to average on this list - a good wine, but over-priced. The Lebanese Chateau Musar, normally listed elsewhere between £16-22, is here at £30. As we looked through the menu we had a bottle of mineral water - English - and were brought a wooden tray of five different and excellent breads with a tasty spicy dip to accompany it. Starters run from a £5.50 soup to £10.50 for the foie gras. They included a grilled tuna, a grilled beef, a duck liver salad, aubergine salad and a saucisson of salmon. Irene chose the aubergine salad and I had the salmon saucisson. Main courses run from £15 for a lasagna with wild mushrooms to £19 for the roast scallops. Other main courses were a braised canon of lamb, roast salmon, risotto with prawn tails, a roast cushion of veal, a confit of duck and fillet of beef. From these Irene chose the canon of lamb and I picked the sea-bass.

With the ordering done I took a little time to look around me. I was struck by what looked like a youthful clientele. Mid-twenties to mid-thirties seemed to be the age range, bringing home forcefully the effects of our vibrant economy. This was a mid-week night and every table was filled. What I liked about the feel of the Tea Rooms is that they manage to carry off the trick of being comfortable and informal at the same time as providing intensely professional service - a good combination.

The starters arrived and I was impressed by the presentation of Irene's aubergine salad and by the taste of my salmon. The salad came layered with crispy deep-fried slices of aubergine so it had the appearance, said Irene rather poetically, of a currach floating upon the green seas of the West. The salad was a mixture of leaves and had a tasty dressing. My salmon was a good dish, a roll of salmon seared on the outside and then served as a slice on a bed of delicious pasta in the shape of rice. Like a kind of sushi, the salmon was almost uncooked in the middle - succulent and very good. The main courses were equally impressive; Irene's lamb was cooked pink, was nicely presented and large in portion, so much so that she had difficulty in finishing it. My sea-bass, a fish I've always liked, came in two fillets and were cooked to perfection. It was so good that I finished it in no time, which left me a little embarrassed when Irene asked if she could taste it, since I'd already eaten it all.

There's a good dessert list in the £6-8 range, in which oddly the cheapest choice is the cheeseboard, and from it we picked the baked chocolate fondant to share. If you like sinfully sweet puddings then you'd have liked this one, it was rich, luscious and very, very good. It was served on a big plate and had its own Priapic extension - a long thin cone of white chocolate. I followed this with two espressos, the second because the first was good. The bill came to £92.50, which included two bottles of mineral water at £3.50 each, putting the Tea Rooms very much in the upper price bracket. None the less I felt that the quality of the food and the service put it on a par with other restaurants that charge this much. But I'm yet to be convinced that marking up wines as much as they do here does much to encourage wine lovers.