We used to play an after-dinner game called 'Name Ten Famous Belgians.' Even for people with an enormous capacity for remembering trivia it's a tricky one. One you've remembered Rene Magritte and Georges Simenon you start getting into very rarefied waters. However this week I discovered that there's a variation on the theme: name 100 Belgian beers. Last week I could have named you Stella Artois and nothing else, but now I can get to 105. I have the list in front of me.

I've always liked Belgium for its gastronomy. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that in general the food is better in Belgium than it is in France. Cynical souls might even suspect that that's the reason the EU has its headquarters in Brussels. But I never suspected that so many different beers could come from so small a country. The reason that I now know all of this is that I went to 'Belgo Dublin', the new Dublin adjunct to the Belgos that can be found in London and elsewhere.

I'd set off to meet Sonia Thornton, who was once described in print as an 'It Girl', whatever that means. I thought that I might leave the choice of the restaurant to her, since she's a trendy urbanite and is a lot more in touch with the new, the happening and the kicking than I could ever be. 'Belgo', which has only been open a couple of weeks, was her choice. It's in Sycamore Street, which runs towards Temple Bar from the Olympia, and it's a big place. Apart from the ground floor there's an upstairs, as well as annexes and linked rooms. We sat in the downstairs which is as hard-edged as anywhere I've ever been to. Even the wooden curves in the ceiling seem designed to reflect noise. Plain wooden tables and chairs are laid out as in a refectory, in long lines. This monastic theme is continued in the Trappist habits that the waiters and waitresses wear. In case you're wondering why, the reason is that many of the abovementioned beers are made by Trappist monks in Belgium, who have a long tradition of beer-making. I suppose it makes staying silent just a little easier to bear.

After a short wait in one of the annexes we were shown to our seats. They were at the end of a very long table, so in true Benedictine tradition you sit alongside a whole lot of other people. Our waiter brought us over the beer list and the menu and although they were very busy, took the time to go through the beers and the menu in detail. He was thorough, charming and well-informed, was called Damian Smith and came from Cape Town. When he left us to consider our choices I said to Sonia that Damian had already sold me the restaurant, even though I'd still hadn't tasted the food. And here's something else: if anyone asks me what I like in a restaurant apart from good food and service, I answer 'a big table and a comfortable chair.' Now here I was with a rock hard chair and a tiny part of a table to call my own and I was enjoying myself immensely. There are so many nice little touches. I particularly liked the 'Beat the Clock' part of the menu. If you arrive between 5 and 7 in the evening you can get a main course and a beer for the price of the clock. Order at ten past five and it'll cost you £5.10, order at half-past six and it'll cost £6.30. Come at lunchtime and you can have wild boar sausages or mussels with beer for a fiver.

Although Belgo's subtitle is 'mussels, chips and beer' the choices on the menu are somewhat greater. Sonia chose the Dublin Bay prawns as a starter and I had the cheese croquettes. Damian told us that the asparagus was really good, so we had a plate of that with Hollandaise sauce as well between us. For main courses Sonia picked the classic moules marinieres while I chose the glazed knuckle of pork. Both of us surrendered all responsibility for choosing beers and left that to Damian who selected beers for both of us to match our dishes.

With our starters Damian brought Sonia a raspberry beer, which is much nicer than it sounds, and he brought me the house beer, the Hoegaarden white beer which I thoroughly enjoyed. I may not have the order right, but for main courses we had a Trappist Ale and a Season Beer named Silly. These are called season beers because they're only brewed in the winter. At some stage Sonia tried a Ninkeberry fruit beer and I tasted one called Dentegems, which sounded, but didn't taste like a toothpaste. To finish we had a De Koninck, a dark beer that came monk-like in a chalice-shaped goblet.

The food was good. The cheese croquettes that I had as a starter were delicious as was the asparagus which came with a near-perfect Hollandaise. Sonia's prawns were a little over-cooked, but they were large like langoustines and there were plenty of them. Be warned: if like Sonia you go for the kilo pot of mussels in any one of the six ways Belgo's do, make sure you're very hungry. This is trencherman stuff - a huge stainless steel pot of mussels that would defeat most appetites. My knuckle of pork was so well cooked that I was able to take it off the bone with just a fork. It came on a bed of Belgian mash and, like Sonia, I had a bowl of frites as well. Just like chips in Belgium they come with mayonnaise, so you can dunk them one at a time.

I know that this is becoming something of a weekly cliché, but after all that beer and food, dessert wasn't as tempting as it might have been. Sonia persuaded me that no food review is complete without reference to dessert so she ordered the white chocolate Bavarois and I'm glad she did. Even though between the two of us we couldn't finish it, it was very tasty.

We were joined at this point by three friends who also shared in some Belgian beers. The bill came to £82.80 of which £50 was food and the rest beer. It has an interesting novelty: a suggested tip (12.5% or £10.35) already added on. Certainly it was well-deserved and I quite like this combination of freedom of choice and coercion. It would take a stronger stomach than mine to say 'Sorry. 10% is all your getting.' But what's good here is that the staff do get the tips; Damian told me so.