One of the best lunches I ever had was hosted by Myles McWeeney and took place in L'Ecrivain. It was a themed lunch, especially for carnivores, and featured a range of unusual meats - ostrich, bison and kangaroo. Apart from the uncommonness of the meats, the lunch stuck in my mind for its beautiful presentation and near perfect execution. Derry Clarke, I decided, was a chef that I had a lot of respect for.

I've been putting off going there for some time now, because I like that thing that psychologists call 'deferred gratification' which is another way of saying 'That pleases me a lot, so I'll keep it for later.' It also makes you feel a bit grown-up, because it's something children have no concept of - their attitude is more like 'I like that, give it to me now.' So having deferred my pleasure a while, I thought it might be time to seize it.

I'd given my wife glowing reports of the lunch, so she was keen to come with me. After a leisurely drive from Wicklow we got to Baggot Street a bit after eight, well in time for our half-past eight booking. When you go in to L'Ecrivain there's a waiting area and a bar downstairs with comfortable chairs and sofas. We were greeted and asked if we'd like to go straight to our table, which we did. The dining room is upstairs and there's the main body of the room and another area, separated by an archway in which we were sat. A large, linen-covered table with comfortable chairs made me feel instantly well-disposed towards the room. There are shelves around the walls lined with old books, quarter and halfbound, which is entirely in keeping with this restaurant's name - 'The Author' in English. You can also find its logo, a quill, on the menu and wine list.

A bottle of mineral water started us off while we read the menu. It was charged at £4 for the litre bottle and this is, I promise, my last whinge about water. However, if there's a restaurateur out there reading this who can give me a justification for water at six times the price of petrol I'd be happy to include it in a future review. But at least in L'Ecrivain you don't have the added insult of having a 10% service charge on top of the £4 - they have a policy here of only putting the service charge on the food element of the bill, which is something I'd like to see more restaurants emulate.

The menu is both a la carte and table d'hote. The starters on the a la carte are just below £10 and the main courses are just short of £20. The table d'hote is £31.50 and is four courses, it includes a selection of vegetables, coffee or tea and rounds off with chocolate truffles as petits fours. There were some good looking dishes on it such as cream of celeriac soup, baked herb encrusted goats cheese, cucumber noodle salad, Caesar salad, pan-fried sausage, rack of lamb, fillet of hake and fillet of monkfish but neither of us felt up to quite so much food. The a la carte had two of my favourite things on it and Susie's too, so that's where we looked. Pan fried foie gras, baked rock oysters, spring roll of duck, Dublin Bay prawns and seared black pudding were some of the starters and main courses included fillet of John Dory, fillet of beef, wild Irish salmon, veal liver or half a West Coast lobster. Susie chose the duck spring rolls and I couldn't resist the foie gras. I know we shouldn't have, and maybe it wasn't such a good idea, but we said 'what the hell' and both chose the lobster.

It did make the choice of wine a little simpler, though. It's a fairly long wine list and starts with seven house wines; four from Chile and three from France, then there's a 'suggested selection' which has wines listed at £15. Bordeaux comes next, listed by year and finishing at 1990. These are mostly crus classes and petits chateaux, and are mostly between £100 and £200. A couple looked like good value to me, but that's a theoretical judgement rather than a practical one and I kept turning the pages. The mark up would appear to be something over 100%, so the fact that there's no service charge on the wines seems to be well covered. With anything French halfway good costing upwards of £30 I turned my attention to the Australian whites. Penfold's Old Vine Semillon looked interesting at £20, so we had that. The Semillon grape can occasionally impart something of the odour of cats' pee to a wine, but thankfully this one didn't. It lived up to its description on the menu as 'a wine with honeyed fruit' and we both enjoyed it.

Susie's starter of duck spring rolls came with an amazing fluorescent green sauce that surrounded her two centrally placed rolls. It looked extraordinary, and said Susie, tasted good. 'Perhaps it's lemon grass,' she ventured, but wouldn't be more specific. The rolls themselves were a little tasteless, though. My foie gras was really good, succulent and perfectly cooked. The service was excellent, the wine was going down well, all was right with the world.

Our lobsters came looking very pretty on the plates and we set to. It took a while before either of us said anything. 'How's yours, Susie?' 'Um, fine. Yours?' 'Okay. Maybe a bit over-cooked.' 'Mine too, actually.' And that's why it's not a good idea to have the same thing when you're reviewing. It's not really fair on L'Ecrivain for me to judge a meal on just one main course. If we'd had two different dishes then perhaps I could have enthused over that and stayed muted on the lobster, instead all I can say in honesty is that our main courses weren't great. As it happens we were back a few days later with a party of ten and the lobsters were perfection. But that's the thing with something as volatile as food, it's hard to hit the nail on the head a hundred times out of a hundred.

Dessert menus came and they're all priced at £6. Susie finished her meal with a summer berry pudding which was, she said, 'perfectly agreeable' and I finished with an espresso. We were about to go when we met some friends, so we stayed a while over after dinner drinks. The bill came to £112.97 of which £65.25 was food.