We'd gone to London for a few days to see John Hurt's powerful performance in Krapp's Last Tape; part of The Gate's phenomenally successful festival of Beckett in The Barbican. As a piece of theatre it's a tour de force and leaves you a little in awe of such astounding talent. There was quite a contingent of Irish there for the same reason as us, so inevitably it became a weekend of parties and late nights. We ate well in a couple of restaurants which I'll mention later, but the highlight of the foodie part of things was a meal in Nobu. Six of us went there, first to try the food, then to bop downstairs in the Met Bar.

Although Nobu is a relatively new addition to the scene in London, it has already acquired something of a reputation. This is based on a number of factors: it's partly owned by Robert de Niro, it's the zenith of fashionable chic, it's full of celebrities and it's very expensive - even before you convert to Irish punts. If you haven't guessed from the name it's a Japanese restaurant, whose history goes like this: Nobu Matsuhisa, a master chef, made his name in Los Angeles with his restaurant Matsuhisa. In partnership with de Niro he opened Nobu in New York, where its celebrity status continued, and now there's Nobu London where it has enjoyed a media high profile - witness this month's Vogue. Because it's Japanese and you can eat daintily, it's also the haunt of super-models and the size 8 glamorous. Lots of Prada in evidence here. It seems I had my back to Danni Behr and the lead singer from Catatonia Kerry Mathews, so we had our share of celebs that night.

Like two of Dublin's high-profile restaurants, Peacock Alley and Patrick Guilbaud's, Nobu is also in a hotel; in this case the first floor of The Metropolitan Hotel in Park Lane. It has its own entrance and you go up a flight of steps to the restaurant. The look and feel is very much Conran style, although I've no idea who designed it. Once inside we were seated at a large round, maple table in a partly secluded booth screened on two sides by walls and on another by glass partitions. Like many hard-edged restaurant interiors it's noisy, and the noise is fuelled by the waiters who shout the names of the dishes as they bring them to the tables. The level of service is impressive; I got the impression there's at least one waiter per table, even if there isn't.

The menu is a complicated affair; there are four pages of it including Nobu specials, Sushi, Sushimi, Teriyaki and Tempura. The Nobu specials include some of the dishes for which Matsuhisa is famous; fusions of South American tastes with traditional Japanese cuisine. An example of this is Peruvian Anti-Cucho, not some revolutionary variant of El Sentero Luminoso, but a spicy sauce which is used with chicken and salmon. The temptation is to ask your waiter for an explanation of all the different dishes, but when they're busy you feel guilty tying them down with questions. Also the pricing is a little complicated: prices refer not to a dish but to the components of it, so all shellfish, for example, are individually priced. I've no doubt that many people faced with this do what we did and elect to go for the chef's choice, which is priced at a hefty £60 per head. What you get for this is plate after plate of wonderful food which only stops when you ask them to.

I picked up what I thought was the wine list and gulped. Two pages, one of red, one of white, beginning at £52 and working up very quickly to over £350. Thankfully one of us noticed that there was another wine list which had a more reasonable entry level and which, unusually, was divided into sections marked light, medium, and full-bodied for both red and white. From it we picked a 1995 Vouvray at £34 for our white and a Penfolds Private Bin Cabernet-Shiraz 1997 at £24.50 for the red. The mark-up is steep enough, but if you decide to be traditional and go far saki you'll find the prices just as scary. To keep us going after we'd elected to go for the chef's choice a plate of sweet Soya beans, tossed in rough salt and still in their pods was placed on the table for us to pick at. Simple and very tasty. Then the main event began with a plate of California rolls, which is rice and seafood wrapped in Norimake and served with soy sauce, pickled ginger and wasabi. Nobu doesn't offer you European implements for eating with, so you do your best with the chopsticks and your fingers. Next came lobster marinated in the Anti Cucho which was served on little cups of lettuce and which we ate with our fingers. Then rock-shrimp tempura which came in the lightest tempura batter that I've ever eaten, then a tiny mound of perfectly cut asparagus with salmon roe, then newstyle salmon sushimi, then a salad of shitake mushrooms, then yellow-tail (a kind of fish) sushimi, then squid cut to look like pasta, then a plate of tempura including a Japanese mushroom of the club fungus family, broccoli and squid, then Matsuhisa's signature dish of marinated seared black cod, then a tempura of sea-urchin and lastly another bowl of the rock-shrimps. When our waiter suggested some desserts there was a collective groan of satiety, not a scrap of hunger remained at the table.

Coffees and Japanese teas ended this amazing meal. Amazing because of the deft presentation, the excellent service, the stunning combination of flavours that were mostly novel to me, and of course, the charming company.

Perhaps our appetites were not as they might have been, as we'd all had an excellent lunch in Thierry's on the King's Road just opposite Paulton Square, where good, honest brasserie-type fare can be got for around £25 a head including wine and service. It's small and quite tight around the tables, but it's unpretentious and I was glad to be introduced to it. Our last London meal was in Joe Allen's, London's equivalent of Dublin's Trocadero - a place for theatricals. Again it's simple, breezy and reasonably priced - you could have dinner for £20 a head without wine - and who knows what famous face might be sat beside you. I sign off this week just a little heavier than before.