Funnily enough, both of the big parties I went to this week were on St. Stephen's Green. One was a birthday party, the other I suppose you could call a christening party. Conrad Gallagher had just re-launched his restaurant 'Christophers' as 'Mango Toast' and had a big bash to mark the occasion with fire-jugglers, belly-dancers and drummers. On the other side of the Green The Shelbourne celebrated its 175th birthday, which was a more formal occasion marked with black tie, much Champagne and a speech by the Taoiseach. The elegant Great Room was awash with Dublin's glitterati and literati, because further to mark this longevity was the coinciding launch of a book by Michael O'Sullivan and Bernardine O'Neill called 'The Shelbourne and its People.'

I'm not great at estimating numbers, but I'd be surprised if there were fewer than 400 people there and the Champagne showed no signs of drying up. There were a lot of people I didn't know and a lot that I did, and a party of us decided to take up Tom Haran's idea and go to the Transylvanian restaurant just off Bolton Street. Ah, Transylvania, the land beyond the forests - setting for my favourite movie, Francis Ford Coppola's 'Dracula' with Gary Oldman in the title role. How could anyone resist such a suggestion?

We slipped away in dribs and drabs as the party wound down with the intention of meeting up at the restaurant. It was somewhat after 10 o'clock as Mary Burke-Kennedy and I made our way in ever decreasing circles all around the roads that are within a half-mile of the top of Capel Street and Bolton Street. I'm not one of those men who dislikes asking for directions, but having stopped to ask people on three occasions who turned out to be Scottish, French, and visiting Spaniards - all of whom were as lost as I was - I did the intelligent thing and phoned the restaurant. A charming and obviously foreign voice answered me, and after nearly five minutes of getting nowhere with telephone directions the voice said 'Where are you?' 'Opposite the College of Technology in a black car.' 'I will fetch you.' 'How will I know you?' 'I'll have a red jacket.'

Moments later a young man in a red jacket knocked on the window. 'I'll get in and show you the way.' Which is how we arrived in time to eat with the others who had already assembled there at a long table across the far end of the dining room. We sat, accepted a glass of wine from Tom and looked around. The word that springs to mind here is 'underthemed.' With all the icons of Transylvania so deeply embedded in our movie-going psyches you can look around this room and find nothing that says 'Nosferatu' or 'Dracul' or 'Vlad the Impaler.' There are no vampire-burgers, no pints of blood, no fangs for the memory, nothing to link you with the few things any of us knows about that part of Romania. At the other end of the restaurant from our table was a dais with two Romanian musicians, one on guitar, the other on keyboards. They played with the odd break throughout the evening and had an amazingly wide repertoire which ranged from 'Oh Carol' to mazurkas and polkas. They reminded me of the musicians who play during the summer in my little village in Italy and, I thought, added immensely to the evening. There were a dozen of us at the table, including restaurateur Johnny McCormack and his wife Sylvia, and we were all feeling the better for the Shelbourne's hospitality. We'd chosen the Romanian red and white house wines, the red a Pinot Noir and the white from Constanza on the Black Sea. They were both good wines for a very reasonable £12.60, and I was interested to discover that soon there will be a house wine for less than £9, which has to be the best value in Dublin.

The menu is unusually constructed, at least as far as the starters are concerned. There are four of them on the menu and three of them were soups; a tripe soup, a Romanian soup and a chicken soup. Not being much of soup man myself I went for the other alternative, a Romanian salad. Looking down the main courses you're struck by the mixtures of meat, which is obviously a big part of Transylvanian food. There's the Sarmale, which is pork, beef, bacon and rice wrapped in a cabbage leaf and there's Tocitura, a Moldavian dish, which is lamb, beef, pork and Romanian sausage in a red wine sauce. The Ceulama is a one-meat dish - chicken served in a white wine sauce with garlic mushrooms. There is also a daily special, and on the night it was meat balls with rice. In a city where restaurants are increasingly pitching the price of their main courses closer and closer to £20, it's rather nice to see main courses priced between £5.80 and £6.80. Couple this with the low mark up on the wine and you can see that there's nothing greedy about this restaurant.

There were good bread rolls on the table which we picked at while awaiting the starters, which were, of necessity, mostly soups. My Romanian salad bore an uncanny resemblance to what we used to call Russian salad - finely chopped potatoes and vegetables shaped into a little mound and served on a lettuce leaf. Actually, apart from the soups, a lot of the food here is served on a lettuce leaf, so we got quite used to that style of presentation. I tasted a chicken soup which was well spiced and the tripe soup, which despite its unprepossessing name, was rather nice. While we ate, the band played, and I'd be prepared to wager that if you'd asked for a request they would certainly have known the tune, if not the words as well. I was almost tempted to see what Italian songs they might have known, but somehow I restrained myself.

I thought I'd ordered the Tocitura, but in the end I had the Ceulama, since I was the only one without a plate and that was the last remaining dish in our waiter's hands. Again, I shamelessly tasted around the table and I can report that the food, although perhaps not gourmet, was terrific value. For not much more than a tenner you could have two courses, drink good wine at modest prices and listen to live music. You may not feel yourself to be in heartland of Vlad, but I suspect a large party of people could have a lot of fun in this restaurant, and it certainly wouldn't break the bank.