It was a bitterly cold night; there had even been a news item telling motorists not to make any unnecessary journeys. Freezing fog and icy roads were predicted around the country. Yet there I was with a restaurant to review and a deadline to meet. So with all the intrepid audacity of a nineteenth-century Antarctic explorer Susan Morley and I set off across the hills for the wilds of Stepaside, our goal being an Italian restaurant called 'La Casa'.

Despite the dire predictions, the trip was fogless but bitterly cold. We arrived in Stepaside to discover that La Casa is annexed to the Step Inn. As in so many restaurants like this you go in through the bar, and we walked into a cosy room with a lot of wood panelling, a wooden floor, wooden tables with padded Windsor-type chairs, a blazing gas-powered fire and a couple of wooden dividers which broke up the room rather well. The snug warmth as we entered was welcome after the vicissitudes of winter outside, and we took a table in view of the fire.

The first thing I should tell you about La Casa is that it's not very Italian. If you can picture the interior from my description you'll see that it fits into the classic Irish pub dining room genre somewhat better than an Italian trattoria. A portrait of, I think, Robert Emmet looks down from above the fire place, but there are a couple of thirties Italian prints of Chianti Brolio advertising on the walls which is at least a nod in the general direction of Italy. There's not very much on the menu that is specifically Italian either, although the dishes on it have been translated into a language with a superficial resemblance to Italian. My first impressions were of a pleasing little dining room, well-laid out and well-kept.

The wine list is short but very reasonably priced. Two Italian house wines at under a tenner, four wines at £11 from Chile and South Africa, and the bulk of the list ranging from £12 to £20, and mostly New World. While I was thinking to myself how fairly priced this list was I found it - a 1996 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo from Cantina Tollo. This is a really wonderful wine from my part of Italy and one that I've enjoyed a thousand times in Italy, since one my pals there was their sales manager for years. I've never seen it on an Irish list so I was delighted to order it, especially as it came with a price tag of only £13.50. It also comes in a curiously lop-sided bottle which looks a bit like the bottle Salvador Dali designed for Osborne's best Spanish brandy. It came to the table at a perfect temperature and right from the first sip tasted wonderful - unusual to that find in so big a wine.

There's nothing quite like the pleasure you get from a first-class wine, and the two of us sipped it appreciatively while we thought about our food. The menu is fairly straightforward; for starters there's pate, garlic mushrooms, Caesar salad, tian of smoked salmon, a threecolour salad, costini, and a penne alla carbonara. They're all around £4 and Susie picked the Caesar salad while I chose the carbonara, since I thought I ought to try an Italian dish. The main courses were in a similar vein; panfried pork fillet, an 8 or 12 ounce sirloin or fillet steak, chicken described as Cacciatora or Zambuca, pan-fried fillet of monkfish with char-grilled vegetables, salmon, roast duck with red cabbage, and a vegetarian dish. Not your classic Italian, but with main courses costing around a tenner I wasn't complaining. Susie decided on the monkfish, and being a little uncertain of the Italianess of the kitchen, I played safe and ordered a sirloin steak.

Our starters arrived and Susie was well pleased with her salad. My carbonara was much as I thought it might be; a long way from what you'd get in Italy. The pasta was overcooked for my taste and the sauce had far too much cream, which is in any case only an optional extra in this dish, traditionally made with no cream. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't a carbonara and it further persuaded me that this was a very pleasant little restaurant, but not an Italian one. I began to feel pleased with myself for choosing an old reliable like steak, a sensation that increased when it arrived; big, perfectly cooked and with enough garnish to assuage the hunger of the most famished trencherman. Susie's monkfish had a rose-coloured sea-food sauce, and although a little rich for her taste, she worked her way diligently through the four large pieces of fish on her plate.

We took a little pause before moving onto desserts, which are priced at £3. There's only one Italian pudding on it, a tiramisu. Apart from that there's ice-cream, pecan pie, prifiteroles, strawberry and rhubarb crumble and cheese. In the end we had the profiteroles between us, our main courses having almost completely blunted our appetites. We both began to feel that if you were to come here looking for Italian food you might be disappointed. However if you chose the more Irish or European dishes you'd be very happy indeed - and anyway, they make up the majority of dishes on the menu. What you get here is what Italians call 'genuino', which really means in this case 'honest'. It's food with no great finesse, but it's well-cooked, unpretentious, served properly and isn't expensive.

We took our time about leaving, we were happy sitting in this cosy room and happy too to enjoy an after dinner cognac instead of a coffee. The music was very much to my taste - American, not Italian - we'd been very pleasantly served and both of us felt that our intrepid drive had been well worth it.

Best of all was the the bill - £53.60 all in, which I was happy to round up to £59. Where else in Dublin are you going to get dinner for two, wine, mineral water and after dinner drinks for just over fifty quid?