Three beautiful days in a row that looked like summer from indoors had me hankering for drives further afield than my norm. Bright days and longer evenings are somehow a deal more conducive to travelling than blizzards and ice. My wife wasn't keen on anywhere that would take much longer than an hour to drive to, so it was out with the ordnance survey and a pair of dividers. 'Westwards,' I said, in the same sort of tone that took braver people than me across the Rockies. 'Let's go to Kildare,' I specified, making it sound like a cross between the Maldives and the Caribbean. Ah, Kildare, rolling plains, stud farms, some bits of motorway and The Flaming Wok in Clane.

Susie made the booking and got the directions. 'It's next to the Esso filling station,' she said as she put down the phone. And so we set off across the Wicklow Gap, where at the summit beside Tonelagee Mountain, we saw one of the more spectacular sunsets I've ever seen. A river of gold ran through the sky like a celestial reflection of the King's River below, feathery wisps of finger-shaped clouds ran parallel, each picking up the gold and orange hues. And there, under this stupendous sky, we could see the plains of Kildare. In a moment of careless abandon I heard myself saying 'Even if we get a rotten meal it'll have been worth the drive just for this.'

We got to Clane in almost exactly an hour and found the Esso station. The restaurant is precisely where you'd expect to find the garage shop, that's to say it's directly behind the pumps. There's a newsagents here as well, and they all seem to share the car-parking in the fore-court area. It's a modern building that houses these various ventures and the Flaming Wok is the one in the middle. Inside it had a bright, clean look: good-sized tables and comfy chairs, the obligatory paintings of Hong Kong's skyline and a handsome long-case clock which was lacquered in a Chinoiserie style and alongside which we were seated.

We were handed a very long menu and a surprisingly long wine list. The menu takes a while to read and you get a feeling while you're reading it that making a decision isn't going to be easy. I saw about ten starters and the same number of main courses that I would happily have picked. Susie was having a similar struggle in making a choice and then, almost simultaneously, we came to the last four pages which contain the four-course set dinner at £15. Apart from the fact that £15 for dinner is very inexpensive, the choice was still big enough to make decisions hard. Most of the dishes that are on the multi-page a la carte can be found on the special dinner menu and both Susie and I decided to choose from that. Just as well, because there are a few rules for this menu; at least two of you must choose from it and you have to have the same intermediary course. In the end we chose like this; for Susie wonton soup, crispy duck for intermediary course and then king prawns with garlic and a black bean sauce - for me squid rings in batter, the crispy duck and lamb with black pepper sauce.

The wine list seems to be an entirely Gilbeys one and it is modestly marked up. Recently I'd tasted an Argentinean Navarro Correas Cabernet Sauvignon from Gilbeys, which I thought was great value for money. Susie had decided she wanted white wine and a Chardonnay from Navarro Correas was listed at £14, so I chose that, believing the white would be as good as the red. It happened that it was, so we both sipped happily.

Starters arrived and Susie's soup was good; a light, clear broth with wantons like dumplings in it. My squid was a clumsier affair, with a heavy batter of the kind that traditionally coats skates' wings - it tasted okay, but had little finesse. The intermediary course of crispy duck came on a hot plate and we were given a pot with six pancakes in it, a ramekin of sauce and julienne of shallots and cucumber. The idea here is to fill your pancakes to your own exact specifications, roll them up and eat. I've always liked food that needs hands, so this went down well with me.

Considering that we were now only half way through our meal neither of us had much appetite left. Still, a sip of wine, a gulp of mineral water and we were ready for the main courses which arrived on cast iron platters, sizzling rather dramatically. Funny, I was thinking as I looked at the two dishes, one of lamb and one of prawns, how similar they looked. The same cornflour glaze and the same mix of stirfry vegetables made the two look indistinguishable at first glance. Not just from each other, but indistinguishable from similar dishes in other Chinese restaurants. There's a certain comfort in that kind of familiarity, the sort of comforting sameness that makes Americans seek out a Howard Johnson or a McDonalds no matter in what country they find themselves. And like a pot of Chicken McNuggets, a dish presented like the ones we were presented with gives you that warm glow of recognition, of comfortable familiarity. Susie's prawns were big and fat and there were more of them than she could eat. My lamb really lived up to its promise of pepper - I had forgotten how strong plain black pepper can be in big quantities. Oddly, as a committed carnivore, I have to say that the part of the main course that I liked the best was the egg-fried rice. I ended up eating so much of this that desserts, even though included in the price, just couldn't be considered, so we finished up with coffees. In fact this wasn't too much of a hardship, the desserts were those industrially produced ones that rarely tempt me.

The thing about a meal like this is that you get consistent food in a clean, well-run restaurant for very reasonable money - the bill was £48.80. There's no great finesse to this food, but it's tasty and there's enough to satisfy even the hungriest diner. I thought I'd made a bit of a discovery in the Flaming Wok, but it seems that Clongowes parents know it well and so do the pupils who avail of their delivery service.