It was Katy McGuinness, my guest this week, who pointed it out to me. If you live or work on the southside there aren't many places you can go to for a business lunch. Plenty of snack bars and pub grub, but few places that offer the essentials for a business lunch; things like linen on the tables, professional service, a good wine list and not least, good food. Since Katy is a film producer, the business lunch figures quite large in her repertoire and since she also lives and works southside, finding a restaurant that fills these needs has occupied her for a while. It was fitting, I suppose, that in a week that I'd done a tiny, but strangely eloquent cameo part in a movie, we ended up eating together.

When we arranged to do a review lunch she suggested Dali's in Blackrock. Dali's occupies a premises that has had a few previous restaurant incarnations and you can find it across the road from Blackrock's library. Inside it's spacious with enough room between the tables to give privacy. The walls are covered in a buff-coloured hessian and despite it's name, I could see nothing surreal in my surroundings. The only painting I noticed, which was hanging behind my head at the table at which we were sat, was an impressionist. We were given a large round table which was almost circled by a padded plush banquette which was very comfortable, a simple pleasure that put me in an almost instant good mood. I said this to Katy and she told me that her mother wouldn't even go to restaurants where the seats were uncomfortable. Sensible lady.

Apart from sitting in a pleasing room, when the menus arrived there was a further pleasure: lunch is not expensive. In fact two courses plus your tea or coffee for £9.95 is good value and if you're feeling hungry three courses come at £12.95. There's no service charge except for large parties. What you get for this is a choice of starters like fish cakes, goujons of chicken, bruschetta or an aubergine tartlet and main courses such as a gourmet burger, baked salmon, cassoulet of Toulouse sausage or linguini. There's an a la carte as well and I persuaded Katy to eat from this. It has many of the dishes that are on the table d'hote, plus a few others like fillet steak and a fish of the day. Most of the starters are under £4 and most of the main courses are around £7. Vegetables come as a side order at £1.50, which is also the price of chips.

So while Katy was making her final choices I turned to the wine list. It's an average length list - about fifty wines, some sparklers and a few half bottles. What struck me at once is how well-chosen this list is. The balance is tipped towards New World wines and so the majority of the listed wines are under £20. There are Chilean, Italian, South African and Spanish wines and some good French ones too. Georges du Boeuf figures quite a lot with his Beaujolais and Burgundies - solid and reliable wines - and there are good shippers amongst the Italians as well. It was from these that I eventually settled on the Pinot Grigio from Collavini which was priced at £16.95.

The starters arrived and Katy was presented with a nicely decorated big, white plate on which sat a pillow of puff pastry and on top, in layers, were the mozzarella and the aubergines. It was a competent dish, but for once the real thrill came to me. I had golden, deep-fried crumbed strips of chicken breast and a little ramekin of mayonnaise. I hadn't really read the description of the dish properly off the menu. I'd scanned it and read 'with lemon mayonnaise'. Actually it was preserved lemon mayonnaise and that little extra word made quite a difference. It was a sublime tasting mayonnaise, so good that you could put it on anything at all and it would make it taste great. I even ended up asking for more bread so that I could finish off the ramekin of this ambrosia. I must have been banging on about it a bit, because Katy offered to send me the recipe for preserved lemons, presumably to shut me up.

She'd chosen the fish of the day for her main course, which on this day was lemon sole. Three fillets, off the bone, came on a bed of savoury mash made with caramelised shallots, the whole surrounded with a tomato salsa. It was accompanied with a green salad which had been dressed with a basil-flavoured olive oil. It all looked pretty on the plate and, said Katy, was about as good as lemon sole gets. I had chosen the cassoulet of Toulouse sausage - a large saucisson on a bed of beans cooked in a tomato sauce. It's a classic French peasant dish, designed over the centuries to enable people to eat and then work in the fields for hours afterwards. For people like me, who have more sedentary lives, it's a very filling combination. Still, with determination and fortitude I very nearly finished it before admitting defeat and giving up. A little dish of broccoli and roasted turnip puree remained on the table, barely picked at.

We sat and chatted, gradually finishing off the wine and very slowly a bit of appetite returned, just enough for a shared dessert. There was a choice of sorbets, which sounded good, some ice-creams, a cheesecake, but when the words 'sticky toffee pudding' came from our waitress's lips, I had no choice, I had to have it. We asked for a taste of passionfruit sorbet, since it too had sounded good, but it was the pudding that Katy and I were really looking forward to. It came with a scoop of honeycomb ice-cream and a caramel sauce - a combination that can make even the most jaded palate come back to life. A single scoop of passionfruit sorbet was presented to us in a tall, elegant Martini glass and even though we both agreed there was no way we could eat anything more than a mouthful of both, you won't be surprised to hear we finished them both.

I would have rated this an excellent meal even at 50% more than it cost, but when you can eat this well for under a tenner it's remarkable. Our bill, including the wine and the a la carte choices came to £52.15, to which I added a welldeserved tip.