My friend Janine Fitzgerald was making her return to the Dublin stage after an absence of two years. Her comeback was in the Andrew's Lane production of 'Entertaining Mr. Sloane' playing the part of Kath. It's one of those ground-breaking sixties plays that was deeply shocking at the time, but it has still retained some of that same power to shock. She'd been in very much of two minds as to whether or not she wanted friends to be there on the first night, but in the end she decided some support from friends wouldn't be such a bad thing. We had a simple plan; as soon as the play was over we'd go round the corner to Muscat, a small restaurant that takes last orders at 11 o'clock, which meant that all things being equal, we'd still make dinner.

Once the play was over we went to the bar for just the one and to wait for Janine. Receiving her plaudits, paeans and praise took a little while, but by ten past eleven, three of us had taken our table in Muscat, who's owners were welcoming and accommodating despite our lateness. Muscat is in a sort of semi-basement; you go down a few steps and you find yourself in a small dining room beyond which is another room with a bar. It's painted in a warm umber and there are oil paintings on the walls. The tables and chairs are simple but comfortable and there are even tiny little deck chairs for your mobile phones. Actually I suspect that the idea here is to encourage you to 'rest' your phone; that's to say you put it in its little lounger and then turn it off.

We were handed menus which included a wine list and a basket of really good home-made bread which we fell upon while examining the menu. The wine list itself is quite short, ten whites and a dozen or so reds, but what wines there are well-chosen and from good shippers. There are excellent French regional wines, some Italian and a sprinkling of New World. Now what my companions knew and I did not, was that apart from the wines that are listed there is also a stash that the owner knows about and he'll share this covert cache with you should you ask. I remember years ago when I had my restaurant, one of the most disconcerting things anyone ever did was to hand the wine list back to me and say 'You choose one for us.' It puts you in a spot. I mean, anyone could pick the most expensive wine on the list; the trick is that it forces you, the sommelier, to pick the best value wine on the list for the sake of your own self-esteem. It's been such a long time since I met someone in a restaurant who knows as much as I do about wine that it came as a surprise to find a man who seemed to know much more than me.

Remembering the old days I simply said 'Why don't you pick one for us?' He thought for a moment and said 'I've a lovely Italian white Muscat, dry and with a lot of fruit and perfume.' 'Sounds good to me,' I said, and, when it arrived, it was perfectly delicious. Apart from anything else it was nice to be sitting in a restaurant drinking a wine of the same name, but there's a moral here too. If you trust the man who knows the wine list you can get some wonderful surprises. £16.95 bought his little jewel.

The menu is an a la carte and it changes daily. Starters range from £4-7 and include things like a buffalo mozzarella salad, a black and white Clonakilty pudding terrine, a risotto with saffron and crab and a tiger prawn salad. Main courses are in a similar vein: a glazed cushion of salmon, marinated pork loin, a breast of duck, pan-seared monkfish and char-grilled beef fillet. These range in price from £12.95 for a vegetarian cannelloni to £17.95 for the beef.

Christine, who's been here a lot, decided to have two starters instead of a starter and a main course, and chose the goats cheese tartlet and then the risotto. Janine had the tiger prawns and I chose the mozzarella salad, since something about this place made me believe the words 'buffalo mozzarella' on the menu. My faith was well placed; it really was buffalo mozzarella, which has a very different consistency to the one made from cows' milk and is completely different to the cheeses from Ireland and Denmark that use the same name. Janine's prawns had that tangy Thai flavouring and Christine's goats' cheese tartlet was very good.

We'd finished our starters when our table started to fill up, firstly with friends who had been sitting at another table who moved to join us with their coffees, and then with the stragglers from the theatre, including David Keating who directed the play. A successful opening night like this one engenders not a little elation, making the table noisy and boisterous. Thankfully by the time this happened we were the only ones left.

Janine's glazed salmon was prettily presented, but the excitement of the evening had somewhat overwhelmed her appetite and she made little headway through it. I tasted it and found it nicely flavoured and cooked. My main course too - the pork loin - was proving a little too much for me. Christine's decision to opt for two starters was looking increasingly wise. Eventually we downed our cutlery and admitted defeat. Funny though, how the appetite returns as soon as a dessert menu is presented. All of the desserts were priced at £4.95 and the passionfruit creme brulee looked too good to miss. We ordered only one, but thoughtfully they brought us three spoons, so we all got a taste. One of the better creme brulees that has come my way, I thought.

There's a very strong sense of professionalism in Muscat. You get the feeling as soon as you walk in that you're in the hands of people who actually know what they're doing, which is a feeling I'd love to have more often. If I'd been less involved with talking to the people I was dining with I know I could have had a long - and to me, at least, interesting - talk about wine with someone who really knows their stuff. The bill for the three of us with two bottles of wine came to £106.55, which included a 10% service charge.