I have several friends who have been life-long vegetarians. It's a diet that once upon a time was considered cranky and peculiar and was rare enough that restaurants made no attempt to cater for it. Recent years have seen a growth in the prevalence of vegetarianism, not just for its perceived health properties, but also because meat producers have brought some really unpleasant diseases into the food chain. The fact is that no one ever got CJD from eating a cabbage, salmonella from a shallot or botulism from a bean. Vegetarians my age remember when the best a restaurant could offer you when pressed was a cheese omelette, some chips and perhaps peas - not a choice guaranteed to elicit boundless enthusiasm. Thankfully that much has changed; vegetarian dishes are on the vast majority of restaurant menus and there are even dedicated restaurants.

So where do you go to find tasty and interesting vegetarian food? My guest this week had a clear view on this. Gill Hall is a maker; lights, film and theatre sets, shop interiors, fabrics and furniture all come into her ambit, as does vegetarianism. When I asked her where might suit her tastes, she replied that Chameleon would be the one. It's a small, intimate restaurant in Temple Bar and it serves Indonesian cuisine. It's on two floors with a few tables downstairs but most are on the first floor. There's a third floor as well, but that's mostly used for private functions. We were shown to our table on the first floor and handed our menus. One wall of mirrors surrounded by intricate carvings helps give a more spacious feel to the room while the opposite wall has a mural of what looked to me like paddy-fields on terraced mountain-sides. I started with the wine list which is very short but has a couple of decent wines. We'd decided on white and after looking down the four listed white wines I ordered the Chilean Chardonnay at £16. Unfortunately it was out of stock so since I didn't want a white Chateau Neuf du Pape nor a Cotes de Frontennais that left the Sancerre at £22.

While we were thinking about food a dish of prawn crackers arrived with a spicy salsa-style dip. I'd eaten a few of these when the wine arrived and I tasted it. I told our waitress it was fine and we carried on studying the menus. As the taste of the salsa wore off my palate, the taste of the wine became clearer - it was badly corked. It's something that happens from time to time; a cork is a natural product and no one cork is identical to another. Very occasionally a cork lets in air and the wine oxidises, taking on a distinctive taste that is known as 'corked'. Oddly I've been talking about this recently with friends in the wine trade trying to get a picture of how often it happens. I'd guess about one bottle in fifty or sixty, but I'm willing to be corrected. It's possible that slightly corked wines get past our taste buds more often than they should, but maybe since we drink our wines increasingly young we have them finished before they have a chance to become corked.

Anyway, there was no problem and the waiter who dealt with the wines changed it without question. It was interesting tasting them side by side; two identical bottles with two very different contents. The menu is partly table d'hote and partly a la carte. The table d'hote part is called 'rijst tafel', which I'd guess is Dutch, and which gives a taste of lots of different dishes. There's a vegetarian one as well, which was what Gill ordered and rijst tafel seemed like a good choice for me too. There were two on offer for under £20, one with slightly more food than the other so I greedily ordered that.

While we were waiting for the food, Gill and I were reminiscing. I think The Good Karma was Dublin's first macrobiotic restaurant back in the early seventies and it was filled with, run by and staffed with hippies. It was determinedly cool, very laid back and people were inclined to say things like 'far out' and 'stay cool, man' to one another. What made it a nice place, perhaps more than the food, was the amateur attitude of everyone involved. You never felt that it was a commercial enterprise. Sure, money changed hands, but somehow you felt you were part of a social and gastronomic experiment. And to a degree I felt the same about Chameleon - the really charming people working in it had no professional brusqueness, just a quiet, gentle attitude. For the sake of clarity let me just say that when I said 'amateur' I was using it in its French sense - something you do for love rather than gain.

First the hot plates arrived in the middle of the table and then bit by bit they were surrounded with little dishes of the rijst tafel. I won't list all the bits, but Gill had vegetable sate; jukut urab, which is mixed vegetables and bean sprouts; sambal goreng kool, which is peppered white cabbage; peanuts fried in ginger and garlic; fried egg noodles with beansprouts and some pickled vegetables. I had many similar dishes, they just had meat in them - chicken shreds with a macadamia nut sauce, pork in aniseed and a beef satay as a starter. There was a wooden dish on the table with four compartments for condiments like a hot chilli oil, roasted grated coconut and roasted peanuts all of which, Gill explained, you add to your dishes ad libitum. Naturally all this was based on plates filled with rice.

The food was good and we listened to African music, which made Gill feel a little sentimental - she grew up in Zimbabwe. It was around this time that I noticed there was also a table set up oriental style, whereby you sit on a cushion and dine off a table that's about ten inches high. I asked Gill if she knew about that. 'Oh yes,' she said, 'they told me about it when I booked, but I said I doubted my companion would be enthused by sitting on the floor.' How well she knows me. Still, like chopsticks or cutlery, it's a choice you have.

The bill came to £74.81, which included a service charge. They're not keen to take credit cards here, but as I only had about tenner in cash it was the flexible friend or nothing.