My wife and I spent August eating our way slowly through Italy from Brindisi in the very South, up through the Campania into Lazio and finally into Tuscany. You get a lot of changes in Italian regional cooking - in the South menus use lots of greens and olive oil and in the North lots of cream and butter. I once saw a map of Europe with the 'olive oil line' line drawn on it. It starts in Portugal and Spain, just nicks the South of France, cuts diagonally across Italy and then shoots over the Adriatic to the Balkans. North of the line it's too cold for olive trees, so the traditional cooking in these regions is done with butter and cream. Which is why northern Bologna, surrounded by plains and pastures filled with contented cattle, is famous for it's cream sauces. It's known in Italy as 'Bologna the Fat'. I'll admit to a prejudice: as a Southern Italian my preference on a daily basis is for a diet less heavily weighted towards dairy. I enjoy the kind of Italian cooking that dieticians like; olive oil, green vegetables, little sugar, and very little butter and cream.

Back for a bit over a fortnight, there was still a little lingering longing for those hot days, good wine and good food. I'd heard of an Italian restaurant in Leixlip so I thought we might go there and see if we could revive the flagging memories of a month ago. The fact that it was pouring rain as we arrived in Leixlip didn't help relive the summer experience. We parked just up the road from the restaurant and as we opened the car doors the unmistakable smell of hydrogen sulphide hit out nostrils. Even if you never studied chemistry you'll know the smell anyway: rotten eggs. My wife and I looked at each other accusingly until we realised the smell was wafting up to us from the river. Now I know why the salmon leap here. Da Vinci's is a very busy place, but we got a table for two. I know I've made this point before, but I'm going to make it again anyway. When I hear the word 'restaurant' I can't help it, I think of table cloths and comfy chairs. Da Vinci's is a pizzeria or a trattoria - it doesn't fit my image of 'restaurant'. This may be pedantry, but if you know what to expect before you arrive somewhere you're less likely to be disappointed. If you'd travelled a long way for a romantic candle-lit dinner a deux, the bright lights, packed tables and general buzz might not suit your mood. If you were expecting a pizzeria it'd be perfect.

Half of the street front is given over to take-away, the other half to the restaurant. The tables are small, closely spaced and it was cool enough for my wife to keep her coat on all evening. The walls are painted a pleasing ochre colour and there are recurring motifs of Leonardo's drawings of mechanical devices all around the walls. Over the course of our meal I even managed to work out what some of them were for.

The menu is an interesting document. Apart from having more misprints than any menu I've seen of late - and I've seen some real corkers in my time - it's determinedly non-purist. Greek salad, Greek-style fettucine, Thai fettucine, penne with Spanish sausage and a very non-Italian lasagne with chips are all listed. There are starters like bruschetta and crostini, lots of pastas which can be had as a starter portion or as a main course, a long list of pizzas and meat main courses. Susie and I took a while deciding how we would approach this. Should we eat pizzas like most of the diners around us or should we go for the more elaborate dishes?

Eventually Susie decided on the fish cakes from the starters and from the long list of pastas I chose the Carbonara. Susie then did the non-Italian thing and chose pasta as a main course, settling on the seafood fusilli. Pastas, our waitress told us, are made fresh daily, which is nice to see. The main courses included 10oz steak, saltimbocca alla Romana, scallopine di maiale, chicken and a vegetarian dish. I liked the idea of pork so I picked the scallopine.

The wine list is average in size and average in price, and has many of Italy's better-known wines. Eight or so French wines are listed and then wines from the rest of the world. Nearly all are under £20 and the house wines - Montepulciano and Trebbiano - sell for a very modest £10.95. I picked the Sicilian red Corvo at £15.90 and we had a couple bottles of San Pellegrino.

The starters arrived and Susie enjoyed her fish cakes which came with a balsamic dip. My carbonara - traditionally made with bacon and eggs - was cooked perfectly al dente and had a lot of cream added. So much that the whole bottom of the plate was covered in it. Personally I prefer the dish with no cream, but this was certainly too much. Still it was tasty and I ate most of it. Unfortunately this left me in a poor way for my main course, the pork escalopes, which came with thinly sliced deep-fried potatoes, courgettes and a very rich cream sauce. I tried to remove some, but I could still feel my liver making bitter complaints. Susie's seafood fusilli came with a tomato sauce to which a lot of cream had been added. The seafood appeared to be mostly crab sticks, but the richness of the sauce defeated Susie before she'd got more than half-way through.

A look through the dessert menu showed us tiramisu, chocolate parfait, profiteroles, cassata, cheese cake and Banoffi. Since each one of these contains cream, neither of us dared eat any more. Instead I had an Espresso and Susie finished the mineral water. This surfeit of cream from which we were suffering was largely of our own choosing since the menu did mention it as part of the dishes involved. Maybe if I'd known just how much was being used I'd have chosen something else.

Da Vinci's gave us good service and reasonably priced wine and food. Perhaps if we'd gone with plan B and picked pizzas it might have been better. The restaurant has a fast turnover of tables and appears to be at its best with a single course meal rather than more elaborate ones. Our bill, including two bottles of mineral water, came to £52.90 not including service.