Occasionally I get emails from readers who tell me they've been somewhere I recommended in the past and that the meal they ate didn't match my description. There are a few answers to this, but the most obvious are these: restaurants have good and bad nights, and chefs change. This last one is the most crucial; a kitchen is made or falls by the input of the chef de cuisine.

If ever I had an experience that demonstrates this fact with clarity it was this week. But to start at the start: a few months ago I had lunch in Bruno's of Kildare Street. I wasn't there to do a review, it was just to have a look. I had a pleasant meal, nothing exceptional, and thought no more about it. This week my old friend Dillie Keane was in town doing her one-woman show for the Dublin Theatre festival. We arranged to meet in the Horseshoe and the idea was to go on to lunch from there. She had an early afternoon sound-check in the Mansion House - which was where she was performing - so she asked me if we could eat nearby. 'What are our options?' she asked me. 'Well, we could eat in Bang's, which is young, or Bruno's, which is French.' She thought for a moment. 'I think I detect a minty tone in your use of the word 'young' and I'm not feeling terribly young today, so let's go to Bruno's.'

I'll tell you something about writing restaurant reviews; great meals and awful meals are the easiest to write about. Meals that are average, pedestrian, mediocre or merely okay are the hardest. After you've said the meal was okay, the place was okay and the service was okay, you're still stuck for another thousand words. As we walked across the road to Bruno's I was pondering this fact and I decided that I could always write about Dillie and her show if I needed to.

The restaurant is in the basement under Mitchell's Wine shop and it's decorated in a modern minimalism. 'Austere,' said Dillie. Even though we had no reservation we were found a table and we settled down to look at the menu. Our table was quite small; trying to fit a newspaper, a phone and a packet of fags on it wasn't easy. Lunch is three courses and costs £12.95 for two courses or £14.50 for three. Starters offered marinated salmon and blini, a pea soup, a potato and ham salad, a smoked haddock fritter and a goats cheese and onion tart. Main courses listed breast of chicken, a fillet of plaice, pot-roast pork, roast sea-trout, a ballotine of duck and a wild mushroom risotto cake.

As Dillie was performing later, she only wanted water so I confined myself to searching the wine list for half-bottles. The list starts with a page of thirteen house wines, which are all priced at £14, so there's a big choice at the reasonable end of the price range. And there are good wines listed here: the New Zealand Corbans Sauvignon and the Spanish Torres Gran Sangre de Toro Reserva. The majority of the list is French - obviously - but there's a couple of pages of wines from other countries as well where there are plenty of wines for under £20.

I chose a half bottle of Albert Pic Chablis for myself at £13.50 and we settled down to wait for our starters. Dillie had chosen the marinated salmon which came on a perfectly-formed blini flavoured with aubergine. Around it on the prettily decorated plate, was a fennel and dill dressing which, said Dillie, was an inspired choice of flavours. I'd picked the potato and ham salad, which arrived as a timbale with French beans laid across the top and a tempura on top of that. I carefully lifted the tempura off the top and cut into it. Imagine my surprise when egg yolk ran out of it. How do you deep-fry an egg yolk? Amazing. The salad itself was close to perfection, both in texture and flavour. Both of us were delighted and impressed.

For her main course Dillie had chosen the breast of chicken, which came served on a bed of puree, was surrounded by tiny wild mushroom gnocchi and was decorated on top with the finest of deep-fried, thinly-cut potato slivers. Mine was just as impressive to look at - I'd chosen the day's special of partridge - it came with breasts served on a puree bed, and the legs served as drum-sticks. In case that sounds somehow ordinary, let me describe these drumsticks. The thigh end of them had been elongated and re-formed with a mixture of chicken puree and foie gras. Not only did enhance the already delicious taste, it made them look wonderful as well. The breasts were perfectly under-done and as tender as any I've eaten. Meanwhile Dillie was in raptures over her chicken breasts. 'Even in London I can't remember when I've eaten as well as this,' she managed between sighs of pleasure. And her tiny mushroom gnocchi - she spared me one - were a delight.

Remember this; if we'd stopped here then lunch would have been £12.95, which begins to look like the best value in Dublin. This is food as you can find it only in the finest restaurants in the world; it's the care and attention to detail that differentiates it from the merely good. The amount of effort in preparation that went into these four dishes was mind-boggling. In a three-star Michelin you'd take it for granted, but at these prices it can only be described as remarkable.

Even though Dillie was running late at this point we didn't need a lot of persuading to try the desserts. A bread and butter pudding, a passion fruit Pavlova, an orange and cardamom tart and a parfait of chocolate and lime all looked wonderful, but probably more than our appetites would bear. We asked our waiter if we could have something really light and he returned with two kidney-shaped dessert plates which contained a tiny orange parfait, a slightly larger lime parfait and a drizzle of chocolate sauce between them. Even here the attention to detail continued; wafer-thin home-made biscuit topped each delicious parfait.

We ended this extraordinary meal with two espressos. The food had been faultless, the service impeccable and the bill came to £49.40 including service. Something had happened since my last visit. The answer was on the last line of the menu - 'Chef: Garrett Byrne'. He's recently arrived in Bruno's and he's a chef whose career I'll follow with interest.