'What', I hear you ask, 'ever happened to bell-bottoms, tank-tops and Afghan coats?' You may as well ask what happened to the Bay City Rollers. That tyrant, fashion, compels you to accept all manner of icons and then, just as you thought you were beginning to like them after all, it capriciously moves relentlessly onward to pastures new. It's no different with food, really. When I was first old enough to take in a restaurant menu, I noticed that there was a curious similarity no matter where you went. Certain dishes were omnipresent; prawn cocktail, melon with port, a grapefruit cocktail, Brown Windsor soup, steak Diane, crepes Suzette and lots of flambé stuff. Today the only thing that has changed is the dishes on the menu. Grilled goat's cheese, rocket salad, pesto anything, tempuras and balsamic reductions are today's stalwarts.

Go to enough restaurants and you'll notice these frequent dishes, and boy, are they frequent. It's almost as though the restaurants are watching one another while at the same time emulating one another. True innovation is hard to find as chefs move from one cuisine to another in a desperate attempt to find a personal style that is somehow different. When I think of the chefs that I admire, I notice a recurring motif: they are all independent of culinary styles. They rely on their skill in the kitchen to create wonderful food that doesn't slavishly follow the caprices of fashion.

But there are other strategies to avoid the tyranny of changing tastes. One I came across this week is based on that old adage 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' The Lord Edward does what it always has - it is quite simply unchanged. It's probably twenty-five years since I last ate here and my memories are understandably vague, but it seemed to be exactly the way I remember it. There weren't many good restaurants in Dublin twenty-five years ago, you could count them on your fingers, but The Lord Edward was in there. You need to know that this is a fish restaurant; carnivores get little to choose from. But you can find dishes on the menu here that have all but disappeared from menus elsewhere. Here are the classics of yesteryear: sole Bonne Femme, Veronique, Mornay and Meuniere, lobster Neuberg and Thermidore - you can even get a prawn cocktail. If you were feeling lyrical you could say that this is almost a museum of food, a glimpse of how the few people who dined out in the seventies uses to eat.

My guest was Miriam Thornton, and when I told her that the Lord Edward was our destination she said 'That was one of my father's favourite places to eat when he was up in Dublin' which sort of backs up my contention. The restaurant is above the Lord Edward pub and it has its own door, right next to Burdock's, one of Dublin's finer fish and chip emporiums. This door will lead up several flights of narrow stairs until you arrive at the second floor where you'll find the dining room. It's a classic 'L' shaped room, the corner of the square being nicked off by the bar.

We sat down alongside the old fireplace and took in the room. The window side looks over Christchurch, which looks very pretty these days floodlit by night. The chairs are lightly padded and the tables have a curious rippled surface, almost like a Liscanner stone - except it's plastic. Breads, menus and a wine list came promptly and we began the task of selection. Like I said, the menu is definitely of the haute cuisine style of the early twentieth century. The array of fish on offer is large: turbot, sole, salmon, crab, lobster, shrimps, eel (off the night we were there) sea trout and prawns. All these fish are offered in a variety of sauces, all of which you could find in the Larousse Gastronomique. The starters are all in the £5-£8 range and the main courses are centred on £16. Apart from the a la carte there's a table d'hôte priced at £22, which is what I chose from.

Miriam began with oysters, which were happily of the Atlantic variety, not the crinkly ones with tiny oysters inside and followed with scallops and crab Neuberg. My choices from the table d'hôte were crab toes, smoked sea-trout, avocado and orange, smoked salmon pate, then a soup, goujons of sole, sole Sinead with Baileys, orange juice and kiwis ( I was doubtful about this one), a darne of salmon, breast of chicken and sirloin steak. From this I settled on the smoked sea trout and followed with the goujons of sole.

The wine list is fairly heavily weighted towards white wines, and comes with higher than average mark-up. It begins in France, moving from the Languedoc to the Loire, mostly over £20, then over to the Burgundy with a Macon Lugny just under £20 and the others running up to £40 and more. Then the list goes off to Australia, Chile, Spain, Italy and South Africa. The Rosemount Chardonnay at £15.95 was my eventual choice.

The starters arrived, Miriam's oysters looking plump and juicy and my sea trout plainly presented as smoked fillets. Neither of these dishes need much by way of preparation, so let's move on to the main courses. Miriam's scallops were brought hot and sizzling to the table in a copper frying pan, and from there they and the sauce were spooned onto a bed of rice. My goujons of sole - small fillets crumbed and deep-fried, seemed never ending. I wondered vaguely how many small fish had given up their lives for this plateful, and then I just got on with eating them. We swapped forkfuls, Miriam's sauce being rich and not for the delicate of digestion, while mine was simply plentiful.

What impressed me while we ate was how only two professional waiters can work a busy dining room, leaving no one waiting or unattended. I've seen plenty of dining rooms with more waiting staff that didn't come close to this level of service. We scanned the dessert menu - fresh fruit salad, crepes a l'orange, pineapple or banana fritters, a Baileys chocolate cup, ice-cream with chocolate sauce or Stilton - and decided on the Stilton with two glasses of Beaunes de Venise, which rounded off the meal rather well.

The bill came £74.40, which didn't include a service charge. There aren't many specialist fish restaurants in Dublin, and there's something quite endearing about the Lord Edward. Anywhere that can stay this true to its roots is unusual, to say the least.