I've given up being surprised at how things come in groups, whether it's good news, bad news or simply restaurant bills. I try, as far as I can, to vary the restaurants that I go to by location, by food type and by price. You may have noticed that I also try to keep my spending for two people to under œ80 and indeed for twelve months I've managed to do just that. However last week broke the ton, and so did this week. With luck, things won't come in threes. If you eat out often enough you'll soon find that although good food can be found at high prices, it can also be found for reasonable money, which is why for me œ100 or more for two seems like a lot of money. If I were to know in advance that I was about to spend that amount, I'd want to be very sure that what I was going to get would be well above the average - whether it was the ambience, the service, the food or a combination of the three.

I'd arranged to have dinner with Kathy Gilfillan and we'd settled on Locks, a restaurant on the Grand Canal that's been there for a long time and has built up a good reputation. Although it's been a few years since I was last in Locks, I've eaten there occasionally and I've always eaten well. On the day of our review Kathy's husband, Paul McGuinness, decided that he'd like to join us after all and a little later in the day so did Michael Colgan, so we ended up as a foursome. Quite like old times, as the four of us have been sharing meals for more years than I'd care to admit to. One of the nice things about Locks is that you can park outside, which for me is something of a big plus. Michael and I got there early and had time to study the menus and wine list over a glass of wine before Kathy and Paul arrived. The place was just as I remembered it - a comfortable room with plenty of prints on the wall to look at for distraction, vertical surfaces and a ceiling of painted tongue and groove, and windows that look out over the canal. Big linen-covered tables with comfortable chairs fill the room. What were new to me were the prices.

There is a table d'h"te and an a la carte; the table d'h"te is priced at œ29.95 plus 12.5% service charge, which, to save you the calculation, comes to œ33.18, and the a la carte averages œ10 for starters and œ20 for main courses. The sort of dishes you can choose from include a cheese souffl‚ at œ8.35, fresh asparagus at œ8.45 (presumably Southern Hemisphere) angel hair pasta with truffle shavings at œ13.10, a lobster salad at œ16.45 or pan fried rabbit and scallops at œ10.75. Main courses listed four fish dishes: monkfish and lobster Thermidore, scallops and prawns, black sole and cod. The meat dishes were chicken, lamb, beef, kidneys, Guinea Fowl, venison and duck.

I turned to the wine list, which is comprised of several pages of hand-written text. It begins with three House Choices which are priced at œ13.50, œ20 and œ22.50. There's a page called 'Good Wines to Accompany Good Food', which are recommended. Four whites and seven reds are listed, only the Chilean Chardonnay being under œ20. From there the list moves through France, very occasionally dipping below œ20, into Italy, Spain and Australia. Here too wines under œ20 are hard to find, so I eventually picked a Louis Latour Macon Lugny at œ22 and a Spanish Raimat for the red at œ23. It's a quite heavily marked up list - the same Macon Lugny is on many lists around Dublin at about œ16, so œ22 is very much at the upper reaches.

When Paul and Kathy arrived, we settled into the serious business of choosing the food. They both chose the pasta with truffles to start, Michael had the monkfish and scallop kebab and I chose the crispy potato skins served with smoked salmon and caviar from the table d'h"te. To follow, Kathy and Michael had fish: the scallops and prawns and the black sole respectively, while Paul and I both ordered a small steak - Paul's completely plain and mine as on the menu, with a soy, ginger and chilli sauce.

There was a large party in another room, which may have put a little strain on the systems. We'd gone through two baskets of bread and Melba toast before our starters arrived and we tucked in, a little ravenously. Kathy gave me a taste of her pasta, which was well cooked and the flavour of truffle came through. Michael finished his kebab happily and I left most of my crispy potato skins on the plate, although not before finishing my smoked salmon strips and the little mound of caviar with the help of more Melba toast. I'm not sure about crispy potato skins; I've got good, strong Southern Italian teeth, but these seem to tempt fate. Anyone with fragile crowns should beware.

The main courses arrived and were served with the vegetables on the side. Simple, winter veg these - Calabrese, (whatever happened to sprouting broccoli?) red cabbage and a ratatouille. Then came the Monte Carlo potatoes - little cubes of potato fried with onion and a little garlic - which were very tasty and it is, by all accounts, one the restaurant's more popular dishes. I tasted a little of everything, enjoyed one of Kathy's scallops and a taste of Michael's sole. All good, solid dishes. I wasn't wild about the reduction sauce on my steak, but I suppose I could have done what Paul did and ordered it plain.

The conversation at the table was gloriously entertaining, as is so often the case with old friends, and before we knew it was late and time to go - a mid-week night is no night for staying up late. The bill for the night came to œ234.60. Last week I wrote that The Kish was expensive, where I'd had a bill for œ244 for four, but thinking about it now, in Locks we'd had one less bottle of wine than we'd had in The Kish, and this time there were no desserts. When you take that into account, it's fair to say that this meal has now taken first place in the expense league in a year of dining out.