I've had it suggested to me that with the Aer Lingus strikes, the teachers' strike and the continuing crisis of foot and mouth, the Celtic Tiger's roar may well become something of a miaow. Perhaps it's a little soon to count the cost of these various inroads into the civic purse, but this much is sure; walk around the Temple Bar area of Dublin and all the evidence points to continued consumer spending. The night I was there the streets and alleys were awash with young people with one end firmly in mind; to party on.

I was there because my guest is young and trendy and even works in the cutting edge field of information technology. If you've looked at www.foodandwine.net for any of my articles you might have noticed that it's been re-designed with a lot of fancy features. All these owe their presence in no small measure to Audrey O'Connor, herself no slouch as a restaurant reviewer. Eliza Blues was her suggestion. She knows Dublin restaurants almost as well as I do and can talk with ease about places that I've yet to go to. It's almost intimidating to be with someone who takes such an interest, and who has that thing I once had - a memory that can recall places and events. My memory these days is a small tape recorder which I use, I believe, with an extraordinary subtlety. I can hold it behind a menu and talk about the dishes while I'm recording, giving the impression to anyone who may be looking that I'm talking to myself and am perfectly potty. Still it's a small price to pay for being able to remember what you ate.

So there we were, just about to walk through the doors of Eliza Blues when I realised I'd left my memory in the car. I'm a paid-up member of the CRAFT club, which is an acronym for Can't Remember A Fecking Thing, so being without my memory is something of a handicap. 'Fear not', said the damsel in shining armour - or at least in a rather pretty floral top - 'I have a memory, whatever you don't remember, I will.' Thus reassured I gave up any thought of going back to the car park and crossed the threshold. Well actually you don't do that here, not exactly. Eliza Blues has the sort of doors that Italian banks have. You press a red knob and the first part slides majestically open, then you step into a tiny circular space. The first door then closes behind you and then the other one opens, letting you into the restaurant. In Italian banks it's to scan you for guns or other armaments, and if it reacts you get stuck there until a man with a gun comes to investigate. I can see why banks might do it, but I'm still unclear as to why restaurants in Dublin need to do this.

Once inside you find one of those hard-edged hard-surfaced design jobs that's better than most. For a start its got a view. The floor to ceiling windows look over the Millennium Bridge across the Liffey and as the evening dusk turned to night the Dublin skyline came to life with illuminated cranes. The water motif is all around the restaurant; the ceiling has canvas pieces like sails stretched in interesting formations, the windows are partly shielded with opaque glass cut into wave shapes and there's a divider in the room with a similar wave or water theme. The floor is wood and so are the walls, in parts stained a deep cobalt blue and in others left au naturel. Somewhere in the back of my mind the phrase 'Stena Sealink' formed, but I pushed it instantly away.

We were shown to a table at a window and started on the menus and wine list. I really liked the wine list here; if I'd been asked to select the wines, it would have come out very like this. About fifty wines including half-bottles, almost all of them under twenty pounds, and a good range across the wine-producing world with a moderate mark-up. I still stop and wonder why all restaurants can't take a reasonable mark-up on their wines, after all it makes the customer happy and even if they don't buy a second bottle they can spend secure in the knowledge that they're getting a decent wine for the money. After a little consultation we chose the Esk Valley Chardonnay from Australia, which came with a price tag of £19.25.

Nearly all the starters are around £5 and include things like salmon gravadlax, crab and avocado salad, marinated buffalo mozzarella with basil and almond pesto, Caesar salad, duck liver parfait, steamed mussels and six or a dozen oysters. Plenty there to choose from. Main courses included three chicken dishes, a sirloin and a fillet steak, lamb noisettes and two vegetarian dishes - a vegetable stack with goats cheese and stuffed aubergine. There were three pasta dishes; seafood pasta, spaghetti with basil and almond pesto, and tagliatelle with smoked salmon and creamed dill sauce. Given the watery theme of the décor we weren't surprised to find that fish figured heavily on the menu. The fish dishes included salmon, an Irish bouillabaisse, sea bream, skate and cod.

Audrey had ordered the vegetable stack with goats cheese as a starter portion and I'd ordered the mussels. Both of these were good, Audrey's roasted courgettes and aubergines bore the marks of the griddle and my bowl of mussels was generous. I'll confess to liking foods that need hands - I like the mucking in and made good use of my finger bowl and napkins. Next came tagliatelle with salmon and a dill sauce for Audrey and the bouillabaisse for me. The tagliatelle were properly cooked al dente and my bouillabaisse - a fish stew originally from Marseilles - was pretty much as my mentor Elizabeth David describes. I don't often eat fish all the way through a meal, but it's light on the digestion and might be the start of a new regime for me, as once again I fight the growing waistline.

Maybe it was this very lightness of the meal that made me compensate and do something else I rarely do, order a dessert. We had one each, an apple crunch for Audrey and a rum Bavaria for me, which I'm proud to say I didn't quite finish, although I wanted to. We ended the meal with two espressos, which came with some rather nice little biscuits. The bill came to £78.10, not including service, which is a little more than I'd have expected, but the service had been excellent and we'd been well looked after. Oh, and thank you Audrey for remembering what we ate.