This week the growing prosperity of this country really hit me, making me pause to reflect somewhat despondently on how I managed to get left behind the plethora of new wealth. I had plenty of time to reflect on it, too, as I was on my way to Navan and my first inkling of the huge changes afoot was the fact that I never got into top gear between Dublin and Navan town. Most of the drive was a bumper to bumper crawl with shiny new cars surrounding my ageing vehicle on all sides. Still, I reasoned to myself, once in Navan I'd be able to relax in bucolic ease - just proving how wrong you can be. Three times around the one-way system and still no sign of a parking place. I swear, you'd have an easier time of it on Stephen's Green in rush hour. I can remember when provincial towns were an open-spaced haven for cars and the only place where you could eat was in the commercial hotel. How things have changed.

I'd gone to Navan to meet Mary Finnegan, who unlike me, is a real journalist covering real news. She'd been in Derry to cover what I learnt is officially called 'The Bloody Sunday Inquiry' and she was heading back to Dublin. Navan seemed like a good meeting point and I'd been told about a restaurant there that sounded interesting. I met Mary at the door of Hudson's Bistro where she'd rather annoyingly found a parking place just in front of it. The god of parking clearly looks after some people rather better than others.

The first thing you notice about Hudson's Bistro is the colour scheme. Outside it's painted very brightly in green and purple with a large awning protruding over the pavement. There's reception area just inside the door where we were greeted, and then we were shown to our table. Downstairs there are three dining areas and we were sat in the smallest of these at the back. After a visit to freshen up, Mary told me that there was another dining room on the first floor as well. Inside it's very much bistro in style with simple décor and furniture, but with linen napery. Although it was busy, the various dividing walls made for a sense of seclusion.

I started with the wine list which begins with a page of beer, since this is a fully licensed restaurant. There's a listing of half-bottles, with red, white and dessert wines, and then the list proper. It's a very moderately priced list and unusually its divided into grape varieties, so if you know your varietals it's easy to find what you want. And talking of unusual you can even find wines for under £13 as well as David O'Brien's excellent Chateau Vignelaure. We were told that the wine list was about to be changed the next day and that some wines were being de-listed, but my choice of Los Alamos Cabernet Sauvignon was still available at a very reasonable £13.75.

The menu was as interesting as I'd been led to believe. Starters, all around £5, included Tiger prawns with Mexican chilli, potato cakes, mussels Catapalana, a Sambal kebab with chicken and prawns, cumin-flavoured lamb sausages, a Basque fish soup and three different salads. Main courses included various chicken dishes such as Moorish, New Orleans and crisp lemon; Jerez lamb shanks, linguini with mussels, duck with ginger, a chicken kebab with Mexican salsa, a fritto misto, a Thai curry, lamb steak a la plancha, haloumi and lastly fillet and sirloin steak with a variety of sauces. These ranged in price from under a tenner up to £16 for the fillet steak.

Between us we picked a fish and a meat course each, Mary starting with the Catapalana mussels and me with the lamb sausages, and then the lamb steak for Mary and the fritto misto for me. When the starters arrived we began to swap mouthfuls and decided that we'd picked well. The lamb sausages looked awfully like burgers, but were very well flavoured. The balance of the spices was just right and I was impressed.

When the main courses arrived I made a silent bet with myself that Mary was never going to finish her lamb steak. It looked quite huge sitting on her plate and by the time our side orders had arrived the whole table was covered with food. Basically you need a good appetite to come to Hudson's. My fritto misto was equally generous, pieces of hake, salmon, calamari and prawns served deep-fried in batter. Perhaps the oil could have been hotter as the batter wasn't as crisp as it might have been, but I made fair inroads into a Gargantuan plateful. No surprise either when Mary deftly slipped me a big piece of lamb steak across the table. I did manage to make a little space for the potato au gratin, which was very good.

Now after all that food I'd normally be saying 'no thank you' to dessert, but we had a toast to make. Mary spent a few years in Jamaica in her youth and got to know and love its music. It was on this very day, twenty years ago, that Bob Marley died, so we had to raise our glasses to salute his memory. Looking at the dessert menu, which were all priced at £5, there was a 'funky toffee pudding'. Irresistible, so we had one between us while attempting a rendition of 'Catch a Fire'. I finished the meal with an espresso and we took the bill, which came to £69.14 including a 10% service charge.

In past reviews I've been irritated by credit card slips which come with a space for a 'gratuity' even after a 10% service charge has been added. It always appears to me as a crude attempt to extract money from you twice for the same thing. But this time a new thought occurred to me; we'd enjoyed a level of service better than normal, so perhaps 10% was too little. Instead of simply leaving it blank, as is my wont, I added a further £2, which brought it up to 13%. It's a device that I may use again in the future.

As we stepped outside we noticed a large sign on the building saying 'Thriving restaurant for sale'. I hope that if the sale takes place Hudson's Bistro will find a new incarnation somewhere else. Good food in every town is definitely a change for the better.