This week it was my turn to be a guest, and a very pleasurable experience it was too, with Harry and Rita Crosbie taking my wife and I to dinner. Now Harry is the quintessential inner-city man, born and bred, making his living from its re-development. And when I say inner-city that's precise: he even lives there, such is the commitment. None of you poncey Dublin 4 for Harry; the hard-edged landscape of the docks is his milieu and that's where he feels at home. Of course, you can't make as much of a mark on a city as he has without offending a bunch of people. Rita tells us that every morning he has to drive past an enormous piece of graffiti on a hoarding which carries an unprintable description of Harry. Harry is enormously amused at this, his laughter positively infectious. 'It's a very inventive insult. Almost an art-form.'

Part of being a guest is that you get driven as well, in this case by Harry to The Clarence, where we were going to eat in the Tea Room. On the way we amused ourselves with the old game of 'we were so poor when we were young…'. It's one I can play too, with centuries of peasant blood in my ancestry. 'Walk to school with newspapers wrapped around your feet? That's luxury. We used to dream of having newspapers for our feet. We had to use nettles tied on with barbed wire.' 'Call that hardship? Barbed wire? We couldn't afford barbed wire. We had to use second-hand bandages that we'd steal from tramps.' And so on. But it did while away the traffic lights to The Clarence.

The Clarence is styled in the mimimalist tradition. Lots of plain wooden surfaces adorn the entrance from the quay's side, taking the uncluttered look to new extremes. You pass the Octogon bar, awash with the young and trendy, and the Tea Room is on your left. It's a large dining room with an immensely high ceiling, giving an immediate impresion of airiness and space. One wall has large leaded windows that are back-lit with a cool blue that almost mimics daylight. A balcony surmounts the entrance and the tables are separated by wooden dividers, some of which are topped with huge and impressive floral displays. The table settings follow the same uncluttered feel - there's comfortable seating surrounding the plain wooden tables that are simply set with linen runners and expensive cutlery, a polished wooden floor beneath and simple, but elegant table accoutrements.

Just like last week's review of Gordon Ramsey's Petrus, the Tea Room offers two menus, a set dinner which is priced at £31 for two courses and £39 for three, and a tasting menu designed and prepared bt the executive chef Anthony Ely at £50. One thing is for sure, when you see food priced at this level, then it comes from a kitchen that takes itself seriously. The only remaining question is whether or not it can match the quality of the food to the price. With ten starters and nine main courses to choose from there's no shortage of options, and some of the dishes on offer looked very tempting. Here's a few, more or less at random, just to give you a flavour of the menu: roast quail with a ragout of borlotti beans, mosserons and garlic cappuccino; seared scallops with escabeche dressing; a broad bean risotto with truffle oil and a deep-fried egg and beer-battered salmon nuggets with caper mayonnaise. Main courses looked equally inviting: red mullet with a sauce vierge and pesto noodles, caramelised halibut with a cockle risotto, herb-crusted cod fillet with crushed peas and deep-fried courgette flowers and a magret of duck with a butternut squash fondant.

Harry passed me the wine list and asked me to choose the wines, which I was delighted to do. It's a fairly long list, simply divided between red and white wine, and there are some good wines on it. I had a long chat with the new sommelier, who is as passionate about wine as I am, and is slowly overhauling the list. I'd guess that the pricing of the list is outside of his remit, however, because this is a heavily marked-up list, by which I mean it's three times wholesale rather than double. Normally this puts me into a grump, but since I was a guest this time I was able to choose our wines with my wallet in peaceful equanimity. For the white I chose a New Zealand Sauvignon from Marlborough called Mudhouse listed at £31.50, and for the red I took our sommelier's advice and went for the Spanish Pesquera from the Duero, listed at £29.90. Both were fine wines, but over-priced. On this list £30 is very much the median price, and there are plenty of wines in the three-figure bracket should you feel so inclined to go there.

And so to the food. For starters Rita had chosen the broad bean risotto, Susie had a special, a risotto with mussels and saffron, Harry had the deep-fried potato and bacon cakes and I had the quail. All of these dishes, which we were careful to share, were truly excellent, on a par with the best that I've eaten in Ireland and elsewhere. And the standard stayed right up there with the main courses as well; a Crusted cod fillet for Susie, loin of pork for Rita, noisette of lamb for Harry and a ribeye steak for me. So to answer my original question, yes, the quality of the food matches the price. This kind of labour-intensive and skilful food needs a small army of skilled chefs in the kitchen, and these days that skill is well rewarded, hence the price you pay to eat it.

Harry couldn't be persuaded to a dessert, but Susie had a raspberry pudding and Rita and I shared a cappucino crème brulee, both of which made a fine end to what had been an excellent meal. If you enjoy the refinements of French cuisine, you'll enjoy the Tea Room.