I'm not finding it too easy to write this week; I've just said goodbye to an old friend that's been with me for thirty-five years. Call me sentimental - but I feel the loss, especially now the weather is better. This old friend was built thirty-five years ago in Newport Pagnell in England and my father bought it a little later. Perhaps I should explain that this friend had four wheels and over the past years I've lavished a great deal of time and affection on it, after all an Aston Martin DB6 is a very pretty car. A couple of days ago it burst into flame while I was driving it and nothing could put out the petrol fire. It sits outside my window as I write, a burnt out shell: a great beauty reduced to an eye-sore. It represented for me a direct link to my father, and in a way it served much the same purpose for my son. We worked on it together hoping that one day it would be his, an aspiration that will now never be.

All this was yet to happen when I set off for Dublin to meet my guest Caroline Sleiman. It's an odd thing, but I've had dinner with Caroline in New Orleans and in London, but never in Dublin. That's a function of her job in the drinks business, which takes her all over the world. Finding a time when she was in Dublin wasn't easy, but having found a date it seemed a good idea to try the Lebanese restaurant called the Cedar Tree, since Caroline is half Lebanese and knows her way around a Lebanese menu.

The Cedar Tree is in Andrews Street and can be easily missed, since the entrance is a single door that leads you down to a basement. When we arrived it was very full, but we took our table between a wall and some pot-plants and sat down. The first thing that I noticed were the tables and chairs, which are very ornate. Intricate carving in wood, like strings of beads, interlace the table tops while the flat areas are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The chairs are of the same design and, said Caroline, very typical of Lebanese furniture.

Before I even attempted the menu I picked up the wine list. If, like we were, you're tempted to a Lebanese wine, be warned, the prices are horrendous. Chateau Musar comes at €50 and Chateau Kefraya a couple of euros less, so by default the choice was from the rest of the world. It's not a long list, but it did include a lot of wines and shippers that I'd never come across, and nor indeed, had Caroline. After a lot of passing the wine list to one another we settled on a Rasteau from the Cotes de Rhone, which turned out to be unavailable. As I wearily went back to the list our waiter said, 'That's a very good Rioja,' pointing to the Valdemar, so we had a bottle of that at €23.40.

Now the menu is long, and if you don't have Caroline with you it could be intimidatingly long, but I placed myself entirely in her hands. 'We should do this the Lebanese way,' she said, 'lots of different dishes.' So she picked out seven different starters and said 'if we're still hungry, then we'll pick a main course.' Not a man to argue with a lady I agreed at once. Shortly afterwards a Baba Ganouge, a Tabouleh, a Hommos Bilahem, a Kibbeh, a Sanbousek Lahem, a Arayess and a Rakakat chicken arrived on the table. This last dish, it transpired, is not pronounced as we might expect; the 'k' is mostly silent so it sounds more like Rah-ah-aht. We needed to do a little re-organisation of the various dishes to make room on the table, a small price to pay for such a variety of goodies. What we had was a humus, a humus with finely minced lamb, two different deep-fried filo pastry parcels, a salad, some Lebanese bread - which is much like pita bread - and skewered chicken pieces. I never asked Caroline whether it was the Lebanese way or not, but it looked like just the sort of food you could eat with your fingers, so I did. Pieces of the Lebanese bread made perfect scoops for the various dips and the chicken and pastry parcels came already in handy bite-sized pieces. I asked Caroline how authentic it all was. 'Pretty good,' was her considered response, 'but mayonnaise is very much an addition for the Irish palate.'

I do like eating like this; it's like a really good antipasto in Italy when a plethora of dishes come to you, each one enough for a taste, but not in themselves particularly filling. I enjoyed the various mixes of flavours and had fun trying to match the dishes to other Mediterranean dishes, especially Greek. There wasn't a lot left when these starters were cleared away, although I hadn't eaten a lot of the salady bits. We had a little hiatus while we considered the possibility of more food. Some wine and mineral water later we were ready for a shared main course, a mixed Meshwe and a mixed salad to accompany it.

I was surprised to notice that by the time we were eating our main course there were very few diners left, and by the time we'd finished the Meshwe we were the last remaining customers. Coffee was only of the watery filter variety so I gave it a miss. While we were finishing the last of the wine, the bill was presented in the manner of 'Here's your hat, what's your hurry?' Quarter-past-eleven seems early enough to me to be clearing a restaurant, but then again it was mid-week and we both had a working day beckoning. A bill for just over €90, not including service, seemed fair value for what we'd eaten.