I had a meal this week that'll make you jealous. It was in the excellent L'Ecrivain restaurant and it was hosted by Dillon's Wines and Eurotoques, an organisation dedicated to putting the best possible ingredients on a plate. Seeing the Eurotoques plaque outside a restaurant should encourage you to enter it. What was out of the ordinary about this meal wasn't just the wonderful food, it was that three of Dublin's best chefs prepared it: Derry Clark of L'Ecrivain, John Howard ex of Le Coq Hardi and Ross Lewis of Chapter One. It was a gourmet's delight and there were fine wines to accompany it, but sadly it wasn't the review meal.
That turned out to be rather different. My old friend Dillie Keane is back in town doing the Vagina Monologues in the SFX hall. 'Come and see the show,' she said, 'and we'll go out to eat after that.' Which is how I found myself in an audience of several hundred women and about five men, of which I was one. 'Sit near the front,' Dillie had said, 'and then we can pick on you from the stage.' Yeah, right. Get picked on in front of a load of women. Very attractive proposition. I sat far away from the front and hoped she wouldn't spot me, rehearsing my repartee in case she did, saying over and over to myself 'pick on someone of your own sex.'

There wasn't a man within five rows of me and I buried my nose in the program notes trying to look as inconspicuous as possible until the house lights went down. Reading about 'vagina workshops' and 'vagina days', it dawned on me that as a man I was missing a basic ingredient to get full value from the show. From what I'd gathered from the papers, I suspected that I'd find myself writhing in acute embarrassment while being regaled with the 'vagina facts' that are the show's leitmotif. Actually it turned out to be entertaining and not embarrassing, and although I wasn't as empowered by the monologues as many of the female spectators, I'm glad I went.

By the time it was over and Dillie had taken her due compliments from her fans, it was nearly eleven o'clock. I'd done a little research and found a couple of restaurants that took orders up to eleven, but we were cutting it fine. Arriving in Temple Bar we were met with 'Sorry, the kitchen's closed' a couple of times and the clock was marching relentlessly onwards, making further refusals even more likely. Apart from anything else, we were both quite hungry, so finding a place that would feed us was becoming urgent. At the top of Parliament Street on the corner of Dame Street we finally got a 'yes' in Da Pino's. 'You can eat if you order quickly,' we were told, so needless to say, we did.

I know you've probably read my rants and whinges before about never being able to find an Italian restaurant that in my opinion is worthy of the name. And it may well be that I'm more critical of Italian food than other cuisines, but I'm still looking. I can't tell you with my hand on my heart that Da Pino's is any different from so many other restaurants that call themselves 'Italian', but I'm very grateful to them for letting us in and feeding us at so late an hour. I'd feel positively churlish being unkind to an establishment that saved us from the pangs of hunger.

It was busy when we sat down, mostly tables of young people, there was a young and enthusiastic staff and the buzz that you get from a crowd of people lingering over their bottles of wine. The menu arrived promptly as promised. It's of the very large variety - by which I mean it's printed on a very large sheet and then laminated, and it listed all the dishes that you'd expect to find in an Italian restaurant as well as some very Spanish dishes like paella. In fact the menu listings seems to be almost bilingual, using both Italian and Spanish and each dish is also translated into other languages, giving it all a very cosmopolitan feel. Most of the starters are centred between €7 and €10, and judging by what we got, the portions seem quite generous.

There are also soups like minestrone, lots of different pastas and pizzas, as well as some main courses that were more unusual. I was happy to discover that it was possible to have a starter portion of pasta, so I ordered a spaghetti carbonara to start and an osso buco for a main course. Dillie chose a risotto cooked with Rioja and topped with asparagus and followed that with escalopes Milanese.

The wine list is short enough, but there are some good wines on it and the mark up is average. Dillie was keen on a white wine, so I chose the Verdicchio di Castelli di Jesi, a light Italian white that caused us no hardship. Throughout our fairly quick meal the service was excellent and attentive, which helped me over some of the less successful aspects of the meal. I won't dwell on the dishes we ate, but it's only fair to say that what comes out of a kitchen at midnight is probably not the same as what is prepared at the start of the night when the energy levels are higher. Da Pino is cheap and cheerful, accommodating and very clearly appeals to a young market. However, my quest to find an Italian meal in the capital remains as yet unfulfilled. The bill for the night came to €75.40, not including service.