I've been lying on my back in St. Vincent's hospital for five days now, my constant companion being my trusty laptop. Couldn't be more apt really, since St. Vincent is the patron saint of wine and wine-making. I've been probed and prodded over most of my body and poked in some very surprising places, and all to find out why I was feeling poorly. My arms look like pin-cushions - I've even got a cannula, which is like a little valve that gets inserted into your arm and functions as an in-out valve. Blood out, drugs in. And pills. I had seven at one stage today, then injections in my stomach, and later lots of little cups of a pink liquid with a taste so unpleasant that all other hospital ignominies fade into insignificance by comparison. They even have licensed vampires here who come and remove your blood several times a day by the phial-full. There's a cover story that it's for blood tests, but I'm not convinced. I just wish Buffy were here.

What happens to you after a few days is a shift in your daily paradigm. The new routine takes over from your usual one, you even begin to adapt to the feeding timetable, which seems to be run according to a Victorian nursery. Breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, your evening meal at four and then you're ready for bed at six-thirty. Can you imagine calling up a restaurant and saying, 'Can I make a booking for two for dinner?' 'Certainly. What time?' 'Let's say four, four-thirty.' Outside of meals, time can go quite slowly, which means you start to look forward to mealtimes. It's very much like the way we look forward to the meal tray on an aeroplane: it's not the quality of the food that heightens the expectations, it's the break in the monotony. Actually the food in St. Vincent's has been surprisingly good given the constraints of institutional kitchens. What I have got used to now is tea. It comes with every meal, it comes mid-morning, it comes just before bed-time. I've never drunk so much of the stuff in all my life. I'll tell you this, though, the moment they let me out I'm having a really mean little espresso.

Even in a hospital bed you can still get bad news from outside. It came from Wexford town and I learned that Roberto Pons has closed his restaurant 'La Dolce Vita'. It's been one of my recurring complaints that good Italian food is hard to find in Ireland, so when one of the better Italian chefs closes shop it becomes even harder. Strangely 'Roberto' is also the name of another very fine Italian chef, whose surname is Morsiani. I came across him first in a little restaurant in Ashford, Co. Wicklow, where he sang as he cooked wonderful food. Shortly afterwards he opened up in Blackrock in a restaurant called 'da Roberto'. Now he's come full circle and he's back in Ashford, only this time on the other side of the road in 'Chester Beatty's' in a restaurant called 'O Sole Mio'.

Well, yes and no. It's slightly different this time round. Roberto starts very early in the morning and he prepares all the sauces for the day in O Sole Mio's kitchen. But being the hard working man he is, he prepares these sauces not only for O Sole Mio's restaurant but for da Enzo's in Fairview, his old haunt of da Roberto's in Blackrock and now for da Bacco at the Roundwood golf course as well. The principle here is straightforward enough - the hardest thing about a pasta dish is getting the sauce right. Anyone can learn very quickly to cook pasta properly, so if you can combine that skill that with the sauce made by a master, you should end up with a good dish. What intrigued me about this concept is that it generalises easily to the consumer. Roberto sees it like that as well, so hopefully before long you'll be able to go to your local deli and buy these same sauces to use in your own home. If it can improve the standard of Italian food over here, then I'm entirely in favour of it.

So to put the theory to the test I went down to Ashford to meet Roberto in the new restaurant. It takes up all of one side of Chester Beatty's so it's quite a big room and Roberto and I took up position next to the open fire - a welcome sight on a November's eve. It has enough bric-a-brac to say 'Italian' and the main feeling that the décor engenders is comfort. I was intrigued by the set of old brass topped soldering irons by the fire, but managed to keep my concentration on the task in hand.

Roberto has constructed the menu in such a way as to be sauce dependent - on the ones that he makes - so the menu in all four restaurants that these sauces got to are identical. There are two pages of starters, divided on the menu between hot, cold, fish, pasta and fish pasta, and mostly they're priced between 6 and 9 euros. What I chose in the end was a lot of starter portions, the better to get an idea of how this worked. So between us we tasted the penne diavola, the hot sauce that's often described as 'arrabbiata', which was as deft as I'd had it; bocconcini di manzo which is pieces of beef fillet in a spicy sauce; then the classic funghi Parmigiana which is mushrooms cooked with rosemary garlic and bacon and topped with mozzarella and parmesan; and another pasta dish, the orecchiettte alla Pugliese, which is bacon, broccoli, garlic and chilli.

What I liked about all these dishes was not just that they tasted awfully good, but that they were genuinely Italian dishes that tasted exactly as they would have done had you ordered the dish in Italy. The rarity value of that in Ireland can't be over-emphasised, because mostly the only similarity is the name of the dish. What you get in O Sole Mio is a taste of Italy, a taste of food the way Italians make it, and most importantly a chance to taste good Italian cuisine in Ireland.