So where do you go after ten days of Sybaritic gourmandising in France? What sort of restaurant is going to please the palate after the sort of spoiling only French restaurants can supply? Well, the safest answer to that had to be a restaurant that in no way competed on French terms, in short an ethnic restaurant where no comparisons, odious or otherwise, could be made.

It's one of the great changes in Dublin over the last twenty years; you can get dishes from all over the world, where once Indian and Chinese were the only non-Irish cuisines. I'm totally in favour of this sort of culinary diversity, because the palate is as prone to jading as anything else. Change is always invigorating, and the cross-fertilisation of skills and techniques have given us some interesting fusion cuisines around the city. There is a horticultural term, hybrid vigour, which describes what happens when two gene pools are crossed - you get a vigorous cross-breed. It's tempting to assume that all cross-pollinations result in some exciting new breed, but in cooking that's not always the case. Italian mixed with Irish is one of the classic failures, it simply doesn't work. Like cooks who believe that wild experimentation always results in something interesting and worthwhile. More often than not it doesn't. The reason that steaks are rarely served with chocolate sauce isn't that no one has been bold enough over the centuries to try it, but because it isn't very nice. Not all fusions and experimentations are successful.

So with the urge for ethnicity firmly in mind I set off with my wife for the Rathgar Road to eat in an Indian restaurant called Poppadoms. It's on that row of shops opposite the imposing Presbyterian Church at the Terenure end of the road, a few doors up from The Ivy Court. Inside the décor is more modern European than Indian, saffron yellow walls have a soothing effect and a few colourful oils break up their expanse. The lighting is quiet and subdued and best of all they have candles here. Real candles, not those fecky little nite-lites that cast as much light as a pulsar in Lyra casts on this planet. Candles, plus some gentle electric lights make the room seem warm and welcoming. The tables are well-spaced and the table for two at which we were placed had us sitting at 90 degrees, a placing I much prefer to sitting directly across a table from your dining companion.

The menu is uncompromisingly Indian, there are notes to explain the regional provenance of each dish and there is a note of pride in their description of the purity of the ingredients. There's a fusion going on here, but it's not with the food, it's with the room, the presentation and the service, which has a distinctly European feel. Happily, the cuisine is purely Indian and all the better for it.

As soon as we sat down we were brought a dish of hot poppadoms and three little ramekins into which we could dip them; one with a minty yoghurt dip, one with a sweet chutney and one with a spicy dip. These kept us busy while we worked our way through a very long and elaborate menu. Both Susie and I felt like a Cobra beer on this evening, but it's a wine only license. Turning back to the wine list I found ten or so reds and ten or so whites, all very reasonably priced with nothing over €28. There were plenty of New World wines to pick from, but my eye fell on a Gewurztraminer and I chose it, on the basis of the fact that a spicy wine might be a good bet to accompany some spicy food. It was from Domaines Schlumburger, and was the most perfumed and spicy Gewurztraminer I've ever had the pleasure of drinking. A really delicious wine with hints of roses and violets at a reasonable €26. And while we're talking of drink, we also had two bottles of mineral water at the lowest price I've seen it for a long time, €3.80 a litre.

Susie started her meal with the king prawns tandoori, which were quite the largest prawns I've seen and they were sensational, cooked butterfly fashion. 'I'd come back here just for these,' was her verdict. I started with dahi vada, or lentil dumplings. They were tasty enough, but maybe dumplings isn't a good translation, since that implies soft, moist things, whereas these were firm and harder on the teeth. To follow, Susie had chosen the haryali murg, a chicken dish that was both herbed and spiced while I found myself unable to resist the lamb dish named after Shah Jehan. I reasoned that the Mughal emperor who had given us that most beautiful of buildings the Taj Mahal might also have lent his name to good dish, and indeed he had. The creamy, coconut milk sauce which bathed my small cubes of lamb was quite delicious and for once we were both entirely pleased with our own choices, each of us unwilling to share with the other. Susie had plain boiled rice to accompany her dish, while Pulao rice came with mine.

Unusually for an Indian restaurant, Poppadoms has good desserts as well, offering a choice of khulfi, which is an Indian style ice-cream, a lemon tart, a chocolate dessert and lastly a lychee ice-cream, which we decided to have between us. This was based, I think, on yoghurt and came surrounded by fresh lychees and slices of skinned orange. As a palate cleanser it was hard to beat, the freshness of the lychees combining well with the smooth, cold ice-cream. I enjoyed our meal in Poppadoms, we had attentive and professional service, pleasing surroundings and good food. Our bill came to €93.93, which didn't include a service charge.