I've just finished reading an article about Ireland's first celebrity chef, Sean Kinsella, that brought back memories. His restaurant, The Mirabeau, was in its heyday at much the same time as mine, Armstrong's Barn, was. It turns out that much of the grief that caused him to close up shop was pretty similar to what I was subjected to. If you're too young to know about the eighties I'll tell you this; by the mid-eighties Ireland had come to virtual economic stop. Gay Byrne once famously remarked at the height of the gloom, 'will the last person to leave Ireland please turn out the lights.' In those bad old days we suffered from a succession of governments that were high-taxing and high-spending. As more and more people emigrated or went bust the few remaining tax-payers were squeezed harder and harder. Thankfully our politicians realised that this couldn't go on and established a lower tax regime that has brought us a continued boom until today. Sadly there are signs that high taxation is coming back, as the years of economic success seem to have left the exchequer still empty-handed. The fruits of the boom have vanished as completely as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The other memory that came back to me was of late autumn evenings when summer was long gone and the customers were few. Some mid-week nights we ended up with two people dining, which was economically far worse than having no one at all. At least with no customers at all you could close the door, turn off the heat, waste no food and have the night off. But with even just two customers, you still had to heat the place, keep the chef and staff on and have every dish on the menu available just in case. Despite a Michelin rosette, a high score in Gault Millau, plaudits from most major guides, we still got quiet nights - the classic case of critical acclaim and no bums on seats. I have no wish to be a Cassandra, but nights like these may come back to haunt today's restaurateurs.

The location of your restaurant is also an important factor in its success or lack of it. For example being in the back end of the Wicklow Hills wasn't so great when the majority of our customers were from Dublin and there was a major petrol crisis. But even in Dublin there are good and bad locations. What seems truly bizarre to me is that these good and bad locations can be in the same street. Logic doesn't seem to apply at all. If you're in Dublin, Henry Street serves as a good example. It's insanely busy as far as Liffey Street, where an invisible barrier occurs and pedestrian movement ends. Or, like Hugo Jellet and me this week, you go to Ely Place and find The Ely impossibly full and across the road Papaya empty. Papaya occupies the same basement premises that Snipes did until recently, when it went off to restaurant heaven alongside The Commons, Belgos, Peacock Alley, Cookes, Fire Island, Blue Room, Velure, Duzy's, the Pembroke etc. etc., leaving the astonishingly resilient Kitty's Kaboodle still in business.

Papaya's basement dining room is pleasingly vaulted, with well-spaced tables and comfortable beechwood chairs that are upholstered in velour. What it serves is Thai food, a cuisine that can be found these days quite easily in Dublin. Within walking distance of Ely Place you can find Diep le Shaker, Tiger Becs, Baan Thai, The Chilli Club, Pad Thai and The Thai Orchid, so there's clearly a demand for this brand of ethnic cuisine.

Papaya's menu is long, with a huge variety of dishes to choose from. Thankfully our maitre was a charming Iranian student, who knew his way around the Thai menu and put the now ruined chance of an early departure aside to enthuse about the chef's recipes. We chose a Papaya platter for two to start with, which consisted of prawn cakes, vegetable rolls with plenty of carrot inside, Satay chicken on a skewer, and sesame cakes which were crunchy, but a little oily. Two dipping sauces that came with them and I liked the sweeter of the two. Prawn crackers came to the table along with the menus and our glasses of iced water were kept topped up by our attentive waiter.

For our main courses we decided to order something that that we knew and liked; in this case crispy duck with a plum sauce at €15, and something that we didn't know; the sea-bass with cucumber, pineapple and tomato, which was listed at €16. I ordered egg-fried rice as an accompaniment and Hugo chose the sticky rice. The duck was exactly as you'd expect it and the sea bass was really good, but let down by the pineapple pieces, which like all fruit in Ireland wasn't properly mature. Fruit that is harvested green and unripe and then expected to complete its ripening process in a container on the back of some lorry is hardly ideal.

We both turned down dessert, but at the behest of the waiter we tried 'Ireland's only Thai dessert', which was diced pear in warm coconut milk with some ice on top. The chef had decided to dye the pear pieces red, green and Ford Escort blue with food dye, but I remain unconvinced that blue is a good colour for food. Between the colour and the unripeness of the pear this dessert wasn't a big success.

Our bill came to modest €75.50 without service but including a bottle of the very good Kefraya from Lebanon, a wine that grows in stature each time I taste it. A decent meal then, but thank god Hugo and I had plenty to talk about, because there were no other conversations taking place around us that we could earwig.