'Mercury's retrograde,' my pal Mark told me, 'that's why everything seems to be going pear-shaped.' 'Ahh,' was my considered reaction. True enough, life still has the edge of struggle to it, but despite the April showers, this May week has been a good one. I finally fixed the lawn mower and so had the joy of an afternoon's grass-cutting, I sprayed all the gravelled areas between showers to keep them weed-free and then, feeling virtuous in the extreme, I sat in the middle of my newly-mown lawn and listened to the bird song. Spring may still be a little wintry, but the birds are undeterred in their nesting, territory claiming and mate-attracting calls. I enjoyed this Arcadian idyll for a moment or two before being driven indoors by yet another shower.

Once indoors it was time to pick a restaurant. 'Where are we going?' asked my wife. 'Give me five minutes and I'll tell you,' I answered, heading for my desktop and my email folders, where kindly readers send me suggestions. Exactly five minutes later was wife was by my side. 'Well?' pause, 'have you decided?' 'Naas,' I said definitively, 'a new Indian restaurant in Naas.'

I'm old enough to remember that whenever you drove south you drove through Naas. Back then, with but a few cars on the road, Naas was a bottle neck in much the way that Enfield is now. Prosperity has come to Naas along with its by-pass, although whether there's a causal link or not, I'm not sure. The main street doesn't seem to have got less busy since the motorway bypassed the town, it seems to have got even busier. Even arriving at eight o'clock on a mid-week night we found tailbacks. For one of those quirks of the eye the restaurant, Maloti, is easy to see when you're on the N7 going towards Dublin, but easily missed in the other direction. It's just a few doors down from where the N7 takes a right-angled turn at the top of the town.

Maloti has very clearly been designed as a restaurant. The entire building has been renovated internally while the exterior now boasts a double-height glass frontage. Inside that high glass window sheds lots of light, while the ground floor has seating for twenty or so on decent sized wooden tables with comfortable seats around them. At the back of the ground floor is the open plan kitchen, where you can watch the chefs going about their busy business. Wide, gently raked stairs take you upstairs from about halfway down the length of the room, where you find another bar counter and then more dining rooms running the length of the building on the first floor. The colour co-ordination, the themed patterns on the menus, take-away cards and business cards all match pleasingly. The style doesn't evoke anything specifically Indian in the traditional way, but rather clean, crisp modern décor that would be at home in any European city.

What is undeniably Indian is the staff. 'Aren't they handsome?' asked my wife - god knows what kind of answer she expected from me. Still, what our waiter was able to do was steer us through an immensely long menu. But before I tell you about that, I'll tell you about the wine list, which is short. Roughly ten reds and ten whites - I think all from the same supplier - are reasonably priced and cover a good selection of popular wines. What attracted both Susie and I more than this though, were the big bottles of Cobra Beer, 66cls, which gives you a bit more than a pint. We had one each. So to the menu, which has a page of appetisers, then four pages of main courses. All the dishes are colour-coded, ranging from mild to very, very hot. On the appetisers page, mostly priced between €5 and €7, you can find chicken tikka, lamb kebab, tandoori dishes, beef on skewers and of course, lots of prawns. Then comes a page of house specialities, then a page of lamb dishes, then tandoori, then biriani dishes. As well as those there are vegetarian dishes and seafood to further complicate your choices.

After much deliberation we finally settled on a paneer pakora for Susie and an onion bhajee for me. Susie's dish translates as cottage cheese fritters, which were pleasant enough but not overly exciting. My onion bhajee was excellent, well-flavoured and crisply cooked. Both of these starters were served with Irish-style garnish on the plate - some undressed iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato and so on. I did what I always do with this stuff, I left it on the plate.

For main courses, the cause of all our deliberations, we had chosen a Jhinga Hara Pyaz for Susie, which was butterfly prawns in a mild chilli sauce, and a Patia Gosht, which was lamb in a traditional Persian sauce for me. These were placed in the middle of the table so that we could share them, which is what we did. Egg-fried rice for me and special fried rice for Susie were our carbohydrate. What made Susie's rice special seemed to be peas. Apart from the main courses we'd also ordered some Naan bread, which is really out on its own when it comes to mopping up sauces from the plate. Both our main courses were bursting with flavour, although mine was a little hot for Susie's palate.

What sets Maloti apart from many Indian restaurants is that it goes lightly on the Indian theming, confining it to the food. It's a formula that works very well, used to great effect in Dublin by Jaipur in Camden Street. Here in Naas it has to be a welcome addition to the increasing range of ethnic cuisines that can now be found there. A very modest bill of €74.30 ended our evening.