I was just a kid, three years old, and they made me wave a flag in kindergarten. It was Great Britain, 1953, and there was a new queen. At three years of age you don't care much about monarchs, realms and kingdoms, and maybe still less about the new incumbent, one Elizabeth the Second. But strangely, with the passage of the years, that lack of interest has remained intact. Still, if teacher tells you to wave a flag, you do. But out of that early summer month in 1953 something else was memorable, and it generated all kinds of excitement, news of it coming as it did right on the eve of the coronation: Edmund Hillary had conquered Everest. Being fifty years since then, the airwaves have been full of Everest stories for the last month.
In the ensuing years, English schools never quite made it plain to me that Hillary was a New Zealander, nor was there much emphasis on the fact that he'd been helped to the summit by Tenzing Norgay - who was always referred to as Sherpa Tensing, the way one might refer to a coolie or a bearer. No surprise then, that Hillary got knighted and Norgay got ignored. It's taken me fifty years to find out that the really great climber, the one all the international expeditions wanted on their team, the man who'd been climbing Everest since 1935, was that same Tenzing Norgay. And only this week did I discover that the mountain, rather vaingloriously named after George Everest of the Indian Trigonometric Survey, has a Nepalese name - Sogarmatha - meaning something like Sky Goddess, which is a much better name than Everest.

I discovered that piece of information in a restaurant called Monty's of Kathmandu, which has photographs and paintings of the Sky Goddess on its walls. My wife and I had gone there after the star-studded opening of Charlie Whisker's exhibition of paintings in the Solomon, where we'd literally bumped into my son Rocco and his friend Tamara. So the four of us and Lainie Keogh - who looooves Nepalese food - set off for Monty's in Temple Bar. From the outside Monty's looks plain and quite simple and inside it looks much the same. Simple wooden tables, lightly padded seats, varnished floor-boards, unobtrusive lighting. Nothing particularly remarkable. There's maybe ten tables upstairs and a few downstairs as well.

So that's how five hungry people sat down to eat, knowing little about the restaurant and even less about Nepalese food. No, that's not quite right, Lainie knows a bit about it having been to Kathmandu. I could tell you the names of all the dishes on the menu, but I won't. Instead I'll tell you that the basic ingredients of lamb, chicken prawns and spices are largely the same you'd meet in an Indian restaurant. After a little struggling with the unfamiliarity of the menu we noticed that it said on it 'If you need help ask the waiter.' We decided that not only would we ask our maitre d', we'd get him to choose our starters. He suggested that he could bring a mix of different things to taste and we all agreed happily. After a further moment's thought we asked if he'd do the same for main courses, which meant all we had to do was sit back and wait to be fed.

We decided against a bottle of wine from the short but reasonably priced list and chose a mix of Nepalese beer, fizzy water and wine by the glass. Poppadoms and three ramekins of dips were on the table, so while we awaited the starters, we picked and dipped. Our starters arrived with some panache, a platter of baby squid sizzling on a cast-iron base rather dramatically. This was the Poleko squid, flavoured and spiced, cooked to perfection and sensationally good. Alongside this came the lamb Kachela, which is the lamb equivalent of steak tartare. If there's any carnivore in you at all this really ought to be tasted, it's absurdly good. Apart from these two memorable dishes we had an array of plates on the table; some Tareko Sabji, which were deep-fried vegetables in light batter; some deep-fried cheese and some spicy chicken.

Every one of these dishes was delicious, the flavours of each dish crisp and clean, unmuddied and clear. For me there was a purity that pleased my palate, I've always enjoyed carefully flavoured food where the spices or herbs can be tasted clearly. The arrival of the main courses only further convinced me that we'd found a very special restaurant indeed. Once again an array of sizzling and steaming dishes were placed on our table and once again we were enthralled by the tastes. Especially good were the lamb chops which were so tender that the side of a fork would have cut them easily enough. There was chicken in a spicy tomato based sauce, a hot and fiery dish of lamb cubes, we had Himalayan vegetables, we had Jhaneko Dal, possibly the finest dahl I've ever eaten and a vegetable masala. To help soak up the wonderful sauces we had plenty of Nan bread and we went to the trough with gusto.

It won't surprise you to read that despite our best endeavours much of this fabulous food remained uneaten, as we simply ate ourselves to a standstill. It was Lainie who thought of getting it bagged for the next day's lunch, when our maitre assured us it would taste 'even better'. We finished with coffees and after-dinner drinks, feeling replete and totally contented with our feast. This wonderful food, far more than we could actually eat, came with a price tag of €177.65 for five people, which by any computation has to be the best ethnic meal per euro in Dublin. Exquisitely mannered waiting staff help to turn a meal in Monty's into an experience.