There's a general rule about restaurants that's worth bearing in mind if you should find yourself abroad. It applies equally well on the Cote d'Azur, the Amalfi Peninsula, an Aegean Island or on La Costa Dorada. Any restaurant that is filled only with tourists and no locals at all, is deeply suspect. If the locals aren't prepared to eat what passes itself off as their ethnic cuisine, neither should you. This rule of thumb applies equally well even when you're in your own country. If you walk into an Italian restaurant in Dublin and find no one Italian in the kitchen or on the waiting staff or even eating in the restaurant, you have reason to be suspicious. The opposite is equally true; if you walk into a Chinese restaurant and find it filled entirely with Chinese people, you know you've stumbled onto a Good Thing.

It was Hugo Jellet's smart idea. 'Tell you what,' he said, 'why don't you join me and a bunch of friends and let's eat in a Chinese restaurant in Moore Street. It's cheap and cheerful and the food's really good.' I don't need much more encouragement than that and so at about 9 o'clock one evening we walked down Moore Street looking for the restaurant. Sounds easy enough, but trust me, it's not that simple. The signage is there all right, writ plain and bold and proclaiming the restaurant's existence, but the trouble is that it's written in Chinese ideograms and I can't read them. What you need to know is that it's above the Russian Deli and the door's right alongside it.

Step though this doorway and you're into a scruffy hallway with bags of gravel stored mysteriously on a bench, a few empty cans and crisp packets decorate the floor. Various signs are on the wall in both English and Chinese, one said simply 'Party' with an arrow underneath it. The stairwell is not for princesses, the squeamish, the hyper-sensitive or the precious of sensibility. Just try not to look too closely as you ascend the stairs. On the first floor you come to a lobby that looks like a small Chinese video and CD shop, which it is. It doubles as a vegetable store-room and lobby for the restaurant and it features a big, red, white-bearded Santa Claus - something you don't see that often outside of Yuletide. Beyond this again is the dining room.

The décor is idiosyncratic: red and gold paper good luck charms adorn the walls like prints, the windows are bedecked with what looked like more Christmas decorations, the tables are very plain, the chairs are office-type tubular steel, the carpet is Astroturf green and there are two large filing cabinets in one corner with a TV mounted atop screening a Chinese satellite station. Eight of us settled in easily enough and began scrutinising the menu. It's not your standard starter, main course, dessert menu. It has headings that you've never seen before, things like 'Staple food' and 'Cool dishes', as well as a range of individual dishes that were new to me. Spicy lamp, fried pork with eggs ingredients, ridish, catsup pig's elbow, sour soup tasted like chilli, and pieces of potato. It's quite a long menu and it's bilingual, the Chinese ideograms first and the English underneath. I had a growing realisation that the charming waitress who was looking after us would have a far better idea than we would of what to order. She seemed genuinely pleased when we asked if she'd choose us eight dishes and we'd all pick from each.

Real honkies, us, we also asked for forks and got some white picnic plastic ones. Good enough for barbarians who can't master the art using knitting needles as a means of getting food to the mouth. To drink, we asked for the Chinese beer. Then we sat back and waited, while I got to see some karaoke on the telly, the ideogram subtitles changing colour rather prettily as the words were sung.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, eight truly delicious platefuls came to the table. Judging by the size of them, I thought that perhaps each plate represented a two or three portion plate. Obviously I'd asked for the 'catsup pig's hock' to be included in the choices, how can you resist a name like that? For the rest we had the deep-fried aubergine Cantonese-style; pieces of crispy pork with a Chinese tomato sauce; chicken pieces stir-fried with peanuts, radish and cucumber; very peppery squid rings; sweet pork and soy in batter; sea-food soup with tofu; pieces of stir-fried lamb and a vegetarian dish of lettuce, broccoli, spinach and garlic.

Between the eight of us - Hugo, Grellan, Vincent, Nikki, Ally, two Julies and me, we attacked each plate vigorously and ravenously. You may notice that we didn't order any rice. Even without that, the sheer quantity of food eventually defeated us and rather annoyingly we had to leave some of this wonderful food behind. We had the sort of food that I've always suspected must be available in China, but that I've never eaten here. It can't be a coincidence that throughout the evening we were the only Caucasian diners, and presumably the only non-Mandarin speakers. For me it was another confirming instance of the theory I began with. All those Chinese diners around us knew that they'd found a home from home - the genuine, the honest, in short, the Real Thing. Nothing clumsy or bastardised about this food - this is as good as Chinese food gets in Ireland.

Hurry though, because word has to get out about this place soon enough. It'll get busy with Western barbarians like us, the prices will go up and the Chinese will stop coming to it. But for the moment it's a jewel of gastronomy. Bring cash if you go, but you won't need a lot of it. All that fabulous food and sixteen beers left the eight of us €78 lighter. Not even a tenner a head. I had to pinch myself to be sure I wasn't dreaming.