Seems to be a new phenomenon. Take a bank and turn it into a restaurant. When I had a restaurant all I really ever wanted to do was turn it into a bank. You could open at ten, then close the doors at three. Banks seen from my perspective appeared to be places where real magic took place. If you were a bank, you could magic money out of nothing - ex nihilo as it were. You may have only a million on deposit, but you can lend seven million. Six million suddenly exists where it didn't before. That's such a good trick you'd wonder why ex banks are becoming restaurants.

One of the big pluses of old banks - that's to say banks that were built back in the golden days of unfettered capitalism in the nineteenth century - is that the buildings had real money spent on them. Back then the brief wasn't 'Give me as many square feet as you can for the money', no siree it wasn't. Back then you had to make the building look as imposing and as immortal as you could. Classical revival architecture seemed perfectly adapted for banks. You could make a building whose purpose was the pure venality of money look like a Greek temple, a pantheon to the Hellenic gods. This managed to communicate a sense of authority, of gravitas and seriousness, an important message to convey to people who were about to consign their life's savings. You want your money to be housed somewhere that looks like it treats money with respect.

If you have your back to the front gates of Trinity College and look down Dame street you can see a number of these Victorian buildings that were built as banks. The old Royal Bank, on the block between Church Lane and Trinity Street, is now a restaurant and bar and it's been renamed rather inventively 'The Bank'. The outside is entirely unchanged, save for the sign over the door that reads 'bar and restaurant'. My companion on this damp evening was Irene Keogh, who had booked us a table at 9 o'clock. As we walked through the fine old mahogany doors, we found ourselves in what was unmistakably a bar. Momentarily confused we took in our surroundings and saw that there was a mezzanine floor, surrounded with a brass balustrade. We made our way up the stairs that are tiled in what looks like nineteenth century Paris Metro white tiles and into a small area with about ten tables from where you can overlook the ground floor. This, we thought, must be the restaurant part. And in a way it was, you can eat from the four-page menu here, as you can on the ground on the ground floor, but no matter where you choose you're eating in a bar, not in a restaurant.

From the mezzanine you also get a great view of the ceiling, a wonder of the stucco-worker's art. It's arched and very high - a big bonus for non-smokers - and there's not a patch of it that isn't decorated. All around the room big marble fluted columns are topped off with Corinthian capitals, the volutes and acanthus leaves picked out in gilt. It is, no doubt, one of the prettier public rooms in Dublin.

As we sat down Irene was starting to fret. 'Is this a restaurant? Have I brought you somewhere that isn't a restaurant?', but she needn't have worried. We were given the bill of fare and there's a four-page menu here and a four-page wine list, so The Bank is taking itself seriously enough as a purveyor of food. I started with the wine list, which has twelve reds and fifteen whites listed and then a page of half-bottles and quarter bottles. There's a page of sparklers as well, ranging in price from €30 for sparkling Loire wine to €480 for a '88 Krug. The mark-up is on the high side for all the wines, but there's some good ones listed. I found one of my favourite Montepulciano d'Abruzzos on the list, the Colle Secco from Cantina Tollo, which was listed at €26, so we ordered that.

The menu is divided into sections: starters, open gourmet sandwiches, salads, pastas, main courses, side orders and desserts. There is also a single page menu just for bar food - fingerfood like cocktail sausages - but we concentrated on the proper menu. Irene began with the Japanese Torpedo prawns, which had me thinking about those mini kamikaze subs, basically a manned torpedo, and I chose a galette of puff pastry with feta and sun-dried tomatoes. The idea was okay for both of these dishes, if a little hackneyed, but the execution wasn't quite there. Over-cooked prawns for Irene that had turned to powder inside their breaded casing and a much too salty tartlet for me, with an over-cooked base.

For main courses Irene had chosen the rack of Wicklow lamb and I'd picked the Barbary duck breast. Irene's was very generous, five cutlets cooked nicely pink, while my duck breast came with a selection of tasty and well prepared vegetables - asparagus and green beans. I was happy to discover that not only does The Bank have large bottles of mineral water, they charge €5 a bottle, verging on the cheap by Dublin standards.

I'm not sure that The Bank is really a restaurant. It's more a super-bar that serves much better than average pub food. Even though the outside signage gives equal weight to 'bar' and 'restaurant', as soon as you walk in you can tell it's a bar. Perhaps as it's newly opened, they're still waiting to see what their customers want. For the moment it's a great room to sit in and have a drink, and if you want something to eat, they can do that too. Our bill came to €94, without a service charge.