'Now', said my father, 'there's a boat in a harbour and it's got steps running up the side of it from the sea. They're exactly one foot apart and there are eight showing above the water line. Oddly, in this harbour, the tide comes in at exactly one foot an hour. After four hours of a rising tide, how many steps will be showing?' I was good at maths, even at the age of five. 'Four!' I said, pleased with ability to calculate. 'No, son,' said my dad gently, 'a rising tide lifts all boats. There will still be eight steps showing.' That's how I still remember my first picture of a rising tide. It's a useful metaphor for many things, but it applies really well to Irish gastronomy in the past thirty years. Once good food was a preserve of the few in Ireland, something to which few aspired and few enjoyed.

Thirty years ago I used to travel the country with Italian cattle dealers, going to country markets and buying beef cattle for the insatiable Italian market. Food stops then were of the necessity variety. You stopped to eat because you were hungry, the provincial hotel fed you food that took away your hunger. The idea that pleasure could be involved in this process was entirely unknown. But there's been a relentless rising tide of gastronomy and of interest in food and wine which has lifted all the metaphorical restaurant boats all around the country. Today good food is found readily and often in places where it was never found before.

I went to visit my friend Isobel Smith this week, who has left Dublin for the greener pastures of Kilkenny. There's a particular part of Kilkenny county that I've always been much attracted to and it's that triangle made up of Inisteaugue, Graignamanagh and Thomastown. I like its neatness, the way the land and the buildings look cared for. I get a strong sense that heritage means something here, that the Kilkenny people are proud of what they have and where they've come from. I met up with Isobel and her son Karl in Carroll's Bar in Thomastown, a place that's obviously the epicentre of music and craic. 'The nice thing about Thomastown,' said Isobel, 'is that everything's in walking distance.' And she was right. Even my short legs didn't object to the walk to Hudson's Restaurant, which is a new addition to Thomastown's fabric.

It's a sympathetically restored building of brick and stone opposite Thomastown's concert hall. There's a small bar on your right when you walk in where you can sip an aperetif and go through the menu. The a la carte menu has much of the New York steak house, not just in the variety of char-grilled steaks on offer, but also the side orders like whipped potatoes and creamed spinach. There are starters like shrimp cocktail, scallop gnocchi, a Cornish crab potato boxty and a goats' cheese gallette all of which cost around €8. Apart from the char-grilled meats there are fish and poultry dishes, with all main courses costing between €18 and €23.

The wine list has some well-chosen wines ranging from many wine-producing countries, but the prices are quite high. There are wines listed at under €30, but they're very much in the minority. I found the Argentinian Norton at €28 and ordered it before I found the Bin End listing, where some good wines were listed under €20. That'll teach me to be less hasty.

Back at the menu Karl has decided that he wanted to eat off the set menu, which is priced at €24.95, and from it he started with a Caesar salad and followed with the penne alla carbonara. Isobel chose the beef carpaccio to start and then had the magret of duck while I started with the crab boxty and then the T bone, a mere 14 ounces of it.

The dining room is in two distinct halves, the first part - and I suspect the oldest part - all dark red walls, velour seating and big, widely spaced tables and then the other part, high ceilinged and very open to natural light. I was happy to find our table in the snug, red-walled room. The service is very good here, attentive and quick. A hot loaf, a cutting board and a knife arrived on the table to keep us going till our food arrived, a very Shanahan's touch. The starters were good, especially the carpaccio. It took a while to persuade a doubtful Karl to try it, but when he did he became a convert. The main courses too were good, I tried Karl's penne and found a creamier sauce than I'd make, but tasty. Isobel's duck made her happy and my T bone, a little more cooked than I'd have liked, was truly monstrously large. When I was a lad (and Old Shep was a pup) a T bone had a fillet on one side and a sirloin on the other. Now it has a fillet on one side and a New York Strip on the other. <it>Plus ca change…

Just to prove it, if proof is necessasry of the tininess of this island, while were eating our main courses, in came a big group of golfers, which included the good Dr. Paul Smithwick and restaurateur Patrick Guilbaud, who had been playing just down the road in Mount Juliet. Even a few years ago a restaurant with high aspirations like Hudson's could only have been found in the bigger cities. It's a sign of our rising tide of affluence that even provincial towns can host restaurants like this. The bill for the three of us came to €135.20 not including service, which I felt was fair.