Forgive me if I indulge in a little nostalgia. The urge to reminisce on the 'good old days' can be a strong one. The other thing that happens with retrovision is that everything somehow seems rosier, better, less complicated and less venal than the brutal consumerism of today. It might even be true that the old days were somehow more wholesome, but it could just as likely be the point of perception. Some things have definitely changed, though. They used to wash your windscreen when you bought petrol, grocers used to deliver stuff to your door, milkmen brought milk right to your doorstep. Service was service, men were men and women wore hats. Ah, god be with the days.

You could argue that back in the sixties and seventies good restaurants were thin on the ground - they were - but there were also very few people who could afford to eat out anyway. It was a tiny market for the privileged few, serviced by some old-style professionals. When I think back to those halcyon days it's not really the food that I remember, it's the service. Real waiters in dinner suits for whom silver service was a skill from their youth, were the norm. There was a four-year apprenticeship for just about any part of the catering industry. Today you can walk in off the street and get a job waiting tables, but not then. You had a long training period. Because of this high level of training waiters were required to perform a great deal more than simply bringing you a plate from the kitchen. Firstly the plating up was not done in the kitchen. The chefs put the food onto flats - silver salvers - and the waiters then made up the plate at the customer's place. 'May I give sir a spoonful of this? A little more of that, sir? Perhaps some dauphinoise?' A waiter might even be required to cook - as in preparing a flambé dish to order. A waiter had to know how to do a very wide range of things.

I was reminded of a this and more when I went to meet Noel Tymlin for lunch in the Lobster Pot, a restaurant that has been going about its business in Ballsbridge for over twenty years. It's upstairs in the same block that houses Roly's, Bella Cuba and Kites, so it's in good company. The dining room is good old-fashioned plush; warm brick-red walls, a dark red carpet, big tables set with linen napery, shield-backed and well-upholstered chairs. As its name would suggest, The Lobster Pot is essentially a fish restaurant. You can eat meat of course, they'll even give you steak tartare, but if you want to know what this place is really about, go there for the fish.

We were sat at the window overlooking Mr. Ball's bridge and idly looking at the menu when the trolley arrived with the day's catch arrayed. This is pretty much par for the course in Italy, but it's the first time I've seen it in Ireland. Instead of looking at the menu we looked at the fish. Oysters, mussels, prawns, black sole, salmon, sea bass, lobster, calamari. I can't resist calamari, so I asked for prawns done as scampi, just like Noel was ordering. 'Would you like a few calamari with the scampi?' I was asked and immediately said 'yes'. 'Would you like to try a few mussels meuniere?' 'Yes, please,' I surrendered.

Noel selected a fine Chablis 2001 by Moreau to go with our lunch and it made a perfect crisp, flinty accompaniment to our meal. Anyone other than a glutton would probably felt full enough after the starters. A big plateful of crisply cooked prawns in a light crumb and squid rings with a very delicate batter disappeared slowly, but surely. Then we picked on the mussels, sucking the little beasts off their shells and enjoying the sauce. Finger bowls and napkins made the cleaning up process easy.

For the main courses I'd picked out a monkfish tail and Noel had asked for the sole Bonne Femme. Quite apart from the fact that both of these dishes were well-cooked and very good to eat, I watched in admiration as our maitre, with consummate skill, de-boned the sole at the table using nothing but two forks. Can you think of another restaurant where there are people with the skill to do that? I can't. But these are exactly the skills that I was talking of earlier. When these skills are gone, of necessity a number of really good dishes go with them, since without the waiter's skill the kitchen can't do it on its own. You can't have a lobster Neuberg unless there's a waiter who can flambé it, you can't enjoy crepes Suzette unless there's a waiter who can do it at your table.

All this means that The Lobster Pot can offer you dishes that are hard to find elsewhere. Classics, like lobster Thermidore or Neuberg, sole Caprice or Colbert, prawns Mornay, coquilles St. Jacques and even steak Diane. I remember eating these dishes in my teens, when my parents took me out to eat in the grand old hotels of Dublin. The Russell, the Gresham, the Lafayette Room in the Hibernian, the Saddle Room in the Shelbourne. There have been times when I've wondered if that dining tradition stretching right back into the nineteenth century had simply disappeared, but now I know that it can still be found.

This isn't dining eighties, nineties or noughties style, where the fashion element is forefront, where ingredients are today's trend, where style often overtakes substance. This is dining in the very finest traditions of haute cuisine, both in the kitchen and most evidently in the level of expertise on the floor. It's one of the last in a long unbroken line. If you want to know how Victorian or Edwardian gentlefolk dined, the Lobster Pot will give you a very good idea of the Belle Époque.