Kind readers often send me emails keeping me abreast of new happenings or simply recommending a restaurant to me. Sister Brid emailed me recently to tell me about a new Italian restaurant in Newton Park. It has been my experience over the years that the religious orders are good judges of food, my early years in a Benedictine boarding school showing me the path at an early age. Maybe it's because their career path often takes them through Rome that our priests and nuns tend to have cosmopolitan tastes. Anyway, it sounded good so I made my plans.

My friend Gill Hall lives almost within walking distance of the restaurant, so what better companion could I hope for? She liked the idea of it too, because if it was wonderful she'd have a great place to eat almost on her doorstep. Obviously we didn't actually walk to it, but a moment or two in the car had us parked outside. It's been a couple of other restaurants before, it might even have been called the Olive Tree once, but now it's quite simply called 'Papa's Italian Restaurant'. Makes a change from all the Italian restaurants that have a 'Mama' in their name.

We were shown to our table on the busy ground floor, a table next to the kitchen door. I don't have a problem with that, but there was a speaker above Gill's head playing Eros Ramazzotti loudly, so she asked if we could have another table. Being a busy Friday night, the only other free table was upstairs, so we sat, somewhat isolated, in a return in a corner overlooking the road below. I don't as a rule choose to review restaurants on a Friday or a Saturday, since I'm convinced that when a restaurant gets to over 70% capacity all systems start to break down and mistakes happen. I much prefer the gentler mid-week nights, but for once here I was out on a busy Friday and the general buzz and murmur seemed perfectly agreeable.

I began with the wine list, which I was happy to see was entirely Italian. Most of the wines listed fall into the €20 to €30 range and there's a few big reds going up higher in price, wines like Barolo and Amarone. The mark up is also reasonable and I was happy to find a Sardinian Vermentino, a white wine of some character, which was priced at €25.95. The menu is long, there are many pages of different dishes, and most Italian classics are listed. Among the starters you'll find a classic antipasto, bruschetta, pate, avocado and prawn cocktail, calamari, bresaola, and a Parmigiana of aubergines. They're priced at under €10, but they're closer to €8 and €9 than they are to €5. There's a whole page of pastas, again with a lot of classics listed like arabbiata, carbonara, fettuccine Alfredo and lasagne al forno. Then there's a page of meats, which again include classic sauces like cacciatore and boscaiola, and there are also two 'tornado' dishes listed, a windy dish that might have been 'tournedos'.

The main courses are priced in the twenties, some up to €25, which for a suburban restaurant is far from cheap. Couple this with the fact your main course comes with either a salad or potatoes and everything else is extra, you could end up spending a lot for just one plateful. Gill doesn't eat red meat, so we asked our waiter what the fish of the day was. 'It's sole, very fresh, very good.' 'How's it prepared?' I asked. 'It's very good. Very fresh.' He seemed unwilling to go the kitchen to find out how it was prepared. 'Okay,' I surrendered, 'it's a secret, then.' Gill decided to have the sole anyway and a light tomato bruschetta to start, while I chose the antipasto and followed it with the veal escalope Milanese. A couple of bottles of mineral water completed the order.

The wine was good and our starters were okay, not blisteringly wonderful, but competent enough. When these were cleared away along with the bread - such an un-Italian thing to do - things started to go wrong. Now I know from my restaurant years that when things start to go wrong you have take decisive action, or one calamity starts to compound into others. Gill's sole arrived with mussels on top and she is severely allergic to shell-fish. I thought we'd made it clear that sole was fine - indeed it was what had been ordered - but that mussels were not acceptable. The dish was removed and we sat for a while, Gill with nothing to eat, me staring at a rapidly cooling escalope. 'You should start,' said Gill. 'I would if I had some cutlery.' A while later a waitress arrived with small sole fillets that had been wrapped around prawns, plus some cutlery. Somewhere along the line misunderstandings had taken place. I tried again. 'The sole is fine, just do it with no shell-fish.'

So that's how Gill watched me eat my escalope, and then I watched her eat her sole without the mussels a while later. This fecking about hadn't left me in a good mood, it all seemed so eminently avoidable. A simple description of how the sole was prepared at the start of the night would have eliminated all the subsequent annoyance. We asked for dessert menus. Like most Italian restaurants the desserts are secondary and there's just a few of them, but Gill liked the look of pears poached in port. 'Sorry, the pears aren't fresh,' we were told, so that was that. A couple espressos finished off the meal.

So this is the substance of my beef: if you end up paying over €100 for a meal that consists of one bottle of wine and only two starters and main courses, I think you can reasonably expect competent service. We're into fairly expensive here, there are city centre restaurants that charge much less, so the kind of amateur night we were subjected to verges on the unforgivable. The bill was €95.35 with no service charge.