Well thank God that's all over for another year. There's an old Chinese proverb: it's a fool who trips over the same stone twice. Never mind twice, I'm wondering now about the fool who trips over the same stone every bloody year, without fail, unremittingly. Don't know about you, but at the start of every December I tell myself I'm not going to get tied up in knots over the whole Christmas / New Year thing, I'm not going to strung out by Stressmas. See me, I say, I'm not going to buy into all that insane pressure just for one day. Catch me doing that one more time, oh no, not me, I learnt my lesson last year. And then what? I do the same old stone-tripping exercise all over again. The panic buying, the shopping frenzy, the over-stocking of food for the larder, the futile attempts to please everyone with your careful choice of presents - the ghastly familiarity of these things comes back over and over to haunt you. And who's that grizzly wraith over there, wrapped in shiny paper and tinsel? Why, it's the ghost of Christmas present.

So here we are, well into the brand-new year, and the festive season haze of parties is a fast-fading memory. The sales have soaked up the last of my disposable income, I've eaten more than I ought, the final splurge of 2003 has carried me well into 2004 and now I'm sitting here fatter, but no wiser. What I needed was a very good reason for setting off once more in pursuit of good meal. And that good reason was provided for me by my friend Miriam Thornton, an intrepid girl, who spent the last year travelling around the world. Literally. Australia, New Zealand, South America, North America - a real globe-trotter. After such a long absence from the dinner table with her I wanted to take her somewhere where we'd have a good chance of getting a good meal. Before Christmas I'd been invited to a 'Dubliner' lunch in the Mermaid and we'd had a stonkingly good meal, so that's where we went.

On the night Dublin looked as it might after a neutron bomb attack. Scarcely a soul stirred, there were even parking places, for god's sake. We took our table in the Mermaid and watched what life there was passing the windows. Inside the Mermaid is spare; plain walls, simple wooden floor and very heavy wooden chairs and tables. It calls itself a cafe, so that Laconic simplicity is perfectly in keeping with its name. We spent a while on the menu, there's a lot of interesting dishes to read about. With careful deliberation we arrived at these choices: the crab cakes followed by chicken wrapped in prosciutto for Miriam, the seafood chowder followed by the yellowfin tuna for me.

Given these dishes we thought maybe a white wine would be good, so I turned my attention to the wine list. There are interesting wines on it, but it's a list that's clustered around the €30 mark rather than the €20, so picking a wine within my budget wasn't so easy. Eventually I picked a Pinot Blanc from the Alsace, a pleasant enough wine that was listed at €24.50.

With our choices made we nibbled on the breads that were on the table while we awaited the starters. Before I go much further I'll tell you that the service we got from our waitress was about the most professional I've had in a while - attentive, quick and perfectly charming. Shortly, the starters were before us, two crab cakes in front of Miriam and a steaming, creamy bowl of chowder in front of me. Crab cakes and fish cakes are one of those dishes that's very easy to get wrong. I've lost count of the dry, powdery, flaky nothings that have come to me under those names. These were good. Browned more than I'd have liked on the outside, but well-flavoured and with a moist texture. The chowder was my undoing. It was delicious and I barrelled into it like a ravenous wolf, hardly pausing to make conversation. Unfortunately it was also very filling, so when the main courses arrived I'd almost completely lost my appetite.

I've been thinking about this since then, and the loss of appetite may be why I wasn't able to make much of an inroad into my plate. But in part it was also because the tuna was cooked to point of being of being dry and chewy, so it didn't stimulate any hunger in me. Miriam's chicken was good, but it was a very busy dish, full of different and contrasting flavours. Perhaps the prosciutto that wrapped the breasts wasn't meant to be eaten, because when cooked until crisp, thin slices of cured ham become less than enticing.

And so we both arrived at desserts fairly replete. One dessert between us was the decision, the sticky toffee pudding was the final choice. It was sublime, a totally orgasmic pudding that despite our lack of appetite we nearly finished, tiny forkfuls at a time. A couple of espressos and a grappa each finished the dinner. To sum up our meal, it was the classic curate's egg, good in parts.

The downsides of the night are simply related. The wooden chairs that are fine for a short lunch become very uncomfortable after a couple of hours of a lingering dinner, and the reasonable lunchtime prices become replaced with fairly steep dinner prices. With just the one dessert and a lower-end bottle of wine the bill came to €125.60 with service still to be added, putting this meal well into the above average price category.