I confess. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I still smoke, forgive me please you guardians of my health and welfare. Okay, I'm no longer the 40 a day addict that I once was, I'm down to two or three a day and up to now those were mostly in the evening, after dinner. But that's all changed, that avenue of pleasure is now firmly closed off. After dinner isn't what it was. No lingering over a second espresso any more, now the only option is on with the overcoat and out into the great outdoors. Frankly there's not much fun in that, so I suspect my future behaviour will be to eat and run home early. I do try to take comfort from the realisation that the state is keen to look after me: sensible rules like this and the 40 mph motorway can only make life safer for everyone. With luck and determination we can soon catch up with North Korea in the Interventionist State Stakes.

There is, though, the odd oasis for addicts of my lady nicotine, so here's part one of the occasional forthcoming series of 'The Smokers' Guide to Dublin'. I went to meet Sonia Thornton, my guest for the night, in Cafe Ciao on Baggot Street Bridge. I banked there for many years, so I know the building well. What's new about it is the outdoor deck, a really comfortable place with heaters and windbreaks where you can look over the Grand Canal, watch the ducks, admire the view and best of all - smoke. I enjoyed a good espresso, a rather spectacular sunset, and then a fag before we set off for Temple Bar.

Funny how these things happen; I'd been planning a trip to Miso since a few kind readers had emailed me to tell me what good value it is. Then when Sonia came home from London for Easter week we decided to go to dinner and I suggested Miso. As we walked through Temple Bar we remembered that we'd dined together in Bruno's of Temple Bar as one of my very first restaurant reviews. So there was a nice circularity when we found Miso and realised that it occupies the very space that was once Bruno's.

What Miso offers can probably be best described as pan-Asian food; part Japanese, part Thai, part Indonesian, part Chinese. There were two menu choices on offer, an a la carte menu and a special of two courses plus a glass of wine or beer for €19.95. Being the thoughtful girl she is, Sonia picked from the set dinner and left me the a la carte choices. She picked the duck spring roll to start, the Thai green chicken curry to follow and glass of the white house wine to accompany them. I went through some dreadful indecision as there were plenty of things I wanted to try. but in the end I settled for the Norimake rolls to start and for a main course I picked a Chinese noodle dish, which came with roast red pork, Asian greens, water chestnuts and coriander. I rather like beer with Asian food, so I had a bottle of Tiger beer to go with my food, but if you really want wine here there's a simple list here with some decent wines listed around the €20 mark.

What we could have had, but didn't, was quite a lot of starters - fish cakes, beef salad, tofu salad, tempura of prawns and a calamari salad - all priced between €7 and €9. Five different soups were on offer, mostly at €5.95, then there were skewer dishes with chicken or beef, stir-fried rice dishes between €14 and €17, curry dishes ranging from €13 to €16 and a whole lot of noodle dishes. Rather helpfully on the back of the menu all the different kinds of noodles are listed with their ingredients, from the rice flour noodles, to the wheatflour ones and the buckwheat ones. There are seven sub-divisions of the noodle section, each part devoted to one particular noodle type. My main course choice came from the Chinese noodle section, which are made from a mixture of cornflour and wheatflour.

Sonia's spring rolls came, nicely made, and served with a choice of a hot chilli dip or another less fiery one. My sushi plate of Nori looked very pretty indeed, served traditionally with a little bowl of soy and a squeeze of wasabi. There's something about those two tastes together that really titillates my palate - especially that wasabi effect of clearing your sinuses, starting at the back of your throat and working its way relentlessly up your nasal passages. When the tears are flowing freely, you know that the wasabi's good and strong. Curiously the rice in the rolls was unusually unabsorbent, so it was hard to get the soy to penetrate. I ended up drinking my soy and wasabi from the little dish, accompanied by Sonia's admonishments of 'that's almost pure salt, you shouldn't be drinking that' and me replying pitifully, 'but I like it.'

Sonia's Thai green curry was spicy enough, it's marked as 'hot' on the menu, and she'd picked it with prawns. It was tasty, as was my noodle dish. Not perhaps amazingly tasty, but I kept reassuring myself that all those greens, the plain noodles and rice, all these things were good for me, and right now I need saving from myself. Good, wholesome food, properly prepared and served. That's got to be a niche that needs filling. What I liked about Miso is the comfortable room, the attentive service, and the self-satisfaction that wholesome food engenders in me. But the best bit came when I asked for the bill. Our food, two glasses of wine and two Tiger beers came to €63, which for the quality of what we'd eaten was very fine value for money.