I've been a country boy for so long now that I've come to know the signs of the changing seasons that are manifested in the natural world. As summer comes upon us I take note of these portents: the fully leafed trees, the swooping swallows, the buzz of a milliard insects in the air or the first abandoned mattress on the side of the Sugar Loaf. All these have been part of my bucolic lore for years, but recently I've come to notice a new sign of summer - the first cyclists on the Calary Bog. When you find a cluster of them in pink stretch Lycra, heads down with effort, a bunch of what looks like bananas strapped to their heads, you know that summer has arrived.

In moments like these I find myself asking my windscreen where do these cyclists hibernate? What is their chrysalis stage? What development do they go through before emerging in summer as fully-fledged cyclists in their Day-Glo colours of full maturity? I've been pondering this for a while, but I think I may have found their mother-ship. I think I may have found that place as elusive as the elephants' graveyard, a place where you could find cyclists overwintering. And here's the surprise. It's not in some far-flung place like the Sargasso Sea or some African hot-spot, no, it's right here, in Ireland, in Dublin, in Capel Street.

It's disguised, of course. It looks like an Italian restaurant, it even has an Italian name - Romano's. But the game is up as soon as you walk in. Every photograph on the walls has a bicycle in it; there were men in shorts at a couple of the tables with alarmingly large calf muscles, and at one stage in the evening a man in Lycra walked the length of the restaurant carrying a bicycle over his shoulder. At that moment I realised that I'd unknowingly entered the cycling world's Holy of Holies.

The other thing that you'll notice as you walk into Romano's is that there's few if any Italian faces to be seen among the staff. I've admitted before to harbouring a prejudice that Italian food is best cooked by Italians, so I mentally noted their absence, set my expectations low, and sat down in a booth a the back end of a very long and thin dining room with my guest, Alexandra McGuinness. We had much to talk about, not least the fact that she'd just come back from the Cannes Film Festival with a contract for her first screenplay, which is exciting stuff by any standards.

As we spoke we checked through a menu that's the usual blend of Italian dishes and Celto-Med fusion. The biggest sections on it are pastas and pizzas, but there are little corners of the menu that also offer meat and assorted non-Italian dishes. The starters section had the dishes you'd expect, like bruschetta and a selection of cured pork products, and from this list Alexandra picked the classic melon and prosciutto, while I picked the mussels. Just to spread the choices a little for main courses Alexandra chose the penne all'Amatriciana (misspelled on the menu) and I picked a pizza, specifically the one called 'Romano's Special'.

The wine list is shortish and very reasonably priced, so I picked the Sicilian Red called 'Corvo', which I always enjoy and we had a couple of bottles of mineral water as well. When the starters came the first thing that we noticed was that they were generous in size. Alexandra had three slices of melon each wrapped with a slice of good Parma ham plus another slice in the middle of the plate folded into the shape of a rose. Very pretty. The ham was good, tasty and not too salty, but the melon could have been riper. Actually I'm not sure the restaurant is to blame for that, it's virtually impossible these days to get ripe fruit. The distribution system seems to rely on fruit ripening in lorries on its way here rather than in the sunshine, so immature fruit appears to be the norm. As to my mussels, I have to say that the cream and white wine sauce in which they were served was spectacularly good. Truly delicious, so much so that when the mussels were eaten, we both dipped the equally delicious bread on the table into the remaining sauce until it was all gone.

The main courses arrived and the first thing that I noticed was that the tomato sauce on Alexandra's penne was properly reduced and there was enough olive oil in the sauce to give the pasta an appealing shine. The Amatriciana sauce - named after the town of Amatrice where it originated - was well-judged; the chilli, the smoky bacon and the tomato sauce all in harmony. My pizza base was good, too, but for my taste the over-generous topping left it all a little soggy, but tasty none the less. Just to clarify this point, when a pizza topping is in the right quantity, the base will remain firm. If you put too much on the pizza, or things that contain too much moisture, the centre simply collapses and the pizza becomes hard to eat. In my view that's a fault, but one that's caused by too much generosity, so as faults go, it's forgivable.

Maybe it was over-indulgence in the bread and sauce at the starter stage, but having eaten two courses neither of us was ready for a dessert, so we settled on a couple of coffees instead. We'd eaten well, the service had been brisk, friendly and attentive, and when the bill arrived it was modest. €68.40 these days represents a small outlay for dinner for two with a bottle of wine, and when you get good food as well you have every reason to be pleased.