This was a good week for ethnicity; not I hasten to add because of the referendum, but for ethnic food. More specifically, the ethnic food that I ate. My first adventure was entirely of the accidental kind: there was an hour to kill before a movie we wanted to see in the IFC, so we wandered into Meeting House Square looking for a snack, which is where we found 'Il Baccaro'.

I do enjoy a cigarette after a meal and that particular avenue of pleasure is becoming increasingly hard to pursue. However, Il Baccaro has tables set up outside under a canvas roof and there's a bit of shelter afforded by the surrounding buildings, so it was comfortable enough sitting outside and not too cold or windy. Inside 'Il Baccaro' is semi-basement and brick-vaulted, which gives it the look of many an urban trattoria in Italy. The Italian influence is there too, not only in its name, but also in the fact that the waiting staff talk to one another in Italian - and to me too, once we'd established that it was a common tongue.

The menu can best be described as rustic Italian - the sort of dishes you'd find in small trattorie in the Italian provinces. Since that's precisely my background, it made me feel entirely at home. With only an hour till the movie we decided on one course each, a spaghetti with mussels for Maeve and the salsiccie e faggioli for me. The spaghetti was cooked properly al dente and was decorated on top with a dozen or so mussels. The accompanying sauce was nicely judged, too, just the right amount of oil to make the pasta shine. My dish was two fat Italian sausages, butterflied and grilled, which came surrounded by mixed beans - cannellini and borlotti. This is an archetypal peasant dish, the sort of dish that fills and nourishes with a mix of protein and carbohydrates. It also happened to be good and well made, much to my pleasure.

The wine list is quite short, but the mark up is pleasingly modest. Obviously lots of Italian wines to choose from, so I picked a Pinot Grigio at €21.60 which was light enough not to send us to sleep in the movies. We chatted and ate, sipped on our wine and nibbled on our bread, and then I casually glanced at my watch. The movie was starting and we were still eating. There was nothing for it now but relax, eat our food without hurry and finish the wine slowly. Missing the movie also meant we could have a cheese plate between us, which we did, and then a couple of espressos each, turning a quick snack into something approaching a full-blown dinner.

We may have missed our movie in the IFC, but sometime around the arrival of the cheese a movie began outdoors in Meeting House Square, 'The Matrix' to be exact. So the last part of the meal found us struggling to hear one another against the soundtrack of The Matrix, which trust me, is loud. That's not to say we weren't enjoying it - in fact loud background noise is completely in keeping with Italian streetscapes, as anyone who's been there will tell you.

I thought that the menu, the wine list and the food in 'Il Baccaro' were honest, genuine and very reasonably priced. Really efficient and friendly service and good food meant that what was intended to be a simple snack turned into something worth writing about. The bill was a very modest bill €64.40.

With five other judges I'm currently in the process of choosing the Rosemount Young Restaurant Manager of the Year, which has now reached the final stage of visiting the restaurants and watching the young managers at work. This week, with fellow judges Sandra Doody and Sean O'Malley, I was in Vermilion, a smart Indian restaurant above the Terenure Inn, to see Ghazala Shah managing a busy night.

Vermilion is one of the new breed of Indian restaurants, combining good food in smart surroundings. Indian restaurants like Jaipur and Rasam sprang to mind at once on entering the dining room, which is elegantly decorated with comfortable sofas in the reception area and good-sized tables with comfortable chairs in the dining room itself. I like the fact that they make a distinction on the menu between 'fusion' dishes, which are modified to suit the Irish palate, and the more authentic ethnic dishes. For the wary, all the dishes on the menu are marked with a chilli rating from one to three, so you can select your preferred level of heat easily.

I can recommend to you what we ended up doing: placing ourselves entirely in Ghazala's hands both for the choice of dishes and for the choice of wines. For the wines she chose for us a safe white - a Chablis - but for the red her choice was inspired, a Primitivo di Salento, which was one of the cheaper wines on the wine list at just over €20, and was remarkably smooth and velvety for such a big wine. Between the three of us we went through a wide sample of the menu; duck rolls, prawns and peppered beef and then for main courses another spread across the menu; beef, lamb and chicken with side orders of dahl, Pulao rice and Naan bread to mop up the sauces with.

What becomes clear as you eat in Vermilion is that you're getting sophisticated food - I don't know what the Indian for 'haute cuisine' is, but that's what you get. The service is impeccable, the spicing is carefully judged, the room is pleasing to the eye. And if you like American music crooners the forties and fifties, that's what you'll hear as background music. Check their web site www.vermilion.ie for special events and offers.