There's a stretch of motorway that runs from the French Riviera along the Italian Tyrrhenian coast as far as Pisa, which I love. It's the engineering that gets me every time I drive it - the road traverses Alps and Apennines keeping an almost even level. You go through tunnels almost a third of the way and viaducts another third. Some of these viaducts are so high that you could get vertigo if you looked down, but you're so busy avoiding Dutch caravans and campers that you don't. Years ago I used to take photographs of the more spectacular bits - like the bridge over the city of Genova - and wish that such marvels of civil engineering would get built in Ireland. But if you wait long enough, everything eventually comes to you. Now we have bridges and viaducts to match the continentals.

I've driven over the Liffey toll bridge often enough, but this week I was underneath it and got to appreciate its height properly. I was with my friend Hugo Jellet and we were driving along the Liffey's banks through the Strawberry Beds. It's a beautiful bit of countryside and largely unspoiled. Hugo's plan was that before dinner we should have a drink and a game of bar billiards - or bagatelle - in the Strawberry Hall, which is almost underneath the aforementioned Liffey toll bridge. It's been thirty years or more since I last played the game - it's the one where you have mushroom-shaped obstacles that you mustn't knock into the holes in the table. I'm glad we went there, it was filled with friendly people who were kind enough to remind us of the rules and give us encouragement.

Fun as this was, it was time to eat and the reason we were in the Strawberry Beds was that I wanted to try the seafood in The Angler's Rest, a mile or two from Strawberry Hall. It's a place I've been meaning to go to for years, but I may have got there too late. My first inkling of this was reading the menu outside before we went in. It is headed 'Toronto's' and underneath it says 'North American Food'. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I was rather hoping to find a taxidermist's heaven; you know, stuffed brown trout, salmon and pike in glass cases, maybe a heron or a kingfisher, cane rods and ancient brass reels, landing nets and tied flies on display. Fisherman's stuff. But if any of this was once here, it's not here now. Now there are large speakers hanging from the ceiling that play you eighties music and the dining room is dominated by a six by four foot screen that was showing football as we ate. That's what I mean by saying that maybe I got here too late. Toronto's is here now.

Toronto's takes up most of the floor area of the Angler's Rest and, in keeping with the name, offers a predominantly fishy menu. I'm ever hopeful of finding good seafood on the east coast. You can get it just about anywhere on the south and west coasts, but the east coast is something of a piscine desert when it comes to seafood. So although Toronto's offers steaks and chicken, I was determined to eat fish and was hoping that Hugo would too. The menu is a large laminated card with starters on one side and main courses on the other. The starters run from €5 to €9 and all the bar food favourites are on it; things like breaded mushrooms, crab claws and smoked salmon, as well as less usual offerings like chicken quesadillas and chicken Satay.

Hugo chose the steamed mussels and I picked the Caesar Salad. We followed with

Boston prawns Marie-Rose for Hugo and although I'd intended to order the fillet of cod with fries and a salad, I got confused as Arsenal were scoring a goal and ended up ordering battered smoked cod, which came with mushy peas and mashed potatoes.

The starters were very good. Hugo's mussels came in a Thai lemongrass and curry broth, which may sound a little strange, but it worked very well. I wouldn't have thought of curry and mussels together, but as I say, it was a successful dish. My Caesar's salad was good too, classic and pure. We had settled on beer with this meal, Hugo persuading me try bottled Erdinger, which I liked just fine, and we had two each.

There are lots of main courses for under a tenner, and most of them are in the early teens, so whatever else, Toronto's isn't expensive. Hugo's main course of prawns in a Marie-Rose sauce was €12.95, which wasn't a lot for a large plate of prawns. Essentially it was a big prawn cocktail served on a plate rather than in a glass, it was generous in size and competently done. As I said, I'd ended up with battered smoked cod and I've never been convinced that smoked fish deep fries well. This particular piece in front of me had been cooked with the oil at too low a temperature, so the batter had absorbed a lot of oil, making the dish altogether too oily for my liking.

We wanted to finish with espressos, but Toronto's don't offer them. That was all Hugo needed to persuade me to go with him back to the city centre, to the bar in the Gaiety in particular, where the excellent band 'Camembert Quartet' was playing. The bill in Toronto's came to a modest €62.25, but I found myself ruing the fact I hadn't got there before this new make-over to North American fast food emporium style. The stone walls, wooden floors and church pews, chairs and dividers remain, evoking the older Liffey-side pub, but the new layer of trans-Atlantic brash seemed incongruous to me.