The history of Italian cooking in Ireland isn't one of gastronomy's better tales. It's curious to me that I can eat good Italian food in London, New York, Paris and Munich with relative ease, but somehow not so easily in Dublin. I've puzzled as to why this should be so; the obvious answers like 'you can't get the ingredients' simply don't wash any more with today's multinational distribution system. You can get the ingredients, the skills to prepare them are readily available, so why do we end up most of the time with an ersatz Italian cuisine that is neither fish nor fowl?

Over the years I've put this question to Italian restaurateurs and their answers have been much the same every time. It goes like this: 'we tried out the proper dishes but people kept sending them back.' Start serving lasagna with chips and you're onto a winner. Put pineapple onto your pizza, water down your coffee, serve pasta as a side order with steak, put grated Parmesan on a fish-based sauce and suddenly the complaints drop away.

I do understand this. Back in the 70's my father tried opening a pizza parlour in Wicklow Street. After a year or two it was back to serving burgers. The same place served Italian coffee for a couple of weeks until the level of complaints brought the watery stuff back and kept everyone happy. But there's a whole new generation of people who have travelled since then. Thirty years on and times have changed. Ireland isn't the provincial backwater it was, today's Ireland is a cosmopolitan place. The excuses that held water thirty years ago are leaky vessels now.

Clearly I'm not the only person to believe this and there are people who are backing this idea with investment. It's getting easier to get the kind of food that you'd get in Italy here. Dunne and Crescenzi have been proving the point for a while now. The fact is that what they do must be pleasing people, because they also have the Bar Italia on the Quays and very recently they've opened up in Sandymount. My friend Paul is about to embark on a world tour next year, so we arranged to meet in the new Sandymount outlet for the last lunch for a while.

When I got there I was happy that I knew in advance that it was next to O'Reilly's pub, because it's so new the signage isn't in place yet. Even at two-thirty it was stuffed with people. Small tables close together mean that they can fit a lot of people even in this small space. It's laid out like an Italian trattoria with a table just inside the door displaying various goodies. I got there before Paul and while I read the menu and wine list I was happy to hear Italian being spoken - by a few of the staff and by three tables of customers surrounding me. Seems that good food brings out the Italian community like bees to honey.

Give yourself time for the wine list. It's long and covers the entire Italian peninsula. It's divided up by region, so all the Piedmontese wines are listed and then the Veneto and so on. What's remarkable about this list isn't just its length, but it has a very moderate mark-up. Where else can you get a bottle of house wine for €11? I'd mentally picked out a couple I thought might be good for lunch: a Vernaccia, a Sardinian Cannonau, a Montepuliano d'Abruzzo but when Paul looked through the list he went unhesitatingly for the Vino Nobile di Montepulciano 1998, one of the great red wines of Tuscany. It wasn't cheap - €55 - but it was very delicious.

The menu isn't really designed as a restaurant menu. There are snacks, there are pannini, cold plates of charcuterie, there are hot dishes - but you won't find the classic starter, main course, dessert paradigm. There's also a board with a couple of specials, so you can construct yourself a meal with a little ingenuity. Both of us were quite hungry, so we decided on two courses each, Paul beginning with the bresaola, me with a Caprese salad, then linguini with a tomato sauce for Paul and Tuscan sausage with beans for me. A couple of bottles of mineral water completed our order.

When we got our starters it became clear that these dishes are designed as stand alone - they were bountiful. Paul's bresaola was served on crostini and was covered with rocket and Parmesan shavings. It could almost have made an entire meal for a not-very-hungry person. My Caprese - mozzarella, tomato and basil - was well put together; for once a ripe tomato, fresh basil and good mozzarella that was perhaps just a shade past its peak. Good ingredients are what made these dishes work - tasty breads, extra virgin olive oil, Parmigiano Reggiano. It really is worth it to use the right stuff, you can't get the tastes right with cheap substitutes.

Our next two dishes were just as good - the sauce on Paul's linguini has a lively, fresh taste and had just the right amount of oil in it. It was a perfectly executed tomato sauce, a simple dish perhaps, but one that is more often wrong than right in this country. There was a chunky rustic feel to my dish of salsiccia and beans that reminded me of simple bucolic meals in my native Lazio. Genuine, well-prepared food and Ambrosian wine made this a good farewell lunch.

We finished with a couple of really good short espressos each, and the bill excluding the wine was a modest €49.30. Definitely somewhere you can take fussy Italian visitors.