Living up in the Wicklow Hills for close on thirty years has given me an opportunity to watch the extraordinary expansion of Dublin. Little by little the green bits between Dublin and Bray have been covered in houses, the roads have got wider but busier, the conurbation continues to spread. Like many things that you see on a daily basis you don't pay much attention, but a trip this week to Dunboyne in Co. Meath really opened my eyes, mainly because I haven't been out that direction for a long time.

It's logical, I suppose, if the city spreads southwards, it has to spread north-westwards as well. But it did come as a surprise to me to find that Dublin is now just a few fields away from Dunboyne. I'd come to Dunboyne with Helen Boylan to try out a restaurant called 'Caldwells'. A few people had mentioned it to me and the general feeling seemed to be that it was a restaurant that was trying hard to do things right. I'm nothing if not an optimist, so we drove northwest to check it out. We parked outside Caldwell's, which is right in the middle of Dunboyne and is hard to miss.

It's been rather nicely laid out - a small counter on your left as you walk in, a kitchen directly in front of you where you can see the business end of things happening, and the dining room to your right. On the side parallel to the pavement there are small booths built-in against the windows, and it was in one of these that we sat to read the bills of fare.

The first thing I picked up was the wine list. Now there's one thing that every restaurant reviewer in the country agrees on, and it's this: mark-ups on wine can be rip-offs. Even fairly reasonably priced lists keep the same mark-up on expensive wines as they do on cheap wines, which means that a restaurant can make more on bringing you a bottle of wine than it can on the entire meal. Caldwell's wine list has this to say at the bottom of each page: 'We operate with a maximum mark-up of €20'. What a great idea, with a policy like this you might actually be tempted to order an expensive wine.

The list has all the hallmarks of a wine buff at work. It's not a long list - a page of whites, a page and a half of reds, a page of house wines and half bottles, and a half page of sparklers and rosé - but it's a well-chosen list. After we'd decided on our food choices I went back to it and picked the Mudhouse Riesling from Marlborough in New Zealand, a dry, aromatic wine that came at €27.

The menu has some interesting offerings, to give you a flavour of the choices here's two of the starters: a kumquat risotto with seared John Dory and truffle oil, and a vanilla marinated monkfish wrapped in seasoned pancetta with a butternut purée. Main courses are similarly inventive: butter-basted fillets of sea bass with a sweet potato purée, glazed asparagus and a chive yoghurt, and char-grilled noisettes of venison wrapped in pancetta with black pudding mash and a dark chocolate and Jameson sauce.

I chose the seared smoked salmon as my starter and was surprised at how good it was, it came with a potato blini and worked very well. Helen, being a vegetarian, picked the only option available to her, the spinach and mustard cress salad with a parmesan cracker and sweet orange and rosemary dressing. Since she's an excellent journalist, I'll let her speak for herself. 'Modestly proportioned as the Parmesan cracker was, it was the most delicious part of my entire meal. It resembled an oversized Pringle crisp, tangy and crispy with just the right amount of chewiness and I could have relished a whole plate of them.'

With these excellent starters behind us it was on to the mains. I'd chosen the deep-fried cod in a light potato and onion batter with a blood orange and cumin seed jam. The cod was cooked well, but I found the batter limp and unappetising. Helen had chosen the onion tarte tatin and here's what she had to say about it: 'Sadly, it didn't beat the glorious little crisp, but was tasty in its own right. The slice of goat's cheese was too thickly-cut for my taste and it was encased in thick, curved slices of onion. These seemed oversized and awkward on the plate. It all tasted good, but the dish seemed very straightforward and not hugely exciting.' From where I was sitting it certainly looked a little clumsy.

We finished up with the warm sticky toffee pudding, which came with a butterscotch sauce and fresh cream and tasted rather good. A couple of espressos rounded that off to complete the meal. I asked Helen had she had ever heard a good argument against vegetarianism. 'The best I heard was 'if animals aren't supposed to be eaten, then why are they made of meat?''

To sum up, Caldwell's is trying to be inventive and different, which is to be recommended. Not everything we had worked as well as it might have, but it was a pleasing experience, the service was excellent and I liked the wine list. The bill came to €101.80 without a service charge.