The first time I tasted Stephen McAllister's cooking I'd gone to meet friends in Dalkey for a drink. They suggested that we could upstairs to 'The Vico' restaurant for a quick bite. I don't know about you, but for the most part I don't have high expectations for dining-rooms above pubs. It's a prejudice built on experience, but like all generalisations, it gets confounded from time to time.

Stephen was a deal younger then than he is now, but his food in The Vico was extraordinarily vibrant, innovative and tasty. I can still remember his smoky bacon ice cream, a dish which sounds a little odd, but tasted just great. So what was just supposed to be a quick snack turned into a memorable night of gastronomy.

I got to meet Stephen many times a few years later when we started the TV series 'The Restaurant' and Stephen was the chef in charge of the main courses. We did two series together, and recently he'd been doing a regular slot on The Afternoon Show. Now he's made another big change - he's just opened his own restaurant in Number Ten Longfields.

There was of course an obvious dining companion for me when I went to try out Stephen's new restaurant - it was Carol Dollery, who does the desserts in The Restaurant show. It was going to be a Restaurant reunion.

Number Ten is in the basement of Longfield Hotel, but the room gets enough natural light that you don't get a subterranean feeling. It's a small, intimate dining-room seating around thirty, but the tables are well spaced and big, and the chairs are comfortable. The walls have a few bright oil paintings and the colour scheme is distinctly restful.

The menu reflects the innovative choices that I've come to know in Stephen's cooking. Here's a few dishes to give you a flavour of what's on offer: potato and lime ravioli with broad beans and mint; scallops with Granny Smith apples, ginger and beetroot; rabbit loin with Parma ham, carrots braised lettuce and morel jam. Frankly I felt spoiled for choice. Carol chose the potato and lime ravioli and I picked the crab salad with avocado, tomato and basil consommé and an apple sorbet. For main courses Carol picked the roast scallops and I picked the parsley risotto with baked white onions, an olive crust and a tomato sauce. You'll notice that even with the part of the menu that I've described, it's very labour intensive - each dish contains a variety of elements, all of which require a lot of preparation.

The wine list runs to three pages - one of whites and one of reds, and one with house wines, dessert wines, rosés and champagne. There's a few wines listed at under €30, but I picked out the Pinot Grigio at €34 for us.

The first thing to arrive at the table was two small cubes of brioche that were soaked in vanilla butter. They were absolutely delicious, with a really rich, sumptuous taste and made a unusual start to a meal. This was followed by an amuse bouche of a demi-tasse of beetroot and lime purée, which was topped off with an apple and chervil foam. If you wanted a dish that exemplifies Stephen's style of using unusual combinations of flavours, this is one.

The starters were good; Carol's ravioli was a surprise to me, since I would never have thought potato and pasta could work well together, yet it worked very well indeed. My crab salad was made of claw meat, which combined perfectly with the avocado, tomato and basil. So feeling rather full, we went on to our mains. Carol had the roast scallops, which came with a spiced belly of pork and buttered cabbage. Each element of her dish was expertly cooked - the scallops cooked to the second, the pork belly crispy and full of flavour, the cabbage still with a crunch in the bite.

I'd ordered the parsley risotto, but Stephen and I are never going to agree about risotto. I love undercooked everything, from fish to meat to vegetables, but I like my risotto cooked until soft. Stephen believes it should be al dente, or underdone, yet I'll never be convinced that gritty rice getting stuck between your teeth is pleasurable. We'll agree to differ on this.

After all this food neither Carol nor I had much if an appetite, but on the dessert menu was a dish tempted us both: a warm chocolate tart with an avocado ice-cream and chilli caramel. For two foodies it looked irresistible; avocado ice-cream? In the end the ice-cream didn't thrill Carol, but I rather liked it, especially when I dipped a spoonful into the chilli caramel. It occurred to me that since it was almost savoury, you could have had it equally well as a palate cleanser between starters and mains.

The price for this labour-intensive cooking seemed very reasonable to me. The starters cluster around €10, the main courses run between €18 and €26 and the desserts are priced at €8. Coupling these prices with a stylish dining room with generous spacing between the tables, I can't help feeling that in the new Number Ten you can get novel and well-made cuisine for the same price as you can easily spend in mediocre restaurants. The bill for our meal, which included mineral water and coffees came to €106.