If I wasn't so happily ensconced in the Wicklow hills I would seriously consider living in a corner of County Kilkenny. That corner would be the triangle formed by Thomastown, Graiguenamanagh and Inistioge. It really is a very pretty part of the country and despite being rural, it's surprisingly cosmopolitan.

I was there this weekend to try a new restaurant that's opened in Inistioge called Bassetts. What makes it interesting isn't just the good food, but its interesting pricing structure. Over the centuries restaurants have evolved two basic pricing systems. A fixed price for the meal with a limited selection of choices - what the French call table d'hôte - and a price against each dish, what the French call à la carte. These two systems are the ones you see all the time, although I did hear of a restaurant in south County Wicklow that had a very different system. You filled your plate from a buffet which was then weighed and you were charged according to the weight of your plate.

Bassetts have a different system again. Here there are eight dishes on the menu, the first six savoury dishes €9.50, the dessert €6.50 and the cheeses €8. They're designed so that you could theoretically eat each and every one, but in practice you'd be unlikely to manage more than five. It works like this: the first dish is served at 7.30 and after that you get one every twenty minutes or so. You could arrive at eight and catch the later dishes or you can do what we did, which is to arrive at 7.30 and then eat some and skip some. It's flexible and works very well.

The restaurant is in the Woodstock Estate in Inistioge, so you go up a very long and imposing drive with the Nore Valley down the hill on your left. You pass what remains of the Woodstock House on your right before you come to Bassetts, which is in a modern house on the left, with fine views over the valley. I got there with my friend Isobel Smith, her son Carl and fellow Thomastown resident and restaurateur Richard Hudson, who was having a well deserved night off from his own restaurant, Hudson's.

There are large picture windows, so from outside as you arrive you have great views of the dining room. Inside it's warm and cosy and it seats maybe thirty people. We sat at one end of a long table made of thick wood and another group of four sat at the other end, still leaving plenty of privacy space between us. A modern minimalist gas fire burned in the hearth, its yellow flames making a welcoming glow.

Each dish on the menu has a suggested wine, which you can buy by the glass, all of which cost €5.50 except the dessert wine which was priced at €7.50. It's probably worth listing the whole menu to give you a flavour of what's on offer, but the menu does change frequently according to what's in season and what's available, so if you go you may not find the same dishes as I did. Our menu started with a lasagna of home-cured salmon and crispy potato, then roasted pork belly with red onion marmalade, then sautéed scallops with fennel and linguini and lobster bisque, then braised wild pheasant, then seabass with red pepper and rucola butter, then fillet of Kilkenny beef with celeriac gratin, then pecan pie and poached pear, and lastly a selection of cheeses.

As I said, you'd be hard put to eat it all, but between us we did manage to cover most of them except for the lasagna, which we all missed. All of the dishes that I tasted were really well done and some of them were exceptional. The pork belly, which we all had, was superb; tender inside and crispy outside, it made a fine start to our meal. The scallops were cooked perfectly and were delicious, but I was especially struck by the linguini which were as good as any I've eaten in Italy. I missed the pheasant, but Richard proclaimed it to be magnificent, praise indeed from a fellow restaurateur.

Isobel had been to Bassetts recently and had been enthralled with the seabass, so she had it again. Certainly I could understand her enthusiasm, it was cleverly and subtly flavoured and cooked as I like fish to be - only just enough. Unsurprisingly all the men had the beef, which turned out to be as tender as butter, you could almost have cut it with the edge of a fork.

By this point we were all slowing up, so we took just one pecan pie between the four of us. A very tasty pie it was too, but pecans are filling so you'd need to have eaten fewer preceding courses to really appreciate it. After this we skipped the cheeses and went straight to the coffees.

The wine list is short and well chosen and it listed a few of my favourites. There was Yalumba Viognier at €27.50, Brown Brothers Tarango also at €27.50 and the excellent Martin Codax Albarino, which came by the glass at €5.50. For our meal we had a bottle of the Viognier and the Michel Torino Malbec from Argentina, which was listed at €25.

All in all I found our evening in Bassetts thoroughly enjoyable. The food was really excellent and the ambience was warm and welcoming. I might steal a line from the Michelin guide and say 'well worth a detour'.