Town Bar and Grill, Kildare St, Dublin 2.

Review

Personally I have always liked basement restaurants, something about safety and intimacy, or maybe it's just my Bilbo Baggins fantasies! Either way, Town has been a staple of the Dublin restaurant secen for some years now, Paolo has even started to call it an institution! Host Ronan Ryan has created a busy and buzzy space where the food at least lives up to the glamour. Spot some of Dublin's more famous faces while enjoying the superb service. Interesting and fairly priced wine list, with a preponderance of Italians and some tasty house wines around €21. Paolo dined with Gerard Carthy and Deirdre Walsh from Taste of Ireland and they all liked it too....

The starters arrived and all three looked very good. Deirdre's seafood plate had langoustines, prawns, chilli squid, gravadlax and oysters and was nicely presented. Gerard had the red mullet fillet, which came with a fennel and orange salad, and my veal cheek came with herbed gnocchi and a wholegrain mustard. All three of these dishes were well made, well flavoured and well presented.

The main courses were more mixed. Gerard had the rack of lamb, which came with slow-cooked shoulder and caramelised sweetbreads. The sweetbreads were spectacularly good, the lamb tender and succulent. The clam linguini, a variant of the Neapolitan signature dish spaghetti alle vongole, was less successful. The seafood taste that's so integral to the dish was hidden behind other flavours, and the pasta was a little too al dente for my taste. That said, my mushroom risotto was very well done; a good mix of mushroom, truffle oil, prosciutto and Parmesan.

We toyed for a while with the idea of desserts, which are mostly priced at €9.95, before eventually ordering a crunchy biscuit ice-cream to share between the three of us. The meal ended with two good espressos, both drunk by me, which brought the bill to €166.50 not including service.

If Town can weather its present difficulties, I suspect it will remain one of those restaurants that have the epithet 'institution' attached to it, since it's now so well known. Superb service made this evening pass by very happily.