There's a growing awareness that knowing the name of a good restaurant is only half of the information that you really need. The other half is knowing who the chef is. This may be stating the obvious, but if you care about the quality of what you eat, then it's as well to know where the good chefs are, and where they go to when they move. Over the next few months I'll be talking to chefs that I admire. It's a personal choice and it's not definitive; there are bound to be great chefs out there whose board I have yet to taste, but in this series I'll be confining myself to those whose food I've enjoyed. By the nature of their job chefs are out of sight and out of mind, so I'm happy to turn a light upon these unsung heroes of the kitchen.

Ross Lewis is the chef in Chapter One, a restaurant that I admire. He's one of the new breed of chefs; inventive, innovative, and keenly aware of European and global movements in food fashions and styles. He's been in Chapter One for ten years now, and is beginning to reap the rewards of those long years of graft. Perhaps the biggest obstacle Chapter One had to overcome was its location in Parnell Square.

'To compete with our counterparts on the southside, we've always had to work twice as hard. We're a destination restaurant. It was an incredible obstacle being northside, people would phone on a Saturday night and check if we had a table for six, and if we were able to say yes, they'd say things like 'god, that's great!' and then within the hour they'd ring back and cancel. It was obvious they'd been talking to the others in the group and got messages like 'Parnell Square? You can't leave your car there! You must be mad.''

Yet as any Gate theatre-goer knows, yes, you can - and it'll still be there when you come out. It's a problem of perception, and prejudices can be very hard to shift. There's a problem with the support network in the immediate area: apart from the Gate, which brings plenty of people for the pre-theatre menu at £20, there are few pubs in the immediate locality to attract people. You don't just drop into Chapter One - and that's exactly what Ross means when he says it's 'a destination restaurant' - it's a place you go to on purpose when you want to eat good food.

It's puzzling to Ross, but it's an odd fact that the bulk of his customers come from the southside. I admit it's hard to see why this should be so; it must be a great deal easier to get to Parnell Square from Clontarf than it is from Blackrock. He adds, 'of course there are people who live nearby who support us; Jeananne Crowley and David Norris to name but two, and there's Old Belvedere and the Rotunda as well. But it's been a long road persuading people to come.'

I was interested to know what drives his cooking. Was it a style? A final selection from all the dishes he's learned to prepare? 'I'm driven by the ingredients,' was his answer, 'I plan my menus around the best ingredients that are available at the time of year. I use only organic vegetables, and I try to exploit our own native natural resources. I don't really see why we have to go out there and slavishly follow the French.' One result of this way of thinking is the recently opened oyster bar; it's there to make use of Irish raw ingredients.

It's not an easy life being a chef; long, anti-social hours and hard work in a hot environment are the givens. So why do it? 'There are stages in a chef's life; there's the learning stage when you're soaking up as much information as you can, then there's the stage when you fine-line your craft and copy other chefs a lot, but after you've been cooking for years you have your craft - there's no dish I couldn't recreate now - so it's just you and the natural products. You get to learn slowly about flavours and how to use them, and then you learn what to miss out: the rubbish like patterns on the plate and messing around with the fashion foods of the day. A lot of us got lost for a while in showmanship, but today my style is defined by the alchemy of braising meats with alcohol and aromatics. Obviously a part of what we do is what I call assembly food, you know, cook a piece of wild salmon, put it with a potato salad, some olive oil, whatever, but it's the alchemy that fascinates me.

So what does Ross eat when he's not working? 'I like simple food like a turbot steak with a Bearnaise, but you know, sometimes a dish that looks simple conceals a lot of work and skill behind the scenes.' I know exactly what he means; I've eaten in Chapter One.