The first restaurant I ever went into in Ireland was the Green Rooster in Dublin's O'Connell Street. I was a schoolboy in 1962 when my father bought it and we moved from England to here. It was long and thin, operated on two floors and was nearly always full, especially at night when it was one of very few places in Dublin that was open after six o'clock. It had waitresses in black with white lace aprons and at night there was a doorman in a uniform keeping out the rowdier drunks. The menu consisted of chicken and chips, steak and chips and mixed grill and chips. If you wanted wine you could have a sweet white Barsac or a nondescript red Graves. It wasn't gastronomy, but it was what people wanted.

Through the growth years of Sean Lemass' sixties, restaurants began to proliferate slowly. There were a couple of good ones like Jammet's or the restaurant in the Russell Hotel, a few ethnic ones like Mike Butt's, but mostly the fare was fries. The middle of the road was catered to by hotel dining rooms and clubs, where a good roast and two veg would be on offer. Some were very good, like the Shelbourne's Saddle Room, others less so. I can't produce figures to back it up, but it's my belief that the majority of restaurants then were part of a hotel.

I wouldn't be the first to suggest that Joe Walsh Tours had a lot to do with the way people thought about food and eating out. As the first of the big package tour operators in Ireland he was responsible for people going abroad who had never done so previously and they came home with new ideas and standards. This in the days when olive oil was something that people bought in tiny bottles in a chemist shop and then put in their ear, and when a Michelin guide was for finding tyres. From there to where we are now is a fairly major revolution by anyone's standards.

The seventies saw the advent of fast-food franchises like McDonalds, sandwich and salad bars like Murphs and some serious restaurants like Nick Tinney's Snaffles and Peter Powry's Soup Bowl. People had begun to realise that there could be more to eating out than a mixed grill and chips. Somewhere in this equation we have to include Myrtle Allen, whose Ballymaloe House gave a lot of people who went on to work in the catering industry a grounding in what has become known as Irish Country House Cooking. It involved taking the best from continental cuisine and using the freshest and best of Irish ingredients. It was a novel idea at the time, but it struck a chord with the newly emerging affluent society. Until Darina Allen set up her school the main influence was the Catering College in Cathal Brugher Street, whose flour-based white sauces can still be found in industrial and institutional cooking.

At that time there was a light-hearted belief amongst restaurateurs that there were only 500 people in Dublin who ate out on a regular basis. They would come to a new restaurant to try it out, some might return, the others would move on in the never-ending quest for the perfect meal. It was a small cake to share and the early eighties were bad years. Somehow the petrol shortages, the straitened economy, the general air of despondency took its toll. It's my misfortune that these happened to be the years that I was trying to keep my restaurant - Armstrong's Barn - going in the Wicklow hills. In many ways we were pushing the boundaries of taste: presenting vegetables that were cooked al dente, lots of offal, using wild foods like nettles and mushrooms, plenty of game in season and unusually at the time, our own home-made treacle bread. It was a classic case of critical acclaim from all the major food guides and very few bums on seats. Still, we enjoyed it and kept going in the face of adversity. If a malevolent deity had chosen events to unfold that were designed to make country restaurants close, then the eighties would have fitted the bill nicely. Huge rises in the cost of petrol and food, the slashing of entertainment allowances, VAT leaping from 5 pc to 23 pc, employer's PRSI rising relentlessly in a business that traditionally employed part-time workers on a casual basis, higher interest rates and of course that old bugbear, inflation. It's amazing that any restaurants actually survived the onslaught. Mine nearly did, but succumbed eventually to a flood after Hurricane Charlie in 1986 which led to its closure in 1987.

Which brings us to the nineties, where the figures are awesome. From 1990 to 1996 the number of restaurants doubled, the number of people employed in them doubled, the total revenue doubled. Something had started to go right. I spoke to Jim Farrelly of Gilbeys who was able to give me some figures to back up this idea. Wine sales began to rise at a steady 10 pc per annum, the growth being spread through the restaurant and hotel sector as well as off-licenses and pubs. What this reflects is changing habits: apart from eating out more often people are now buying wine to drink at home mid-week, and many people - especially women - are buying wine in pubs as their drink of choice. Jim gave me this extraordinary figure: 10 pc of all wine sold in Ireland is in quarter bottles - that's to say sold in pubs. Only twenty years ago that would have been unthinkable, wine was drunk on special occasions rather than as a matter of course and in pubs drink meant shorts or beer. There's still a long way to go before we catch up with our European partners though; the average per capita consumption in Ireland of wine is 7 litres per person per year, which is half the British consumption and a fraction of that of France or Italy.

When I think of Britain's economic boom in the Nigel Lawson years one image remains with me: young money traders with mobile phones drinking bottles of Bolly by the crate. I suspect that champagne sales are a good indicator of disposable income, after all it's expensive, showy and very much a luxury. Nigel Werner of Findlaters told me that their champagne sales have been rising between 25 and 30 pc per year for the last three years. Not only that, Ireland now buys more vintage champagne as a percentage of the market than any other country. No wonder economic migrants are starting to look to Ireland as the new El Dorado. Yet in the early nineties the reality was much harsher. Nigel remembers when restaurants would suddenly shut their doors owing money to just about everyone, including Findlaters. It's more than three years since it has happened, which considering the sheer numbers of new restaurants, has to tell us something about our changing circumstances.

Nigel was also the first to point out to me that buried in all these figures on sales is also the fact that people are trading up. The average spend on a bottle of wine is rising faster than inflation, reflecting the increasing interest in quality. This is clearly evident in restaurants where the average cost of a meal for two with wine is about £60. This makes Irish restaurants far more expensive than their equivalents on the continent. Ireland's one and only two-star restaurant, Patrick Guilbaud's, is no more expensive than a two-star elsewhere, but the mid-range restaurants are pitched at a much higher price. This is probably the remnant of the days when restaurants were fewer and their customers even fewer, therefore prices had to be high to cover fixed costs. Even though the volume of customers is increasing enormously, prices have tended to remain high since there appears to be little consumer resistance to them.

John Howard is a man who has seen most of the twistings and turnings of economic activity. He's been running Le Coq Hardi long enough to have seen both the good and the bad times. We spoke for a while about the old days, but when we started to talk about today and the future he had plenty to say. Looking at today's explosion of restaurants his first comment was that it's too easy to open a restaurant in Ireland. In other continental countries it's harder to get a license if you haven't got a few year's experience in the business already. But what worries him more than that is where do all these new restaurants find their trained staff? It's certainly true that good, trained chefs are fewer than the number of restaurants opening, and it's the same with the waiting staff. There's no getting around it, people are being promoted beyond their level of competence to fill the gaps.

As for the future he had these predictions to make: owner-occupiers will be the most likely to survive any downturn in our economy. He pointed out that many of our best restaurants around the country are of this kind: Arbutus Lodge, Ballymaloe House, Longueville House, Marlfield House, L'Ecrivain and Patrick Guilbaud. What's more all these places have withstood the test of time and survived through the hard years. Modestly he hadn't included himself in his list, so I'll do it for him. But the biggest danger that he foresees is in part a function of our successful economy. As properties become ever more valuable, so rents will increase accordingly. For anyone who has borrowed the large sums that are now needed to equip a new restaurant, even a small dip in this continuing boom could leave them vulnerable. In this scenario the well-established restaurants are the likely survivors.

From The Coq Hardi I went down to Ballsbridge to meet my old friend Roly Saul, whose Bistro is a testament to getting things right. We talked about the changes he'd seen since moving to his purpose-built Bistro in 1992. The most obvious change was in his neighbourhood. Back in 1992 there were 150 restaurant seats in Ballsbridge, now there are 1,200 - a nearly ten-fold increase. But it was in his observations of changing patterns that Roly was at his most acute. Once again I heard the words 'trade up'. His average take per head had increased in the past few years far more than inflation. People are simply spending more. In the past couple of years Sunday lunch with the children and extended family is increasingly common. Whereas once people were happy with a thin and economical Muscadet, now they drink Sancerre, where once an indifferent Cote de Rhone, now it's a decent Fleurie.

Not all changes that have followed from our economic growth are good. Roly noted ruefully that the days of long business lunches seem to be gone and that people don't linger after dinner the way they used to during the week - they arrive earlier and leave earlier. Typically a business lunch might include a half bottle of a good wine rather than several bottles of something cheaper and mineral water is now de rigeur instead of a jug of iced tap water. The earlier starts in the morning have created their own new dynamic. The most obvious is that to avoid the worst of the morning's traffic people now have to leave home really early. A whole new trade in breakfasts has sprung up to take advantage of this early influx. The pattern now seems to be get in early, park the car, have a leisurely breakfast and then go to work. But just like boom-time London there are people who handle their new-found wealth less than well. Roly looked dolefully out of the window as though remembering something he'd rather not. 'While a good 99 pc of our customers are a delight to serve, there's a growing number of unreasonable and ever-demanding masters-of-the-universe.'

There's another pattern that Roly has pin-pointed. He calls it the ladder of eating out. That's when as a child you go out to eat fast-food burgers, in early adulthood you go to places like Blakes where the food begins to matter, and lastly you experience what Americans like to call 'fine dining'. There's a similar ladder in the drinking of wine as well. Most people begin their wine odyssey with the agreeably sweet Germans like Liebfraumilch and Piesporter. Then slowly the palate moves to drier whites and more complex reds. In its last stages sweet whites make a comeback in good and expensive dessert wines.

Not all of the boom in the catering industry is internally generated. No matter how much disposable income might be floating around, it doesn't account for the proliferation of hotels - the increase in tourism does. Between 1992 and 1997 the number of visitors increased by nearly two thirds, and the money they spent nearly doubled while the consumer price index had risen less than 10 pc. Add this to the fact that our own GDP per capita has risen from £8,474 in 1992 to £13,177 in 1997 and it's easy to see where the fuel for the catering boom has come from.

Interest in food and wine is growing exponentially, there is even an Irish-based glossy magazine devoted to it. Any supermarket now carries not just pasta, but a whole range of it. Vegetables come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and from all over the globe. There are sections in most supermarkets dedicated to Indian, Chinese, French and Italian foods and sauces. Supply is catching up with an ever more demanding palate. All of this has its effects on social behaviour. People are more inclined to be adventurous in their eating habits where once they were not. May Frisbee has turned her fresh pasta in 'Pasta Fresca' into a household word in Dublin since she opened it 1985.

'Back in 1985 there was no Med/Ital food culture. In a way we were breaking new ground and introducing something that was new to most people. It took a while for it to take off. We had to teach people what fresh pasta was.' May is like most dedicated caterers, ridiculously hard-working, but then as she says 'You have to be. You're only as good as your last meal.' Which brought us on to how hard it is to keep up standards. It's a constant struggle with a new twist. Because so many restaurants are opening it's getting harder to keep staff - 'They walk in and out of restaurants like they walk in and out of the bathroom.' May believes that the capital is over-restauranted. 'It's not London or New York. There aren't enough people for all these places to make a living. The competition is getting crazy.'

Breaking new ground is hard work in any business, but it does have benefits. If you can get the business up and running then you're the first onto the market place. The change in our eating habits - especially the fashion for Mediterranian food - has made her business thrive. Where once her shop was a single unit selling only fresh pasta, now it's a restaurant as well that occupies three units, and she has a factory from which she wholesales to other outlets.

The tables outside 'Pasta Fresca' on the pavement are May's contribution to the evolving 'cafe society'. Now that's another one of those catchy phrases that sounds like it might mean something, but in fact doesn't mean a lot yet. It takes a long tome for a cafe society like that of Vienna or Budapest to evolve, and good coffee is just the beginning. But there do seem to be straws in the wind that point us in that direction. A sunnier climate might hurry things along, but with the passing throngs of Temple Bar beginning to be no longer a localised event, the city is starting to have the basic requirements for a daytime cafe society rather than a pub one.

Which brings me lastly to what is perhaps the biggest change of all - good food in pubs. I've touched on the fact that a lot of wine, and increasingly good wine, is being sold in pubs. It's not hard to work out why. Apart from being a drink of choice for many, it's increasingly sold because food in pubs has moved a long way from the traditional toasted cheese sandwich. Good carvery lunches at very little cost are becoming common and there is now palatable wine available which makes a pub lunch a far more pleasant experience than it used to be. Things have changed so much that in the Odeon pub there are sixteen wines on display, which is in itself another pointer to where things are going. It does appear that good food and wine have become inextricably a part of Irish society.

Table 1

Figures from the 1996 'Statistical Report of the Revenue Commissioners' given below

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996
Beer (millions of hectoliters) 4.63 4.63 4.84 4.70* 4.79 4.96 5.24
Spirits (millions litres of alcohol) 5.99 6.04 5.71 5.90 5.90 5.78 6.35
Wine (millions of litres) 5.54 16.14 17.47 20.06 20.91 23.05 27.85

Table 2

Restaurants 1991 1996

Number of enterprises 2,223 3,803

Turnover (£mill.,excl. VAT) 307m 626m

Wages and Salaries (£mill.) 58m 127m

Persons engaged* 15,363 30,058

Full-time employees 6,363 11,991

Part-time employees 5,518 12,972

* includes proprietors and family members