The last time I walked into what is now the Financial Services Centre it was still part of Dublin Docks. The old bonded warehouses were there and when it was finally time for development it was also time for the Port Authority to sell the unclaimed stock of wines and spirits. I came here to the auction and that's why I still have a few bottles of very old nineteenth-century Cognac. On the odd occasion that I sip some, I think of this place.

Behind the main buildings opposite the Customs House is a brand new world of good architecture and water, reminding me more than a little of the Chelsea Harbour development in London. Much of the original features are there, the cut granite blocks that make the basins, the iron bollards and railings, the cobbles, the stonework on the quaysides. When I got there, a little early, the sun shone between the odd showers and the place looked great. Here I am, I thought, in the very lair of the Celtic Tiger.

I'd come to meet artist's agent, art consultant and gallery owner Isobell Smith, who has recently taken up residence near here. We'd arranged to meet in The Harbour Master, where she assured me, the food was very good. After my little appetite-stimulating walk around the immediate environs of The Harbour Master I went through the front door into a bar so full of people that it was hard even to elbow my way to the counter. Rather hopelessly I looked for a restaurant, meandering aimlessly through various rooms and annexes upstairs and down, and found nothing that even remotely resembled a restaurant. Because I have such a bad memory, I began to panic. Obviously I'm in the wrong place, I thought. I phoned Isobell, who was still waiting for a taxi, and she calmed me down by giving me the simple directions to the whereabouts of the restaurant, whose entrance I had managed not to see. I went in and took my seat away from the wild donnybrook of the bar and sat contemplating quietly the rather pretty view from the restaurant's windows.

Before Isobell arrived I had a chance to take a look at the wine list. Apart from the six house wines it's quite heavily marked up and I spent a long time looking for a wine around the £20 mark that I felt happy to pay for. It's slightly irritating to find that the wines you normally enjoy around that price are instead all creeping up to the £30 mark, which makes the meal rather more expensive than I'd like. The only alternative is to spend the same amount of money and pick a lesser wine. Since choosing the wine is one of the first things I do, being forced into this position is irksome, and it's not a good way to begin a meal. Just one example from the list: a Muscadet is £17.50. I don't mean to disparage, but the only use I've ever found for a Muscadet is to add Cassis to it and have it as a Kir, or top it up with fizzy water to make what was once called a Hock and Seltzer. (Purists will no doubt be quick to tell me that Hock is a German wine, not French.) Anyway, after much deliberation I settled on the Yalumba Barossa Valley Grenache, a red varietal from Australia at £20. And while I'm whinging, mineral water is £3.95 a litre here as well. Is this the new norm for water? At this price it borders on theft.

Now for the food. The menu is well-constructed and has some very interesting-looking dishes on it. Starters run from soup at £2.50 to £6.25 and include things like duck liver and Cognac parfait, double baked Roquefort soufflé, terrine de campagne and pan-fried artichoke salmon and bacon terrine. Main courses are divided into two, light main courses and meat and fish. The light mains run from £8.50 to £10.50 and include grilled Toulouse sausage, squid ink linguini, wild mushroom risotto with Parmesan crackling, and tiger prawn linguini. The meat and fish mains are a couple of pounds more expensive and include baked cod wrapped in Parma ham, roast duckling, char-grilled escalopine of chicken, fillet steak with garlic butter and there were scallops as a special as well. In the end Isobell chose the artichoke terrine to start and the special of scallops to follow and I had the Roquefort soufflé and the risotto as my main course.

Bearing in mind that the wine list had disturbed my good temper a little, I was looking around me with a critical eye. We were sitting at a good-sized wooden table and sitting on comfortable chairs. The tableware was of good quality with attractive plates, glasses and cutlery. Also we were being very well served by our Romanian waiter who brought us the water, the wine and a choice of breads. Isobell is very good company and I found a sense of wellbeing growing in me.

The arrival of the starters made that sense of well-being even more defined. They were quite frankly two of the best starters it has been my pleasure to taste in a long time. The combination of flavours in Isobell's terrine was created by a genius, and my soufflé, never an easy dish to get right, was a perfection with just the right balance of Roquefort. Now I've been doing this for long enough now to know that just because it starts brilliantly doesn't mean it continues that way, so I waited for the main courses before I was prepared to be completely won over. Isobell's scallops, which she encouraged me to taste, were beautifully cooked, beautifully presented and came with little rounds of Clonakilty black pudding. Once again the hand that created this dish showed itself to be deft, attentive to details and supremely confident - in short a great chef. My simple risotto proves the point. It's a cliché but true, it takes both skill and confidence to make the simple dishes. Mine was as good as I've eaten and came with delicious chanterelles arrayed around the side. Spectacularly good.

One dessert between us, a praline soufflé which came with a little creamer of chocolate sauce, left me truly impressed. In the most unexpected of places Isobell had brought me to kitchen of a master chef. And nota bene, the bill for the food came to £49.65. If this restaurant had a better wine list at a more reasonable mark up, it would become a place I'd take any gourmet to impress them.