The plan was pretty simple: we'd have a boy's night out on the town. It even had a sort of a purpose, we would celebrate my companion's Freedom of the City of Dublin. 'Where will we go?' I asked disingenuously, during the planning stage. 'We can go anywhere we want,' said Paul McGuinness, (for it was the man himself who was to keep me company) - anywhere at all.' Ah, I thought, so that's what freedom of the city means. Probably you don't get buses and Darts for free, or get into museums and art galleries for nothing, but you can go anywhere you want in the city. 'Do you get a key or something?' I asked. 'Don't know,' said Paul. As the day drew closer our plans firmed up. First we'd go to the IFC and see 'Random Hearts' and then we'd go to eat. I was still thinking about where free men could go to eat, when Paul called again. 'Were going to have company, Kathy Gilfillan and Jeananne Crowley are joining us and they want to eat somewhere near the IFC.' So that was how the decision was made to go The Mermaid Cafe in Dame street.

The Mermaid is on a corner site near the Olympia and there's plenty of glass through which you can watch the world go about its business - I was even able to watch the junkie who had threatened to break my head open continuing to harass the honest burgers of Dame Street.

The dining room has a bistro feel to it, plain wooden tables and chairs, not much room between the tables and a buzz of activity and conversation. A wooden floor and the lack of any soft furnishings means that's it's also a noisy room. The menu has some interesting dishes on it, amongst the starters you can find salmon and red pepper ravioli, crayfish bisque, New England crab cakes and honey roasted figs with blue cheese. Main courses include grilled quail spatchcock, John Dory with a tapinade and venison. There is also a blackboard with the day's specials. Starters go from £4.25 to £6.95 and main courses from roughly £14 to £18.

We were half reading menus and half discussing the film we'd just seen when a basket of bread arrived. I've almost stopped remarking on breads, because getting good, home-made bread in a restaurant is now something we take for granted. I hardly even notice these days when someone arrives with a huge wicker platter of six different breads, it's becoming almost de rigeur. I did however notice this bread. It was completely unrisen and I mean completely. It was impossible to lift a slice from the basket as it broke apart under its own weight. I'm not particularly pushed about eating bread before a meal, after all there's at least two courses to come, but it did bring this thought to mind: surely whoever had sliced this must have noticed that it was inedible? I find it hard to imagine the mind set of someone who cuts into a loaf like this and then sends it out to a table. Sliced pan would have been preferable.

Paul had been studying the wine list while I was examining the bread and had selected two good wines, both by Cline in California; the increasingly fashionable Viognier for the white at £29 and the Zinfandel for the red at £24.20. I looked down the list to see what else was on offer. It's one of those lists with lots of unusual wines from unusual wine producing areas, so it's quite hard to get a handle on its value for money. However there are a few wines listed that are instantly recognisable such as Gavi at £19, a Petit Chablis 98 at £20, a Sancerre at £22.60 and Brunello's little brother, Rosso di Montalcino, at £21.80. I concluded from this that I was looking at a 150% mark up.

The starters arrived and went like this: spicy squid rings for Jeananne, the figs with blue cheese for Kathy, a Mermaid antipasto for Paul and New England crab cakes for me. Kathy got the by far and away the best starter, nicely presented like a bruschetta, with the figs atop stuffed with blue cheese. It was a really unusual and successful blend of flavours and turned out to be the highlight of the meal. The other three starters were not so good: Paul's antipasto contained a crab cake which he couldn't eat, just as I was unable to eat mine. Stodgy and rather tasteless they bore no resemblance to the crab cakes that I've eaten on Cape Cod. Squid is not the easiest thing to cook, since if you're not careful it can become a bit like chewing a bicycle inner tube, which is pretty much what Jeannane got.

However I'm not one to make quick judgements and I waited for the main courses to make sure that the starters and bread were not just a blip. Both Kathy and Jeananne had chosen the fillets of John Dory which came, still with the skin, nicely presented on the plate and both the ladies thought them good. Paul and I had chosen the rib-eye of beef from the specials menu and we were both presented with a decent-sized piece of meat. I was quite hungry by now, having had no bread nor much starter and launched into my beef, only to find that it had that unmistakable taste of meat that has sat in a cold room in a puddle of blood. I thought about mentioning it, and then decided not to. After all, why put the thought into Paul's mind if it wasn't there already and put him off his meal?

There's another point to bear in mind here; when you're with a group of friends and the conversation is entertaining and you're having fun, you can't dwell on imperfections in your meal without disrupting the table's harmony. Things would have to be pretty bad before it came to that, and the fact is it wasn't that sort of bad, it was just not up to scratch. The service was adequate, except for when we had to get our own ashtray, but on balance I have to say that the food that night was not what you should expect for £25 a head. No meal in my experience is ever unremittingly poor, and this one was saved a little by a couple of good desserts - a bread, butter and brandy pudding which was very good, and ice-cream with cookies. We finished with coffees and espressos.

And in the old tradition of 'and now for something completely different', I got a letter this week from Yvonne, who gave me no address or surname, so I'll take this opportunity to say thank you for your kind words.