Zagat, the American food guide, has a word for them - sleepers. These are restaurants that have above average food, but for some reason are little known. They are also exactly the sort of restaurant that reviewers love to find, since it gives them the chance to talk about something new. So when two restaurant reviewers get together for lunch, as Ernie Whalley and I did this week, that's what we wanted to find.

Actually, if I'm to be honest, it was Ernie who suggested the Pad Thai, but I was happy to take his recommendation and that's where we met for lunch. Not before the usual struggle with parking, of course. The Pad Thai is near Portobello Bridge, so you need to go wandering back streets to find a place to leave the car. I don't have a problem with that, but I got very irked when it took it me nearly 20 minutes to find a ticket machine for my 'Pay and Display'. It's irritating enough to have to pay to park just about anywhere in the city, even well outside the centre, but when Dublin Corporation don't even put one machine per street, that adds inconvenience to the extortion. I walked back and forth down three streets before I found the lone meter, so Ernie was already at the table in the Pad Thai when I arrived grumbling.

From outside the Pad Thai doesn't look very special. The upper end of South Richmond Street is still going through a gentrification process and some buildings are in much better shape than others. It's a mixed streetscape and it's hard to park, which may be a reason why we'd found a 'sleeper'. Inside it's plain. Painted tongue and groove is much in evidence, the tables and chairs are of the basic variety. The tables are simply set, there's no linen, no trimmings. The lunch menu, too, is a simple sheet, but surprisingly the wine list appears to be the result of some thought and care. At first glance it seems a little incongruous - you look at your simple surroundings and then you look at a wine list that lists wines you'd expect to find in more up-market restaurants. There aren't many cheap wines on the list, but that's not because of a steep mark-up, it's because someone has picked some good wines for the list. There was also a wine listed that both Ernie and I enjoy - the Pewsey Vale 2002 Riesling, which has more than enough body and spice to match Thai food - so we ordered that at €25.50.

It had been a bit of an Asian week for me, the previous night four of us had had a very good meal in Dun Laoghaire's 'Mao', so I was happy to continue the Asian theme. Ernie has a long-standing love affair with Thailand, so eating Thai food is no hardship for him either. We started with 'finger food' for two, which was a plate of mixed starters - some spring rolls, some prawns in tempura and various dips both spicy and aromatic. The tempura on the prawns was particularly successful; delicate, light and perfectly crisp. We both enjoyed the spring rolls as well and found that it worked well with our Riesling. Just as a little gluttony we'd also ordered a Thai soup, the Tom Yam, which looks thin and watery. Taste it though, and you're converted. It had such a delicacy of flavour with all of its elements cleanly discernible. It was full of goodies too, a tie of lemon grass and plenty of prawns.

So after such a good start we relaxed and looked forward to our next course. And as we talked we realised that as restaurant reviewers we have much in common. Firstly, and I think importantly, we're the only two in the country, to the best of our knowledge, who actually owned and ran restaurants before becoming reviewers. I can't help feeling that a background in catering can do nothing but good for restaurant reviewers. Having seen both sides of the kitchen door you could argue that we're poachers turned gamekeepers. I've ended up late at night playing guitar with Ernie more than once, but until this lunch I didn't know that in our youth we were both buskers, Ernie busking up and down London cinema queues and me busking up and down the Costa Brava, so secondly we're a pair of musicians <it>manqué.

The main course arrived and we settled into a little deconstruction. Ernie had picked the Thai Yellow Curry, which was made with pork pieces. It was of a medium heat and we both felt that just as with the starters the flavours had been really well judged. My dish was also pork-based, but I'd chosen the fried rice with pieces of pork nicely flavoured throughout the rice. And just as with Mao the previous evening when I'd had a very tasty Nasi Goreng, the quantity on my plate ultimately defeated me. Very good, just too much for my appetite.

We finished with a couple of decent espressos, which was nice to find. While we were sipping them, the chef came out of the kitchen and surprisingly we found that he's Irish, not Thai. It seems that both the owner and the chef make a habit of visiting Thailand to learn new recipes and perfect old ones, an onus that sounds like no hardship to me.

This was a lunch of good, flavourful food simply presented and very pleasantly served. Throughout our meal the service had been flawless and even our request for 'short' espressos had been met. The total bill was €65, but if you subtract the wine, the mineral water and the coffees the cost of the food was less than €30 for two, which was good value for what we'd eaten.