There's only one Vietnamese restaurant in Dublin. Surprising for many reasons. Paris has six thousand of them. I know they're the old colonisers but still. It's not that far away from here. Word might have reached us before now.

A lot of the people running Chinese takeaways in Ireland are in fact Vietnamese so it's a little strange that none of them took a break from slinging Triples (rice, chips, curry sauce) and Four Ways (the same thing with chicken balls) at happy punters to set up a place that would represent their country of origin.

It's a very distinctive cuisine, fresher and lighter than Chinese or even Thai, with contrasting textures and flavours based around herbs, stocks and a few core ingredients like fish sauce, lemongrass and peanuts.

The herb thing is something they take seriously. Not for them the small handful of something green chopped at the end to perk up a sauce. In Vietnam, plates of mint, basil and coriander come to the table with main courses. Big bunches of leaves. You eat herbs by the sack-full, which makes you feel all virtuous and healthy even if you've spent the week sitting beside a lake drinking. For example.

Ho Sen has been open for a year-and-a-half. It's in the polite part of Temple Bar with its back turned on the mayhem. It gets more women than men, maybe because of the healthy thing or maybe because the staff are friendly. Gratuitously so.

We ordered three starters because you can't get fat on this stuff and went with the waiter's recommendation on mains.

Rice paper rolls were like a totem of what Vietnamese food is about. They come cold, chicken and prawn and peanuts and herbs encased in a soft, thin, silky wrapper, served with a dipping sauce.

The wrapper seems to disappear as soon as you bite it, leaving the fragrant freshness of the herbs, the crunch of peanut and the salty, sweet sharpness of the dipping sauce.

Fried spring rolls were like a smaller, crisper, more muscular version of the Chinese staple, their dense meatiness lightly perfumed with spices. A cold beef salad with sesame, coriander and peanuts came dressed with lime juice and was fantastically balanced, perfectly seasoned.

The first recommended dish was the fish of the day cooked in stock in a clay hotpot. The fish was tilapia, which is used a lot in Asian cooking and is not unlike sea bass. A very generous portion of fish came in a pork-based stock scented with lemongrass and various spices. The whole thing was almost caramel in flavour, the sweetness cut by the ginger and scallion with which it had been finished. We soaked up the excess sauce with rice. A simple enough dish at first but more clever than it seemed, the quality of the stock giving it real depth.

The other recommendation was less successful. Thin slices of beef fillet were wrapped around homemade pork sausage and served on a hot plate with chargrilled vegetables. The waitress said to eat it when it was hot because it would toughen up if we left it. That's what she told us to do and we obeyed.

Didn't seem to work though.

The flavours were good enough but it was hard work eating it. If beef fillet can be rendered that tough by the cooking process of the dish, then maybe that's not the best thing to be doing with it.

We had a side order of noodles stir-fried with vegetables which were great. We drank beer and a bottle of German dry riesling from a good value wine list. We skipped dessert. Their coffee was excellent.

As the standard-bearer for Vietnamese cuisine in Dublin, Ho Sen is doing a nice job. The prices are reasonable, the food is authentic and different and there is an enthusiasm among the staff that is palpable and enjoyable. It can only be a matter of time until competition arrives (10 million Parisians can't all be wrong) but until then they've got the market to themselves.