A couple of years ago, apartments started going up and now in the evenings there is clear evidence of life. There is a delicatessen that opened recently, aimed, it would seem, at busy working people who want to spoil themselves in the evening by paying slightly too much for fresh pasta.

Kelly & Ping has been here from the early days. It's an odd-shaped room with curves where you expect straight lines, angles and glass and swirling colours . . .like being in the head of a tripping architect. It leaves you with the impression that although you can see nothing at all, everybody else can clearly see you. It's comfortable though, lots of warm paint and low lighting and friendly staff. We're in fusion territory here. Please wake up. The 'Kelly', I suppose, represents Ireland and Europe, the 'Ping' represents Asia, as in the lesser-known Ping dynasty.

The worry always with this stuff is that rather than creating a new glorious union, you end up doing two things badly. They have an early-bird menu, three courses for 22 and it seemed like a reasonable basis for assessing their version of this fusion thing.

Crispy beef salad with a sesame and raspberry dressing was more interesting than successful.

A good mix of leaves was topped with strips of beef that had been fried in a seasoned coating. The salad itself was perfectly fine with a decent dressing that tasted mostly of raspberry vinegar and not at all of sesame. The beef was indeed crispy and was okay flavour-wise. But the two had to be separated to get at them simultaneously. Why not mix them, you might wonder, but then the heat of the beef would wilt the salad and that wouldn't work with the kind of leaves they were using. I'm not sure how good the idea was in the first place. We consumed it all anyway, albeit awkwardly.

Spicy chicken wings with a blue cheese dip were good.

The dip actually tasted of blue cheese, the sauce on the wings more sweet than spicy but no complaints. A simple dish done well.

Wok-fried chicken was described as coming with holy basil and a tamarind sauce. What we got was chicken and vegetables in a thick soy-based stock. It was all perfectly cooked but there was no trace of the aniseed perfume of Thai basil or the sour fruitiness of tamarind. These flavours are so strong and specific that if they had been there at all the dish would have tasted like Thai food, rather than like bland takeaway stir-fry. No real skill needed to make it interesting, just the listed ingredients.

Massaman lamb curry was better. Tender pieces of lamb were cooked in a lightly fragrant coconut soup with green beans, scallion and peanuts, a good mix of freshness and rich comforting warmth. Both main courses came with sticky rice. Lychee fruit salad was a couple of lychees sitting on top of dull fruit salad . . . 90% apple.

Chocolate corruption was a very rich chocolatey cake with cream. We liked. It was chocolate cake and cream, what's not to like?

We had two Ballygowans and one bottle of Curim, a decent wheat beer from a Carlow microbrewery. The bill for all of this came to 54. Exactly half the meal was good, the other half not so hot. If I'd ordered the wings, the Massaman curry and the cake I would have thought 22 was good value.

If I'd ordered the beef starter, the chicken and the lychee fruit salad I would have felt gypped. If you ordered well you could leave happy. They give you fortune cookies with the bill and one of them, I swear, said 'you need to put more effort into your work', which, ironically for me, seems about the right place to finish.