SIXTEEN months ago I started working as a restaurant reviewer. Thirty-five years of practice finally paid off and I began a new life as a professional eater. The positive aspects of the job are immediately obvious; being fed for free on a weekly basis in any restaurant you choose is a pretty luxurious condition of employment. The downside is not so apparent. Wading through thick carpets? Having to drink more than might be sensible?

Repetitive strain injury from all the heavy cutlery? I've eaten in 65 restaurants since starting and on only a few occasions could I say that it felt like hard work.

From when I began I was more interested in going to places that I thought would be good or unusual or that had a positive reputation. New places, new chefs, cheap ethnic restaurants, old established places doing something different or still doing what they always had done. It seemed more useful and enjoyable to try and find restaurants that I could recommend.

There has been a perception in Ireland that many restaurants here are too expensive and of poor quality. If you wander into the first restaurant you come across in any city, town or village in Ireland your experience may not be a happy one. But there are plenty of very good, fairly-priced places run by people who really care about what they're doing and they deserve to be supported.

There were things I learned very quickly.

Even on a Monday or Tuesday, a booking had to be made. I was struck by how many people are eating out midweek, spending Euro100 and more in local neighbourhood kind of places.

I always booked the table in the name of the person I was eating with and gave their phone number as well, an unnecessary piece of subterfuge given that my photo was on the top left of every review I ever wrote. On one occasion when making a booking, I gave 'my' name and when I was asked what my phone number was, I didn't know. Hold on, I said busily scrolling through my address book, it's coming to me. It's 086 or 087. I always forget. Right, the voice on the phone said as he pencilled us in to a table in the staff toilet.

I think I was recognised only twice. It really didn't make a difference. You can tell if the people around you are enjoying themS selves, regardless of your own experience.

A bad kitchen can't suddenly produce food art just because some over-fed gourmand with a pen turns up. Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I was recognised all over the place and I've been living queen-like in a facsimile world where no one carries money and everything smells of paint but I don't think that was the case.

The standard of service was mostly good.

Where it wasn't, it was more often uncertain or incompetent than obnoxious. Well-meaning bungling is easier to tolerate than semiefficient rudeness, but I would say that both were thin on the ground. There were few really bad experiences. On one occasion our table was picked up and moved as we sat at it. I remember a waitress who threw our bill from a height onto the table silently and without looking at us, punishment for an unknown crime that I'm still sure we didn't commit. A waiter who got bored waiting for a decision to be made on dessert and walked away mid-order. These were exceptions rather than the rule.

In olden times, reviewers often had to ask for a copy of the menu when leaving, advertising their presence, possibly prompting a conversation where they would stare at the carpet and mumble about how nice that carpet was. Most restaurants now have information online, often including the whole menu, a dream for the non-confrontational/cowardly reviewer. In the early days of the job with a pregnant and sober companion, I occasionally had to consult the menu afterwards to remember the specifics of a dish.

Was that salmon wild or organic? Was it salmon or trout? Was it in fact rabbit? In truth it was never that bad. When chefs go to considerable trouble in choosing the combinations of ingredients, flavours and textures, you should be able to identify everything that's there. Sometimes things got lost in the mix and consulting the menu afterwards you would discover that certain constituents had disappeared or hadn't turned up at all. There were, as is always the case, ingredients of the moment that showed up everywhere.

The past year has been one of pork belly, broad beans, ravioli, venison loin, squash, big meaty fish like turbot or monkfish paired with big meaty meat like oxtail, duck confit or foie gras, morels, funky little jugs of soup poured over things at the table and still some foams and crisps. There is a risk that one might get jaded with all of this and lose perspective of the issues of the day. If I have to eat one more oxtail ravioli in a broad bean soup I'm going to scream, is not a sentence you hear often in the pubs of Ireland.

Fashions are always going to be there. You can still tell the difference between an innovative chef who knows what they're doing and one who's just following trends.

The dishes that stand out, that I still remember eating, were in a broad spectrum of places. There was a beef dish with chilli and cumin seed in China House on Parnell Street that was, if I may be poncey, exhilarating and cost Euro8.50. There was cured salmon with goat's cheese soufflé on a Breton pancake in Les Gourmandises in Cork.

A veal loin topped with foie gras in Tribes in Glasthule. Venison with pumpkin and hazelnut in Richard Corrigan's Village at Lyon's was memorable and memorably priced at Euro39.

There are practices that annoy. Places that don't take bookings do so because they can. It annoys punters but when a place is hot that's a decision that some restaurants can take, based on sheer financial realities.

Similarly, offering someone a table between 7pm and 9pm seems inhospitable, particularly given that the restaurant has a part to play. Can you be in and out in two hours? That depends, can you serve three courses in that time without making us feel rushed?

Mineral water is just scandalously overpriced. I always felt a burst of affection for a place that either automatically brought tap water to the table or when offering water made it clear that tap was a viable option.

Not giving the choice of tipping by credit card is a practice that appears to be spreading and is unhelpful to everyone if the customer isn't carrying the right kind of cash.

Over the past couple of years the middle of the restaurant market in Dublin, an area that had been very badly served, has expanded enormously. The phenomenon that was L'Gueuleton in 2004 I think was influential in this. When they opened, the notion that you could get good innovative food for reasonable prices had people literally queuing down the street. For lunch and dinner. It'll all end in tears, people said. That no booking thing. Pain in the arse. People won't stand for it. But people did. They stood in neat lines and waited. Any savvy passing restaurateur with a few quid in their pocket would have paid attention. This was evidence surely of an untapped potential.

This year in Dublin there have been a series of openings - Rhodes D7, Fallon & Byrne, Venu and Ely-CHQ - all aimed at that section of the market. That's getting towards a thousand new seats in just a year, all places where two people could eat and drink and get out for Euro80. In the wake of Dunne and Crescenzi and Mick Wallace's Italian quarter, there has been a succession of places serving tapas, small taster plates, cheese and cold meat with good reasonably priced wines, a style of eating that is comparatively new here that has very quickly taken off.

There are the Chinese and Korean restaurants of Parnell Street, places that are aimed primarily at an immigrant market but have become increasingly popular with an Irish crowd. Fun, exotic, interesting places where the bill will rarely go much over Euro25 a head.

The trend I think will continue in this affordable direction. The next thing coming down the line is a slew of gourmet burger bars. Two good things come together. Only once did I meet a burger I didn't like. It was in Scotland, a sponge-like thing made from dangerous bits of cow, every bite seemed to bring me a year closer to death. Gourmet burgers may help to exorcise that memory.

In tandem with these developments, at the higher end there's a new generation of upand-coming chefs - experimental and exciting and innovative - with strong pedigrees setting up on their own. The same wellestablished places have been at the top of the restaurant game in Dublin for what feels like a long time - Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, Thornton's, L'Ecrivain, Chapter One. Places like Bang, Poulot's, Mint, One Pico and Dylan have ambitious chefs that are doing interesting things and they will be worth watching into the future. It's not every day that you feel like loin of wild venison enhanced, decorated and adorned with celeriac, red cabbage, poached pear, Szechuan pepper among a myriad of other ingredients - but sometimes you want the experience of eating something that you're just never going to do at home.

My experience has been focused very much on Dublin. The arrival of a small person into our lives in May meant that getting around the country was like moving a circus.

From what I saw, the places that are highly regarded are spread out and offer good value compared to their Dublin counterparts. In Dublin, restaurants can rely on some passing trade which just does not exist for rural places. They have to work harder to become destinations in their own right. I would have liked to have done more of them.

But after 65 meals that I ate but somebody else paid for, I'm finishing up. Concentrating on other projects, spending more time with the family. Returning to the anonymous life of an amateur eater.